I just want to say your videos are THE BEST music education videos for someone that's more used to think logically instead of artistically - if that makes sense. When I try to teach myself music theory, I can sense that there's a incredibly sophisticated system behind all this stuff, but I often find myself frustrated by all these labels, rule of thumbs and traditions that's so disconnect with each other, it seems like musicians kind of made up as they go and got too used to it to change. Your video in my opinion does the best job of explaining the internal universal logic and patterns in music theory without getting dragged by those notions, as you repeated constantly "don't worry about labels", and I can't thank you enough for that. Your channel deserves millions of subscribers. Please make more videos like this!
Seriously, these five videos in less than one hour taught me more than my guitar teachers in five years. Please, continue your beautiful work, it is gold!
I'm absolutely amazed by this series. I have no musical education at all, I can't read sheet music, and so on; the way I always compose music is throwing some notes into the pot and hoping it sounds good. I found multiple interesting Music Theory resources, but NONE of them gave me as many "aha!" moments like yours! I'm really happy I found your videos, I just subscribed and I can't wait to see more videos from you. If you keep up this level of quality and keep explaining things in such a nicely visualized and understandable way like you do right now, I suppose you have the best music theory videos I found so far and I think I'll be donating soon as well when it looks a bit brighter on my side :) And I would absolutely love a video where people like me can practice identifying the tonic, as you mentioned in the last video!
Same here. No musical education apart from RUclips tutorials. I've been taking some vocal lessons for the past year and one day, out of the blue, I started composing a song. I was really excited watching this tutorial because I had been following these tips completely intuitively not even knowing the names for chords but ”making them up” through trial and error. It turns out well all can speak the musical language. Without that capacity we wouldn't be able to appreciate music.
Wow.. this is actually incredible. I haven't enjoyed or understood music theory like this before. Listen.. I never comment on YT videos, but I honestly have no choice but to try to thank you right now. I've Paid for courses, watched countless YT music theory tutorials; they were all duds. I got snippets of information on music theory, sure.. but it was never put in a form where I understood how I could apply the concepts. But this? Make more videos. Please. Especially more of chord progressions and using them over different scale concepts. How to make progressions with modes and maybe something to understand modal interchange (I think it's called borrowed chords?) would be down right amazing if you could make videos for them.. and even Negative Harmony if you're up for it. All I can say, is I really appreciate the hour of my life I got to spend watching this video series. You put other music theory advisers to shame... But the real question is... how do you understand all this so well?
I drank the whole series in like a greedy whale, Dying for more videos. please continue with the series. The way u break things down is just brilliant. The whole music thing is just starting to make sense. Many thanks from Iran.
RUclips just suggested me your video "Music Theory Distilled - Part 1: Melody". Around 1 hour later i´ve watched all of your music theory videos. I started playing guitar 4 years ago without any musical education and by learning alot of the typical four chord popsongs. I started to write my own songs few weeks ago, but i knew i leck the fundemental basis of music theory. I had so many enlightening moments while watching your videos and i really thank you from the bottom of my heart. Even though i am not a native english speaker, i understood your explanations so cleary. Glad to have a repeat-button to soak up this knowledge like a spong. On my opinion this is by far the best video series about music theory on youtube i have found yet. You got my sub and i will recommend your videos to everyone that wants to learn something about music theory. Keep up the good work and i am pretty damn sure more subs will follow.
Hi, last 5 years I’ve been watching 100 videos about music theory. Your serie is the best one. I love the fact that you don’t show a piano or guitar.Too bad that UI/UX developers didn’t exist during the hundreds of years it took to develop, because it’s hard and frustrating to get stuck because of all the ”bugs” in the system. Great that you point them out for us newbies. I would love to see an episode about how to compose a complete song from start to finish with topics like song structure, theme, bassline, supporting chords and melody.
