Navigating Fulfilling Chords

0:58 What's good, everybody?Welcome back to Love Music More.I am Scoobert Doobert, and today I wanna talk about chords.I've talked about chords before on this podcast,but I want to loop back aroundbecause I think it's a really interesting concept,especially if you're a non-musicianor if you just kinda learn by ear,I've got my piano here,so let's make it a proper music theory adventure.

1:18 Essentially, I'm just gonna break it down to...That sounds brutal after the theme song,but there you go, key relationships.But let's go to C major.Tone cleanser.So we're in C major.C major is just the defaultto all of the white keys on the keyboard,and I wanna use it because it's a very easy wayto start exploring chords.If you have access to a keyboardor if you just have a musical keyboard on your computer,

1:48 it's very easy to just kinda start plucking around.So the main thing that I wanna talk aboutare those white keys.So you look at a piano, there's white keys,there's black keys, ignore all the black keys,and then just skip every other note,and you can make a chord that sounds like this.C major chord.You can keep going, though.C major seven chord.But why does that, a seven?

2:12 It's because you can count one, two, three, four,five, six, seven,and you hear how it kind of doesn't resolve.By putting that little seventh note,the thing that pulls you back home into the home,you create kind of a cool hanging,jazzy kind of feeling.But the thing with chords that I find really fascinatingis that yes, you can add infinite, interesting names to itand really try to make it this heavy theoretical,

2:49 conceptual framework.And that's well and goodand can actually inspire some really coolharmonic movement, the movement from one chord to the next.And so I'm not discounting that.But I also think that there's a lot of valuein approaching it almost like a Picasso-esque viewto music itself, a childlike.What is a chord other than justa bunch of notes played together?Then look at all of those notes

3:14 and say, where does that note wanna go?So in this case, let's do our C major chord.Feels pretty stable.But you can kind of look at each of these notes,like where does that note wanna go?Where does that note wanna go?Where does that note wanna go?Like three vocalists.And so an easy place is maybe some of them don't wanna move.Maybe some of them do.So say that our home base, C in C major,

3:41 in the C major scale, it's the root, it's the key.The whole thing is C.Let's say that C doesn't wanna move,but these other two notes might wanna move up a little bit.Now we can do this.Notice that this C major is stuck down there.This is one of the most common uses in pop music.We're doing what's called a pedal toneor a static thing down at the bottom.So you might hear a lot of songsthat are just kinda be grooving.

4:12 That'll be the whole bass player's job,is just grooving on that root notewhile the rest of the band is playing other stuff.Lot of songs with literally just thatof just literally walking the two notesthat are not the root noteof the root chord, C major.Walking these two up.It's a lot more boring if you just do.That's how you know it's real.Make a mistake.I'm playing on the tiniest MIDI keyboardin the world right now.

4:48 It's a microKEY Air by Korg.Very nice for airplanes.But anyway, so if you noticeif we're moving that root note up,it's a little bit more boringbecause the whole chord is moving together.It's just one unit.It's ants marching up.Nothing wrong with that.A bunch of great songs exist like that.But there's something specialabout keeping some of the notes static in a chord.And one of the things that can happen

5:16 that's really beautiful in pop musicis you can get these really complex chordsthrough really simple means by staying static,by not changing.I do this on the guitar all the frickin' time.And this is one of the thingsthat makes like Radiohead sound complex,but also the thing that makes Coldplay sound complex,but also the thing that makes, you know,pretty much name the rock band.

5:37 And the guitarist will be doing something up, you know,up high while other stuff is moving below that guitarist.By keeping those notes static,by kind of running through themand having the chords move underneath them,the bass movement move underneath them.It's the inverse of what we were saying with them.Inverse of that, of having the chords move belowsomething that's going on a repeated figure up top,

6:09 that can create really complex chords.But you don't necessarily have to think about it.And that's, I think one of the most beautiful partswhere you can stumble on something amazing with musicis approaching it from a place of not understanding,but something that if you wrote down all of the notes,it would be pretty high level.The moments where you get both, that's real magic.

6:32 And I find it similar to like, I've spoken Japaneseand then I've read the transcription backand well, wow, I don't even know a bunch of these kanji.And that's like the same thing with music theories.I think when you're at your limitand really flowing with the musicand just following those individual noteswhere they should go or where you want them to goor deciding the opposite, they shouldn't move.

