Why are chords a thing?

0:01 A harmony of spheres, the gas giants looping around the centipede, the roots, that is the sun.And as they sing in perfect harmony, we listen to the universe.Yeah, so let's talk about harmony.Harmony like a harmony when two singers are singing together and they're singing two different notes.And it sounds beautiful.There's also the harmony of chords and underscore.

0:30 Things like a piano player that's accompanying a vocalist, they're playing harmony.And then the vocalist is singing over that harmony.So how do these notes work together?Again, we're talking about Western music mostly here.We'll talk about other musical styles and traditions later.But right now, mostly focusing just on pop music.Harmony comes from scales.

0:54 And as we were talking about in the last episode, scales come from the perfect fifth.That's how we get all 12 of our notes is by stacking those fifths, like we were doing in the last episode.So like, what do we do with that?Now we have 12 notes.How do we reduce that?So it doesn't end up sounding like this.That scale with all 12 notes is called the chromatic scale.You can do some really cool stuff with it.

1:18 Like the circus song.That's a chromatic song.And so they sound kind of goofy.I also did a scoort song.It sounds like this.It's that riff that the guitar, bass, and saxophone are playing that's chromatic.All 12 notes.Most songs that you hear are usually using seven notes.A lot of times only five.So how do we pick those notes?Well, to start, we're going to talk about the other perfect interval.

2:06 Remember we talked about the perfect octave that sounds like this.Then you have the perfect fifth where we got all 12 notes.And that sounds like this.Then we also have the perfect fourth, which is another Pythagorean thing derived from a ratio.That ratio is four to three.So just so we were doing that three to two ratio to get the fifths,you can apply that same thing with four to three to get fourths.

2:33 One of the cool things about these intervals, and when you're looking at itfrom this arm's distance, birds eye view, is that fifths and fourths inverse each other.So we're kind of talking about the same thing.It'll be easier if I play it for you.So here is ascending a fifth, and here is descending a fourth.Those are actually the same notes.It just depends on direction.

3:01 So when we talk about the circle of fifths, we can also call it the circle of fourths.If that's confusing to you, don't feel bad.It's confusing AF.The key takeaway is just to think that fourths and fifths are just kind of two ways of almost saying the same thing.That's what makes them a perfect interval in Pythagoras' eyes.You're probably asking, why do I need to know these numbers four and five?

3:28 Well, there's a reason why I chose ukulele to play for this episode.So there is the most popular progression ever in pop music.And it is called the one, the four, and the five.Tell me you haven't heard this before.

3:55 So that's why it's important is that pretty much all of pop is based around those three chords.And those three chords are based around the root, the one, whatever you're starting your scale on.Key of C, so that'd be a C, the fourth and the fifth, and the chords that are wrapped around them.

4:13 But it's basically that movement between one, to the perfect four, to the perfect five, back to one, that kind of defines Western music.So how do we figure out the notes to make a chord?So I was playing chords, and those are chords with three different notes in them.That one, four, five.How do I pick those notes?So there are two different flavors of chords.Major and there's minor.Major is happy, minor is sad.

4:45 That's how it's at least usually explained.And that's somewhat the feeling that you get from them.I think it's a little too simplistic, but it at least starts us out.So how do we do this?It all comes from the major scale.First off, what is a scale?I'm going to define it the way that I actually believe it.It's an arbitrary assortment of notes.

5:06 Deciding I'm going to play these notes, and not those, and you're calling it a scale.The major scale is just the one that's most often used.It starts with a major third, which sounds all pretty.And it's rooted around the perfect fifth, and the octave.And then it just fills in some stuff in between.

5:29 It's got some tension, it's got some release, it's got some happy, it's got some sad, and it is most often used.It's the big dog.We don't really need to worry about how you actually construct it.Who really cares?And I'll see you kind of already know.I don't know, if you're a music fan, you know what note I think is coming next.Can't you anticipate it?Doesn't it just feel right?What if I didn't wrong note?