I already knew about many, if not most of the concepts you talked about, but that's just because i've been noodling around and piecing together shards of information from around the internet, but honestly your videos are better than most of others i've seen before. There's no distraction from the core subject, no unnecessary editinng that tries to be fancy and convey more chaos than merit, the graphic design is simple and effective, using dark backgrounds and easily digestible symbols. Also i absolutely love how you always take various possibilities and potential problems a musician might encounter into the account and discuss them, even if briefly (i.e. about the the fact that these music theory principles aren't a hard rule set in stone, how there are melodies which don't conform to any particular scale and are atonal, etc etc - this is something, that many videos fail to mention, not capturing the big picture of the subject as well as you do, and only making novices fall into the trap of needlessly sticking to very common progressions, and tropes, making them less open for experimentation. This is what all theory videos need, even as a brief mention. I also love how this series breaks with the tired trend of stave notation, making it more universal and accessible (especially for computer musicians) Great job, please keep it up
This is EXCEPTIONAL! The way you’ve broken this down into such crystal clear, sun-came-out clarity is simply mind boggling. Mind boggling and mind nutritious. This is useful to anyone who’s ever wondered about music theory, especially people who play an instrument or are involved in music in some shape or form. Yes, I’m willing to pay for this. Could you kindly break down the modes and their practical application over chord progressions etc, to be able to use them to create even more interesting melodies.
Casey you have a serious talent for teaching. You have a well-rounded understanding of what you want to teach, make your points clear and digestable, separate what is essential and what is not and not go off topic, and have an amazing visual language. Please share more lessons!
Based on my 10 years of research on the RUclipss, this channel is a very good candidate becoming the Mecca of us bedroom producers. Your explanations cut through, with the addition of the pianorol visualization you just pondered upon one of the greatest demand I had ever regarding music theory lessons. The attitude You teach, with the emphasis on the freewill aspect is amazingly helpful for anyone be-humbled by the frustrations one can go through by listening many many tutorials, most of which lacks this kind of mentality.
Thank you so much for all the knowledge shared! There is so much to unpack in your music theory videos. I've been playing piano for 18 years on and off and these videos have given me a fresh insight to music theory that I haven't seen before. Thank you kindly for all your hard work and dedication to your craft!
Great tutorial! Keep making more of the educational videos. Could you please make one on borrowed chords and other chord substitutions outside of the diatonic scale?
I reviewed all of your music videos with my son as they are awesome teaching tools. I have subscribed and look forward to your future music videos. Thank you!
Best ever videos on theory I've ever seen!!! I learner that those who come from Diatonic background (my guitar teacher) can't really explain things in a natural way, like this. I'm a mathematician and this IS the logical way. Thanks so much!
Great series of videos. This sums up so much, and it's clear. Most of this I did know from learning in music school, but in the end I got the answer for a question I've had for a long time : there are rules to find chords for harmonization, but you can apply them freely.
Thank you for the effort you put to bring these videos to us. As a musician that struggles to understand some lables and names I found a lot of value here. Wish you the best of luck
Agree with Crimzan, very very useful stuff explained in such an easy way, never seen music theory explained i such a fun way, even if it is not too simple. Thanks a lot, learned lots of things I've been putting away for YEARS Reg suggestions, fun way to learn reading sheet music is always a good topic. Pint of beer on me ;)
These are great! Your methodology of communicating these ideas seems to simplify them down in ways that others don't. Many of these concepts are very basic but we get bogged down by the way we talk about them or by how many seem to need to occur at once. Please continue!
In tip #9, also consider using one of each chord in the two back to back arpeggio runs. Repeating the same notes over a "new" chord adds spice to the harmony.
I really like this video! Please do keep making them, I saldly cannot donate (at the moment anyway, but in the future most probably will be able to!) but, let me tell you, this is WAY beyond my level and I already have trouble understanding music stuffs in general, however I really did learn something from this video and delinitely will come back to it later on when my new knowledge sets a bit and I'm able to understand it better. I'm not good with understanding music, infact it even sort of scared me in a sense, I could never understand people's explanations and that always made me feel so horrible, but I understand your videos or at least after I watch one I know what to google to understand it better. I hope this doesn't sound too weird, I mean it as a very big compliment! Also, throughout the video I kept thinking how well you teach. You really teach very well. You don't dumb it down so people like me wouldn't get annoyed at some incorrect nonsense, but you do simplify it enough for beginners to understand. You visualize well. The example with the mouse helped me personally always connect it to "oh, notes that fit together" and this made it more easy to follow because thanks to this awesome vizualization of the mouse jumping and getting wet or not getting I actually had less information to process all at once. Very helpful. Thank you very much for these videos and I sincerely wish you the million dollars and all the best!