6:58 They should just repeat while everybody else moves.Those little moments where you're not really in the textbook,you're just following the intuition,can create some of the coolest textbook moments.And that's okay.That's where I think the Beatles are a great exampleof complexity out of simplicity,is that they were not necessarily boundby we're only gonna play the white keys on this song.

7:24 They're bound with where does the ear want us to go?How do we subvert expectation?And how do we know when to lean into traditionor against tradition?You know, like thinking about,I just saw the white album live in concert,which is very cool.Revolution number nine is very weird to hear live.But awesome.But one of the things that struck mewas how much the white album both leans into,like doo-wop and the history,

7:53 but also pushes against in terms of lyrical content,in terms of song form,like where is the next section going?Where in the discreet, in the zoomed in,in those moments where it's like,I'm only listening to this section,it can at times feel like a very normalpart of the history of rock.But when taken as a collection, it's absolutely crazy.And I love it.But how do you square those two circles?

8:20 And I think it's through this of saying,not necessarily I'm setting out to write and composethis masterpiece that is going to followfrom my intellectual side.It is saying I'm going to approach the notesfrom where they wanna go.And understand that every decisionthat you can make on a keyboard,or any frequency in general is okay.The biggest, I think, failure is to not make a decision

8:48 or to not follow your intuition, your gut, your joy.I think that some of the hardest music for me to listen tois the music you can just hear their braintrying to be elegant.Not to say that there's not value.I like music theory a lot.But it should be, I think that your intuitionshould draw the lines,and then the music theory can help color it in.And sometimes you wanna color outside the lines.

9:18 But let's get back to chords.So in C major, you can just follow that same patternwhere you're just skipping notes instead of going.And you can just walk that up the entire scaleand you get all of the basic chords.C major, D minor, E minor, F major, G major, A minor,B diminished weird thing, and C major again.But that's not all you have.You can decide, do I wanna use all three of those notes

9:47 or do I just wanna use two?Power chord, or just omit the fifth,the opposite of a power chord.Both acceptable, together they sound like this.It's really not that much difference, right,between and just has a little bit more power,hence the power chord thing.But when you decide whether or not you add notes,you end up changing the fundamental characterof how that chord propagatesthroughout the entire sonic spectrum.

10:15 So like, especially on bass,so let's go down super low.Bass is where you can hear the clusters of chordseven more intensely.So I'm gonna play, that's a power chord.Root and fifth, rings, okay down there.Kinda sounds sick.But let's add in the third.Sounds like day in the life.But the way that the third comes inis it creates a lot more wobbles.Because it's so low.And on this part, I've talked a lot

10:50 about the harmonic series.And this is one of the biggest thingsthat we manipulate when we're doing mixingis like what parts of the harmonic series come out.And the harmonic series is all of the notesthat are not apparent by the thing that you're playing.It changes based on every instrument that you play.That's why different instruments sound different.But it also is a function of how low the note is.

11:11 The lower you go, the crazier it soundsto play dense chords.They all kinda start to rub together.But why?It's because the lower notes have got a lot moreof that harmonic energy down at the bottom.Because essentially you're not just playing the one note.But you listen very carefully.There are a bunch of different notesthat are actually ascending all the way up.

11:34 It's part of what gives this piano, it's a central character.It's part of what gives music a lot of life.And part of how we derive the musical scales.And so back to the example that I was giving beforeof pedal tones in the bottomversus repeated passages up in the top register.When you're doing stuff up in the top register,there's less, part of this is a functionof the human ear.

11:56 We can hear a lot of the stuff in the middlea lot better than the stuff at the top,especially with age.So yeah, use your spectrometer, folks.But when you're playing stuff at the top,there's less of that harmonic rub that low.I think that sounds crazy.That's a C major, a seven chord, same as this.Just down.And down.Harder and harder to discern all of the notes.They get all fumbled up together

12:25 because that harmonic series that counts all the way up,we start to absorb it all at once.They all kind of fight against each otherand they rub against each other.And they create situations just like we havewhen we had that major seven.But listen to the major seven right up against the root.Brutal, even more brutal down here.But that's part of the reason why JAWS hits us is it's...It gives that energy of tension

12:54 just inherent within the harmonic series.It's a low note that's moving a very small distance.So the harmonics, the frequenciesare gonna interrupt each other.Like if you picture two waves, like two slinkies,if you're kind of waving them one right after the other,those two wave forms of the two slinkiesare going to look very similar but slightly offsetand they're gonna create all sorts of weirdness.

