Transcription
Why is it that some people seem to have this innate ability to do awesome things like play by ear or write their own songs or even switch between different instruments? Whereas other people seem to struggle and always be stuck? To me, the difference, the missing link, is music theory, right? That's what enables you to write your own songs better, to improvise music, to play by ear. All of this stuff comes down to understanding the language of music. Music is a language, and music theory is just the way that we understand that language. So, I'm excited you're on this video. Stay tuned. Let's get into it.
Now, the first thing we gotta talk about is the big elephant in the room, which is why do so many people struggle with this, right? A lot of people have tried to dip their toes into music theory, maybe you're one of them, and you come away just feeling totally confused and totally disoriented. Well, I think what most people are missing is a big picture understanding of what we're even trying to do, right? We need a game plan. We need a map. Otherwise, we're just diving into this huge, vast ocean of music theory and not knowing what the game plan is. That's why I want you to make a commitment to yourself right now to stay through this entire video. It's easy to get distracted. It's easy to get lost in the weeds, but if you stay through this video, you're gonna have the tools that you need to finally get this stuff. And I've taught this to tons of people who say, "I've always been confused about this," and I finally have had the light bulb moment.
Super quick disclaimer: there's always exceptions. There's always times where rules get broken. There's always more advanced concepts, but for today, we're just keeping it simple, and we're just doing the fundamentals. Let's start today with the big picture. This is the first section. So, the big picture to me just boils down to one simple equation, okay? Songs equal melody plus chords. That's it. So, all songs are just melody and chords put together. Let's dig into those two elements a little bit more, starting with melody. So, melody is simply the part of the song that you would whistle, hum, or sing. It's the thing that most of us think about first when we think of a particular song. So, for instance, if I play this, "Mary Had a Little Lamb," that's the melody.
Now, on the other side of the equation are chords, and all a chord is is multiple notes that happen at the same time. So, maybe I'm playing three notes at a time, four notes at a time, and it just sort of makes the bed underneath the melody. Now, let's go to the piano, and I'll show you why you need both of these elements. Let's start with this melody and see if you can recognize this. It's a little bland. I kind of just walked up and came back down. Well, let's listen to some chords on the left hand. Does this sound like a song? If I just go, no, not really. It just sounds like some chords, right? But as soon as I put them together, check this out. It turns into "Beauty and the Beast." That's the power of having both melody and chords.
Let's do one more example. Let's say I wanted to play some Katy Perry, and if you just heard the chords to this song, it could really be anything. If I played just the melody, it sounds good, but it's a little bit empty. As soon as I put them together, it becomes a full song. Check this out. All that to say, we really need both melody and chords to make a full song. On piano, very often the right hand plays the melody, and the left hand plays the chords, as you just saw. But it doesn't always have to be that way. Let's say someone's singing and playing guitar. Well, the vocals would be the melody, the singing, and the guitar would be supplying the chords. So, there's all kinds of different ways we could have these two elements, but they're always gonna be there. That's it. That's the entire game plan. All we need to do to be able to understand music theory is to be able to understand melody and be able to understand chords.
I really want this video to be applicable whether you're a pianist, guitarist, producer, songwriter, whatever you are, I want this to apply to you. But it's important that we have a basic understanding of the piano just so we can talk about this stuff and be on the same page. So, for now, I'm just going to throw a quick graphic up of where the piano keys are. We have A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And lastly, we just need to make sure that you know about sharps and flats. So, super quickly, a sharp is where you go up from a certain note, and a flat is where you go down from a certain note. For example, here's A. If I go up to this key, this is A sharp. I could also do A and go down to what would be A flat.
Alright, another very basic element of music that we have to talk about is something called intervals. An interval is just talking about the distance between two notes. For example, if I go one, two, that's a second. If I go one, two, three, that's a third. And some people think of that as a skip, right? I'm skipping a note. I could keep going, one, two, three, four, and I could go one, two, three, four, five. Basically, just think of seconds as steps and think about thirds as skips. That's it for the overview section. And what we talked about is that songs are just melody plus chords. We talked about the layout of the piano, and we covered sharps and flats, as well as our intervals.