This is a really great channel, superb visual work and great content. A video on tonic recognition and on the chord progressions would be awesome, so yea if you can that'd be dope
Hey these videos have been so so helpful for me thank you so much. You make things so clear so quickly it is the perfect way to teach/learn this stuff. :)
I’ve always loved music. I played trumpet in school (both in general ensembles and jazz bands), have taken piano lessons, and am now working to expand my horizons as a primarily self-taught guitar player. Throughout all of this, various teachers and mentors have tried to explain different musical concepts to me, but none of it ever seemed to... sink in? I grasped the basics, of course, but I never had the ideas of chords, intervals, harmony, melody, etc. explained to me in a way that made sense or that really stuck. Again, I’m not sure why this is, but music theory has remained largely a beautiful mystery to me. As a result, I’ve spent years just playing what‘s on the page with vague inklings of why I’m doing what I’m doing but again, not truly understanding it at a subsurface level. This year, as I took up guitar, it began to severely bother me that I couldn’t explain any of what I was doing or any of the patterns I was following. I turned to the internet to find answers, but still nothing seemed to help me as my education on music theory is patchy and any resources I found felt either patronizing or far beyond my comprehension. But your videos-these latest ones as well as your previous series have helped me like no teacher, website, book, or video have before. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I strongly recommend these videos to any musician, whether they’re a beginner struggling to grasp music theory or an old pro who wants a refresher. :)
As for choosing where the chords will fall, to paraphrase Jacob Collier, it matters not how you got there, just where you land (he even uses this with micro-tonality and the ear is just fine with micro-tonal notes in a Major or Minor melody as long as it ends up happily on a chord tone (or extension). So consider most strongly where your melody "wants" to make a strong harmonic statement, and make sure you have chords there.
Thank you so much for your explanations! I love these videos, especially the visual part, it helps a lot!! Can't even imagine how much time and effort it takes to make one such lesson..! I'm so happy to learn it this way Though I knew some of the concepts from books, you really did a great job explaining complicated parts. Now I feel a little bit more confident about my weak and slightly unpracticed music composing skills hehe...>u< I'd like to suggest leitmotifs, or what I find more difficult is figuring out the percussion... I'd love to see anything educational about music. I'm looking forward to it
Thank you for the great video keep up the hard work. Since you did such a great job concisely describing how to choose chords for melody, I would be very interested in seeing your process for how to create melody.
Something that hasn't been addressed in the 5 videos, is what is the point of having a 7 note scale? Scales make things more confusing and makes the notation ugly compared to using all 12 notes. There are clear downsides, so what are the upsides? Is it purely historical, or are there good reasons for using only subsets of the notes?
These are things I wonder too. The videos kind of point out to these issues by saying "things being just labels", "the system not being perfect", and "musicians making the stuff up as they went ahead". I think an upside as Josiah asks, one of the reasons why musical notation evolved in this manner, is "notational economy". I don't know if it is true but let's assume that the major scale and its relative minor is used more than any other alternative in popular music (by popular I mean whatever music pieces were more important to the musicians centuries ago when the western music theory was being standardized). If this assumption is true, then describing everything else as an exception of the major by adding/removing/manipulating the differences would be more economical than going scale-free. With the standard five staff line notation we get almost 2 octaves (without ever adding a new staff line segment adding below or above). But if we were to use the piano-roll as the notation (chromatic notation with 1 line per whole step) we need 12 "lines" for two octaves. By the way nothing in nature or nothing that we create is ever uniform (occur equal in frequencies). We almost always tend to pick or use something more than its alternatives. If it weren't the major scale then it would have been some other scale that is favored more than the others. The important thing is not which scale is used more than others but by what amount. So basically I am arguing for white keys vs black keys in the piano. I am not sure if notes of a musical piece that corresponds black keys sound different than notes by white keys because of the hand mechanics of the pianist. Then obviously we would be adding extra "color" to scales with sharps and flats. I don't think fitting more music into a sheet was the only motivation either. We as humans would like to keep our "coding" (notation) dense enough. When we write on piano-roll we get a lot of white space, staff notation is more dense but still readable (even good enough for sight reading). It is as if we would like to create some workload for our brains but not too much. Our brains are so amazing that if we practice on something long enough it becomes amazingly automatic. Just like reading the letters in this text. Letters are these squiggly shapes but our brains figure out the shapes and the words so fast and automatically that we are not even aware of it (until we try to learn a different alphabet :). This "workload" argument I am trying to make is that if something is moderately complex that it can be learned by a fair amount of practice but at the same time it yields enough "economy" we as humans tend to use it. We a balance/trade-off between difficulty to learn something and the pay-offs it affords after being learned. For example the design of Morse Code is based on the frequency of letters appearing in the English language phrases. It assigns shorter coding (number of dots&dashes) to more frequent letters and longer coding to the others. So this design minimizes the total dot&dash length of a message. Well this is my 2 cents on why the chromatic is not the standard. There are many videos and articles on the number of notes in a scale and intonation of those notes. I would love to see Casey's take on that!