6:00 It's obvious.It's obvious.But you know, that's also a scale too.It's just not the major scale, the big dog.So think about it like steps.There's a very top of the funnel that comes down to popular music.And the very top of the funnel is that assumption that the perfect fifth is God.

6:24 From the perfect fifth being God, you find the 12 note scale, the chromatic scale.That's all the notes, all the putty you have to play with, 12.And from there, you shave out some of the notes, and that becomes a scale.The scale is just saying, I'm arbitrarily going to play these notes instead of those notes because it sounds better to me.And I'm going to hammer it home enough that'll sound better to you too.

6:48 And then from there, you pick an assortment from that scale and you emit other notes and you just play two or three or four sometimes more from that scale at the same time.And you call that a chord, you call that harmony.Some chords sound, you know, sonorous and they are familiar and expected.And maybe they sound happy.

7:12 And then other chords are dissonant and have tension or maybe they sound sad or they make maybe they make you anxious.It doesn't mean that one chord is better than the other.It's just that, you know, one chord evokes one thing over another in part because of the way that we're conditioned to feel about that chord.

7:31 And one of my favorite things about even classical music is the use of bad sounding chords to make good sounding chords sound better.So without that bad, without that contrast, without that tension, then the good stuff can't sound good.So all chords, all scales, even stuff that breaks down that perfect fifth and the twelfth tone scale thing.It all has worth, it's all music.

8:00 And so it's hard for me to call one chord good and one chord bad or one chord beautiful and the other chord sad or tension because just like going back to the last episode,there isn't just one right way of making music.There isn't one way that was like handed down from God as this platonic ideal as you need to make music this way.

8:22 I actually think that some of the chords that have more tension might reflect reality more.But these like I was joking in the intro about how there's this harmony of the spheres and, you know, this kind of BS that people used to believe that all of the planets were circling the earth in some sort of beautiful concentric circles that all had the same ratios as the musical intervals and all this kind of BS.

8:49 In reality, it's both at once. It's chaos and it's controlled.It's metered and expected, but also constantly vibrating and slightly changing.That's what I think is really cool to reflect with music and art is what's really there now that we understand what's really there a little bit more.

9:11 I think that it's cool to be able to make music using the actual music of the spheres, the actual chaos of the intervals that are imperfect and ever changing and ever oscillating.I think that there is value in music that isn't quote unquote good in the sonorous or expected way, but it's got it's got some rub just like the real world does.

9:36 Let's pick some random notes and make some chords. The most frequently used combinations are the root.The third either major or minor, which gives it that happier sad sound and then the fifth.And so by doing that, you create a major chord.You can also create a power chord by omitting the third. So it's just the root and the fifth.

10:02 And like if you hear old rock and roll, or you could do like smoke on the water, power chords, that just doesn't have the third.Here it doesn't really have that happier sad sense. It just has some power to it. That's what the root and fifth together do without the third.But then you add a third and like say, for example, here's a minor chord.

10:32 There's a little bit more mystery and sadness to it, I guess. I think again, kind of a simplistic way of thinking about it because it all depends on the context of the chord.In my opinion, you can make a minor chord sound very bright in the right context.So those are those random assortment of notes, most frequently used major with the major third, minor with the minor third.

10:57 And if you want to learn about every Taylor Swift song, you have the one, you have the minor six, the major four, and you have the major five.It's also every doo-wop song. It's also like every song.If you look at a lot of pop music, it is three major chords, the one, the four and the five plus whatever minor you want.Just throw a minor in there to give it a little bit of flavor.

11:23 And that's pretty much what happens over and over and over again, the music of the spheres.Anyway, join me next time where we talk about non major scale stuff and start to break it down a little bit because I want to show you some of the possibilities, some of the tensions, and probably expose you to some music or some styles that you will hate.

11:50 And I think that's good for us because that's what I'm put on this earth to do is make music that some people hate, but some people don't hate.To hear some of that music, go to www.scoobertdoobert.pizza.That's www.scoobertdoobert.pizza.