13:19 It's the same thing that we can dowith noise-canceling headphones.You flip the phase of the things outside of your ear,push that into the ear, it cancels, phase cancels,everything that you're hearing outsideand it makes the rest of the world sound quiet.Same basic example, but we're doing thisnot to make things quiet but to create frequenciesthat fight each other.Hear the difference between those three

13:46 little mini chords, those little dyads?So just leveraging high notes and low notescan give us a lot of examples.So pedaling one note down there is coolbecause it's taking up a lot of space.There's a lot of harmonics going all the way upand then to move all of the notes above it,you're able to because there's not a ton of rubdown at the bottom and there's also a certain senseof we are focused on change.

14:14 So when like picture visually, you know,everything in environment is the sameand suddenly an animal pops out.You're like, whoa, I saw that very quickly.My entire like frame of focus became that animal.Same thing happens in music where things that are statickind of morph into the backgroundthat can be very positive for groove.So if you are not changing something very much,that's part of the reason why bass parts

14:39 can seem repetitive is that it can createa hypnotic effect.It can tuck you into the grooveand then up on top where we have lessof that harmonic rub, you can do all sortsof stuff over that static blow.It's the same reason why when there's a bass solotypically everybody gets the hell out of the wayjust lets the bass play with the drumsbecause you're trying not to stepon all that harmonic series and therefore

15:03 the parts of the bass that make it legible.The stuff that isn't just way down hereis part of what makes it so you can hearand make up the different notes.Like there's a funny thingwhen you're messing with 808s,this actually happens a lot in pop records.People will do the 808s in the wrong key on accident.You know, they're just doing it by earand half steps this little thing

15:30 is kind of hard to discern when you're way down lowparticularly with like 808 kick drums, tonal stuff.And it sometimes prints all the way to the final recordand that's part of like genre choices now toois out of tune low end because the way formsare so fricking huge it's really hard to discernwhich of the pitches is actually playing.You know, if we had different ears,

15:54 this is one of the things I like to think about likewhat would an aliens music be?I just watched a project Hail Mary and I was like,I wish that they played some of the aliens musicjust because that's fun.But like to think about it whereif we had different ears,if we perceived things differently,if the harmonic series hit us differently,if we filtered out things differently,

16:14 if we could hear things way, way, way up high,I think our music would be very different.And it's also funny to think about like us playingour music for another species with a different kind of earand how different it must sound.But this is the nature of like what we are navigatingwith chords, that's why I like to think of musicnot just as notes, but as frequencies.And I think when you get into production and mixing,

16:40 it can help open up new ways of thinking about compositionbecause you're less locked into the 12 notesand you're much more locked into the gradientbetween them and not just the given notethat's playing but all of the notes aboveand beyond, sometimes below the note that you chosein terms of that harmonic seriesand in terms of the choice of instrument,the timbre of that instrument, the sound of it,

17:01 the reason why a piano sounds this way,a guitar sounds another,even if you're playing the same note.And you can leverage all of that.All of those things kind of give you different levelsof access for clustered chords.Like say for example, we had this open chord.What if we played a bunch of notes in between it?Jazz.What if we added in some of that top noteso we have that rub in there too?Still kind of pretty.

17:34 But if you played that on a different instrument,it might not sound as pretty,but it might sound really pretty in a different octave,might sound really pretty in a different configuration.You can play the same notes, you can spread them out,you can tuck them together.But all of those illicit different emotional responsesand they create that effect of the animalsuddenly appeared in the room.We can get that surprise.

17:53 We can keep the tension and release of a piece going.And it doesn't necessarily have to be one instrument.It doesn't have to be in tune.It doesn't have to be linear.It doesn't have to stay in the same key.You can do literally anything you want to it.You can change the harmonic progression.You can change the equalization.So you're pulling out the hidden notesthat you're not actually playing,but are being perceived.

18:17 And all of those are just knobsand things that you can do for the sake of emotionand for the sake of fulfilling your intuitionand making the song that you wished existed exist.So don't be too scared of chords.There's a lot of room to play with it.If you enjoyed this podcast,I'd invite you to rate it five starsand share it with your friendswho need to learn more about chords

18:41 and check out my chords at scoobertdoobert.pizzaor just search me on Spotify, scoobertdoobert.And I hope you like what you hear.See you all next week.Thank you.