Thanks! Yes, this is the last video in the Choosing Chords series (for now, anyway.) And yes, I greatly admire 3b1b! Our teaching styles are different, I think, but obviously the visual style draws from his work.
Glad you liked it! I don't have a great suggestion re: chords, but my first thought is that you can begin by looking at chords in the domain of genres that you are interested in. There are many, many chords, and they're used in many different ways, so it makes sense to start with the music you're really interested to play and see what chords it uses. From there you can do a kind of "functional" analysis of the chords: what each additional note adds to the sound of the chord and why, and how those added notes help the chord move to the next chord, etc. Maybe some day I will make a more in-depth video on more elaborate chords.
In #8, you change the penultimate chord to something that contains the natural 7th in the melody, making this short section diverge to a key that's different from the Gm used by the rest of the melody & chords. • What is this change called in music theory? I guess it could, in theory, be called a very short-lasting modulation to a different key, but somehow I get the feeling there's a better name for it, as the term modulation (to my understanding) is usually reserved for something that will last a bit more. • When creating divergences like this, are there any tips or rules for which changes (and chords to accompany them) would sound smooth? Is it as simple as looking at the circle of fifths and choosing a key that's as close as possible to the "primary" key in the circle or is this just one of those black magic things in music where you just have to use intuition or serendipity to find a correct divergence?
Good questions. I don't know the official term... "alteration" is close, but I'm not sure it's broad enough for what we're talking about: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_chord ... in terms of choosing them: yeah, I would say that the general rule is that the less alteration you need to do, the smoother it will be. And if you aren't just altering a familiar chord but are using a chord quite oblique to the original key, then the guidelines are similar: the more notes coming from the scale, the smoother it sounds. And you can draw on a lot of black-magic type awareness about how you guide the ear with familiar motions, etc. E.g. the classic III-VI-II-V-I movement is leveraging the familiar V-I relationship in the circle of fifths to get away with chords that use non-scale notes (the III, VI, and the II).
When you teach people do smth by ear you should know have they actually ears))) Many people are just deaf for the chord function and other common things. At the beggining better way is do it according to rules, not deaf ear)) This thing is golden anyway.
![Quando Rondo - Life Goes On [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/eIf3fhMXAow/mqdefault.jpg)
I just want to say your videos are THE BEST music education videos for someone that's more used to think logically instead of artistically - if that makes sense. When I try to teach myself music theory, I can sense that there's a incredibly sophisticated system behind all this stuff, but I often find myself frustrated by all these labels, rule of thumbs and traditions that's so disconnect with each other, it seems like musicians kind of made up as they go and got too used to it to change. Your video in my opinion does the best job of explaining the internal universal logic and patterns in music theory without getting dragged by those notions, as you repeated constantly "don't worry about labels", and I can't thank you enough for that. Your channel deserves millions of subscribers. Please make more videos like this!
Seriously, these five videos in less than one hour taught me more than my guitar teachers in five years. Please, continue your beautiful work, it is gold!
Exactly.
I agree.
im lucas.
Jesus what a cringe comment
I'm absolutely amazed by this series. I have no musical education at all, I can't read sheet music, and so on; the way I always compose music is throwing some notes into the pot and hoping it sounds good. I found multiple interesting Music Theory resources, but NONE of them gave me as many "aha!" moments like yours! I'm really happy I found your videos, I just subscribed and I can't wait to see more videos from you. If you keep up this level of quality and keep explaining things in such a nicely visualized and understandable way like you do right now, I suppose you have the best music theory videos I found so far and I think I'll be donating soon as well when it looks a bit brighter on my side :)
And I would absolutely love a video where people like me can practice identifying the tonic, as you mentioned in the last video!
Same here. No musical education apart from RUclips tutorials. I've been taking some vocal lessons for the past year and one day, out of the blue, I started composing a song. I was really excited watching this tutorial because I had been following these tips completely intuitively not even knowing the names for chords but ”making them up” through trial and error. It turns out well all can speak the musical language. Without that capacity we wouldn't be able to appreciate music.
Wow.. this is actually incredible. I haven't enjoyed or understood music theory like this before. Listen.. I never comment on YT videos, but I honestly have no choice but to try to thank you right now. I've Paid for courses, watched countless YT music theory tutorials; they were all duds. I got snippets of information on music theory, sure.. but it was never put in a form where I understood how I could apply the concepts. But this? Make more videos. Please. Especially more of chord progressions and using them over different scale concepts. How to make progressions with modes and maybe something to understand modal interchange (I think it's called borrowed chords?) would be down right amazing if you could make videos for them.. and even Negative Harmony if you're up for it. All I can say, is I really appreciate the hour of my life I got to spend watching this video series. You put other music theory advisers to shame... But the real question is... how do you understand all this so well?
Not a single person can explain music theory like you. Keep up the great work!
I drank the whole series in like a greedy whale, Dying for more videos. please continue with the series. The way u break things down is just brilliant. The whole music thing is just starting to make sense. Many thanks from Iran.
It's a series so well illustrated visually and musically. A gem among the too theoretical or hollow videos elsewhere on youtube.
This work is OUTSTANDING! Your Music Theory Distilled series is incredible. What a gift. Thank you!
RUclips just suggested me your video "Music Theory Distilled - Part 1: Melody". Around 1 hour later i´ve watched all of your music theory videos. I started playing guitar 4 years ago without any musical education and by learning alot of the typical four chord popsongs. I started to write my own songs few weeks ago, but i knew i leck the fundemental basis of music theory. I had so many enlightening moments while watching your videos and i really thank you from the bottom of my heart. Even though i am not a native english speaker, i understood your explanations so cleary. Glad to have a repeat-button to soak up this knowledge like a spong. On my opinion this is by far the best video series about music theory on youtube i have found yet. You got my sub and i will recommend your videos to everyone that wants to learn something about music theory. Keep up the good work and i am pretty damn sure more subs will follow.
Hi, last 5 years I’ve been watching 100 videos about music theory. Your serie is the best one. I love the fact that you don’t show a piano or guitar.Too bad that UI/UX developers didn’t exist during the hundreds of years it took to develop, because it’s hard and frustrating to get stuck because of all the ”bugs” in the system. Great that you point them out for us newbies. I would love to see an episode about how to compose a complete song from start to finish with topics like song structure, theme, bassline, supporting chords and melody.
Great topic suggestion.
I already knew about many, if not most of the concepts you talked about, but that's just because i've been noodling around and piecing together shards of information from around the internet, but honestly your videos are better than most of others i've seen before. There's no distraction from the core subject, no unnecessary editinng that tries to be fancy and convey more chaos than merit, the graphic design is simple and effective, using dark backgrounds and easily digestible symbols. Also i absolutely love how you always take various possibilities and potential problems a musician might encounter into the account and discuss them, even if briefly (i.e. about the the fact that these music theory principles aren't a hard rule set in stone, how there are melodies which don't conform to any particular scale and are atonal, etc etc - this is something, that many videos fail to mention, not capturing the big picture of the subject as well as you do, and only making novices fall into the trap of needlessly sticking to very common progressions, and tropes, making them less open for experimentation. This is what all theory videos need, even as a brief mention. I also love how this series breaks with the tired trend of stave notation, making it more universal and accessible (especially for computer musicians) Great job, please keep it up
Thanks for the kind comment, and glad you found it useful!
Man, these tutorials are awesome!!! I was looking for this style of teaching (in the music theory world) for a while now. Thanks to you!
This is EXCEPTIONAL! The way you’ve broken this down into such crystal clear, sun-came-out clarity is simply mind boggling. Mind boggling and mind nutritious. This is useful to anyone who’s ever wondered about music theory, especially people who play an instrument or are involved in music in some shape or form. Yes, I’m willing to pay for this. Could you kindly break down the modes and their practical application over chord progressions etc, to be able to use them to create even more interesting melodies.
If i'm keep watching every morning, in one mouth i get, great job!
Casey you have a serious talent for teaching. You have a well-rounded understanding of what you want to teach, make your points clear and digestable, separate what is essential and what is not and not go off topic, and have an amazing visual language. Please share more lessons!
Based on my 10 years of research on the RUclipss, this channel is a very good candidate becoming the Mecca of us bedroom producers. Your explanations cut through, with the addition of the pianorol visualization you just pondered upon one of the greatest demand I had ever regarding music theory lessons. The attitude You teach, with the emphasis on the freewill aspect is amazingly helpful for anyone be-humbled by the frustrations one can go through by listening many many tutorials, most of which lacks this kind of mentality.
This man is telling the Truth
Thank you so much for all the knowledge shared! There is so much to unpack in your music theory videos. I've been playing piano for 18 years on and off and these videos have given me a fresh insight to music theory that I haven't seen before. Thank you kindly for all your hard work and dedication to your craft!
Choosing the chords is my favourite episode of Choosing the chords for your melody, finally I got to choose the chords.
Casey Connor + FireWalk + In the mix = Deadly combination. Im super happy to discover your channel.
I'm loving this :) already watched the 5 videos! Thanks
Great tutorial! Keep making more of the educational videos. Could you please make one on borrowed chords and other chord substitutions outside of the diatonic scale?
I reviewed all of your music videos with my son as they are awesome teaching tools. I have subscribed and look forward to your future music videos. Thank you!
Best ever videos on theory I've ever seen!!!
I learner that those who come from Diatonic background (my guitar teacher) can't really explain things in a natural way, like this. I'm a mathematician and this IS the logical way. Thanks so much!
Thanks! Glad you liked it!
Your content is so amazing please keep doing more videos like that... thanks ! I was looking for something like this
Great series of videos. This sums up so much, and it's clear.
Most of this I did know from learning in music school, but in the end I got the answer for a question I've had for a long time : there are rules to find chords for harmonization, but you can apply them freely.
Thank you for the effort you put to bring these videos to us. As a musician that struggles to understand some lables and names I found a lot of value here. Wish you the best of luck
I loved your series about music theory. I hope you will make more teaching videos like these!, it defenitely helped me a lot!
Great videos! Simple explanations that make it easy to understand. Please, keep making these.
Agree with Crimzan, very very useful stuff explained in such an easy way, never seen music theory explained i such a fun way, even if it is not too simple. Thanks a lot, learned lots of things I've been putting away for YEARS
Reg suggestions, fun way to learn reading sheet music is always a good topic. Pint of beer on me ;)
I just discovered these videos and they're seriously amazing!!! I have seen a lot of these theory videos recently and yours are some of the best!
These are great! Your methodology of communicating these ideas seems to simplify them down in ways that others don't. Many of these concepts are very basic but we get bogged down by the way we talk about them or by how many seem to need to occur at once. Please continue!
In tip #9, also consider using one of each chord in the two back to back arpeggio runs. Repeating the same notes over a "new" chord adds spice to the harmony.
Best tutorial I've seen on youtube about this topic.
Thank you Casey.
These are the most concise videos on RUclips. Really helpful!
Best time spent on youtube by me in comparison to last few months! Congratulations, pretty awesome amazing holly-molly oh-my-god tuts, really!
I really like this video! Please do keep making them, I saldly cannot donate (at the moment anyway, but in the future most probably will be able to!) but, let me tell you, this is WAY beyond my level and I already have trouble understanding music stuffs in general, however I really did learn something from this video and delinitely will come back to it later on when my new knowledge sets a bit and I'm able to understand it better. I'm not good with understanding music, infact it even sort of scared me in a sense, I could never understand people's explanations and that always made me feel so horrible, but I understand your videos or at least after I watch one I know what to google to understand it better. I hope this doesn't sound too weird, I mean it as a very big compliment! Also, throughout the video I kept thinking how well you teach. You really teach very well. You don't dumb it down so people like me wouldn't get annoyed at some incorrect nonsense, but you do simplify it enough for beginners to understand. You visualize well. The example with the mouse helped me personally always connect it to "oh, notes that fit together" and this made it more easy to follow because thanks to this awesome vizualization of the mouse jumping and getting wet or not getting I actually had less information to process all at once. Very helpful. Thank you very much for these videos and I sincerely wish you the million dollars and all the best!
I love this so much. Perhaps you could make a video on song structure? As in how to transform a melody into a full song with motifs and such.
nobodys dine it better! thank you for this great lesson
This is a really great channel, superb visual work and great content. A video on tonic recognition and on the chord progressions would be awesome, so yea if you can that'd be dope
Hey these videos have been so so helpful for me thank you so much. You make things so clear so quickly it is the perfect way to teach/learn this stuff. :)
Your videos are connecting so many dots for me
I’ve always loved music. I played trumpet in school (both in general ensembles and jazz bands), have taken piano lessons, and am now working to expand my horizons as a primarily self-taught guitar player. Throughout all of this, various teachers and mentors have tried to explain different musical concepts to me, but none of it ever seemed to... sink in? I grasped the basics, of course, but I never had the ideas of chords, intervals, harmony, melody, etc. explained to me in a way that made sense or that really stuck. Again, I’m not sure why this is, but music theory has remained largely a beautiful mystery to me. As a result, I’ve spent years just playing what‘s on the page with vague inklings of why I’m doing what I’m doing but again, not truly understanding it at a subsurface level. This year, as I took up guitar, it began to severely bother me that I couldn’t explain any of what I was doing or any of the patterns I was following. I turned to the internet to find answers, but still nothing seemed to help me as my education on music theory is patchy and any resources I found felt either patronizing or far beyond my comprehension. But your videos-these latest ones as well as your previous series have helped me like no teacher, website, book, or video have before. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I strongly recommend these videos to any musician, whether they’re a beginner struggling to grasp music theory or an old pro who wants a refresher. :)
This are gold!!! So easy to follow and well explained. Definitely you got a talent for teaching.
Dude.. you deserve a medal!! You helped me soo much! :) Thank you
I ve benn studying music by my own, and THIS explains a lot of things. Love ur vids ! Greetings from argentina
Brilliant please continue thanks so much
So good ! Very easy to understand . Thankyou so much . Kindly make videos on blues , chord substitution and melodies. Thankyou so much appreciate it.
As for choosing where the chords will fall, to paraphrase Jacob Collier, it matters not how you got there, just where you land (he even uses this with micro-tonality and the ear is just fine with micro-tonal notes in a Major or Minor melody as long as it ends up happily on a chord tone (or extension). So consider most strongly where your melody "wants" to make a strong harmonic statement, and make sure you have chords there.
Amazing content here you may be one of the best teachers I had come across on RUclips man!
I really like those videos
Thank you so much for your explanations! I love these videos, especially the visual part, it helps a lot!! Can't even imagine how much time and effort it takes to make one such lesson..! I'm so happy to learn it this way
Though I knew some of the concepts from books, you really did a great job explaining complicated parts. Now I feel a little bit more confident about my weak and slightly unpracticed music composing skills hehe...>u<
I'd like to suggest leitmotifs, or what I find more difficult is figuring out the percussion... I'd love to see anything educational about music. I'm looking forward to it
Really enjoying your videos! Great work, hope you keep it up!
Thank you for the great video keep up the hard work.
Since you did such a great job concisely describing how to choose chords for melody, I would be very interested in seeing your process for how to create melody.
this is so interesting, thanks for sharing! my personal favorite method is by ear, but all the others seem like great starting points too!
I love your videos! Keep making them please!
Great friendly teaching ideas of harmony please Keep On !
Keep up the great work! I love these videos!
Amazing man seriously
Great video's! Very informative and great explanation, keep up the good work!
Suuuuch a great series.
Basically you are the 1st I feel like i would love to pay to get lessons from !
Thank you !
Top notch explanation. Thanks
Keep it up my friend! You're very good at teaching! Subscribed
This is amazing
Dope lessons
cool stuff - love it!!
"i decided not to make any more educational music videos" D: "until the recent surge of support" :D
The mouse analogy was... Amazing, things just kinda clicked!
Something that hasn't been addressed in the 5 videos, is what is the point of having a 7 note scale? Scales make things more confusing and makes the notation ugly compared to using all 12 notes. There are clear downsides, so what are the upsides? Is it purely historical, or are there good reasons for using only subsets of the notes?
These are things I wonder too. The videos kind of point out to these issues by saying "things being just labels", "the system not being perfect", and "musicians making the stuff up as they went ahead". I think an upside as Josiah asks, one of the reasons why musical notation evolved in this manner, is "notational economy".
I don't know if it is true but let's assume that the major scale and its relative minor is used more than any other alternative in popular music (by popular I mean whatever music pieces were more important to the musicians centuries ago when the western music theory was being standardized). If this assumption is true, then describing everything else as an exception of the major by adding/removing/manipulating the differences would be more economical than going scale-free. With the standard five staff line notation we get almost 2 octaves (without ever adding a new staff line segment adding below or above). But if we were to use the piano-roll as the notation (chromatic notation with 1 line per whole step) we need 12 "lines" for two octaves. By the way nothing in nature or nothing that we create is ever uniform (occur equal in frequencies). We almost always tend to pick or use something more than its alternatives. If it weren't the major scale then it would have been some other scale that is favored more than the others. The important thing is not which scale is used more than others but by what amount. So basically I am arguing for white keys vs black keys in the piano. I am not sure if notes of a musical piece that corresponds black keys sound different than notes by white keys because of the hand mechanics of the pianist. Then obviously we would be adding extra "color" to scales with sharps and flats.
I don't think fitting more music into a sheet was the only motivation either. We as humans would like to keep our "coding" (notation) dense enough. When we write on piano-roll we get a lot of white space, staff notation is more dense but still readable (even good enough for sight reading). It is as if we would like to create some workload for our brains but not too much. Our brains are so amazing that if we practice on something long enough it becomes amazingly automatic. Just like reading the letters in this text. Letters are these squiggly shapes but our brains figure out the shapes and the words so fast and automatically that we are not even aware of it (until we try to learn a different alphabet :). This "workload" argument I am trying to make is that if something is moderately complex that it can be learned by a fair amount of practice but at the same time it yields enough "economy" we as humans tend to use it. We a balance/trade-off between difficulty to learn something and the pay-offs it affords after being learned. For example the design of Morse Code is based on the frequency of letters appearing in the English language phrases. It assigns shorter coding (number of dots&dashes) to more frequent letters and longer coding to the others. So this design minimizes the total dot&dash length of a message.
Well this is my 2 cents on why the chromatic is not the standard. There are many videos and articles on the number of notes in a scale and intonation of those notes. I would love to see Casey's take on that!
keep going boyy pleasee
Please make a video about Key changes
awesome video keep it up man
Thank you so much for this! Please continue what you are doing. You are like the 3blue1brown of music theory :)
I NEED PART 3!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It sounds as if you've found your niche! (AND A NEW SUB!)
Great! I loved it, is this the last video in the series? And were you inspired by 3blue1brown?
Thanks! Yes, this is the last video in the Choosing Chords series (for now, anyway.) And yes, I greatly admire 3b1b! Our teaching styles are different, I think, but obviously the visual style draws from his work.
Sir great lesson 🙏🙏🙏..May I know there are many chords except the basic Maj & min.. what should be the procedure to learn them & their application
Glad you liked it! I don't have a great suggestion re: chords, but my first thought is that you can begin by looking at chords in the domain of genres that you are interested in. There are many, many chords, and they're used in many different ways, so it makes sense to start with the music you're really interested to play and see what chords it uses. From there you can do a kind of "functional" analysis of the chords: what each additional note adds to the sound of the chord and why, and how those added notes help the chord move to the next chord, etc. Maybe some day I will make a more in-depth video on more elaborate chords.
@@CaseyConnor Thanks again for the suggestion & for sharing.. Will be great if you make further videos ..
very helpfull!
In #8, you change the penultimate chord to something that contains the natural 7th in the melody, making this short section diverge to a key that's different from the Gm used by the rest of the melody & chords.
• What is this change called in music theory? I guess it could, in theory, be called a very short-lasting modulation to a different key, but somehow I get the feeling there's a better name for it, as the term modulation (to my understanding) is usually reserved for something that will last a bit more.
• When creating divergences like this, are there any tips or rules for which changes (and chords to accompany them) would sound smooth? Is it as simple as looking at the circle of fifths and choosing a key that's as close as possible to the "primary" key in the circle or is this just one of those black magic things in music where you just have to use intuition or serendipity to find a correct divergence?
Good questions. I don't know the official term... "alteration" is close, but I'm not sure it's broad enough for what we're talking about: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_chord ... in terms of choosing them: yeah, I would say that the general rule is that the less alteration you need to do, the smoother it will be. And if you aren't just altering a familiar chord but are using a chord quite oblique to the original key, then the guidelines are similar: the more notes coming from the scale, the smoother it sounds. And you can draw on a lot of black-magic type awareness about how you guide the ear with familiar motions, etc. E.g. the classic III-VI-II-V-I movement is leveraging the familiar V-I relationship in the circle of fifths to get away with chords that use non-scale notes (the III, VI, and the II).
When you teach people do smth by ear you should know have they actually ears))) Many people are just deaf for the chord function and other common things. At the beggining better way is do it according to rules, not deaf ear))
This thing is golden anyway.
Thank you. Dont you dare stop the tutorials.
Thanks alot man great video. These video's have opened my eyes on why my music sucks ass! Thanks though..
we need more … please donate guys...
The last one sounds jazzy
Some mice love to swim. (C) Casey Connor
3blue1brown of music theory.
I'm guessing a hundred percent positive feedbacks on the comment section.
I wish I could understand melody, I still can't :/
Shut up bitch, yes you can