So, let's talk about how each of these things work. The next section is specifically based around scales. Now, a scale is something we've all heard before. It's that "do re mi fa so la ti do." That's a scale. Now, a lot of people talk about scales and they learn scales, but I want to start in sort of a different place. I want to start with, why are scales even important? Why do we need them? Well, what a scale does is it gives us a set of all the right notes for our song. And what I mean by that is, any melody we could ever have is just some combination of notes from our scale. I'll say it again, any melody known to mankind is just some pattern of different notes from a scale. So, if we learn the scale, we have the tools we need to make melodies.
Hey, Lorelai. So, if our scale is "do re mi fa so la ti do," let's just take the first five notes, "do re mi fa so," and that was "Beauty and the Beast." Then I come back down, "so fa mi re do." So, the melody could even be as simple as walking up the scale for a few notes, then walking back down the scale. And that Katy Perry example from earlier starts on "so" and walks down to "re," "so fa mi re re do mi." And one last melody example could be Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." That melody goes like this. And all I'm trying to show you with these examples is that every melody is just a pattern of notes from our scale.
And on top of that, one really, really good reason why you want to learn your scales is because they help with your improvisation, your songwriting, and your ear training. So, let me show you how that would work. Let's say we're trying to make up a certain song, okay? We're just trying to improvise or songwrite. Well, as long as I stay within a certain scale, it's going to sound good. For example, here's a G scale, and we'll talk about how to make this in a second. But let's say I'm just making some stuff up as I go, I'm improvising, I'm writing a song. Anything I hit is going to sound pretty good until I forget my scale. So, let's say I miss this note. Oh, gosh, you heard that wrong note there. And that's a wrong note because I didn't stay within the scale. And that's why if we know our scales, we automatically have the ability to find all the quote-unquote right notes.
Alright, that was the songwriting and improvisation side of it, but let's talk about ear training. Let's talk about playing songs just by hearing them. Well, let's say hypothetically that you're a singer, okay? Maybe you were in chorus, maybe you've done some vocalizing before, and you have a really good understanding of solfege, "do re mi fa so la ti do." And let's say you want to play "Beauty and the Beast," and you can hear, you already know "do re mi fa so so fa mi re do." But you go to the piano, and all of a sudden, you don't know quite how to do that. Maybe I try to figure it out, and I get this. No, that's not right. No. Okay, what we need to do is use our scale, and we'll automatically be able to get to the right notes. There we go. That sounds better. Now, of course, you need to know your scales before this can work for you.
So, let's talk about how to actually make a scale. Let's dive into it. Now, you don't just snap and blue stickers magically appear all over the piano. It'd be awesome if it worked that way, but instead, what we do is we use two things to make our scale. Those are half steps and whole steps. Those are the building blocks. And a half step is just one key to the very next key on the piano. It's the smallest distance you can possibly go. So, in other words, from here to here would be a half step. So, with this to this, or that to that, or even here to here, that's a half step as well. So, what I want you to do, if you're at a piano, you can pause the video and try just doing all half steps. Doesn't have to look pretty. I'm just chicken pecking it right now with one finger. Uh, there's a more technical way to do it, but for now, just see if you can do all half steps and get the hang of what those feel like.
Then, let's talk about whole steps. All a whole step is is two half steps, okay? So, in other words, if this is my starting note, I'm gonna count one, two. That's a whole step. Same thing, starting note, one, two. That's a whole step. Now, check this out. This is important. From here to here, that's only a half step, right? So, a whole step would be one, two. There's our whole step. So, you really want to pay attention and make sure that you're doing two half steps for a whole step. Now, again, if you're at a piano and you want to try an all whole tone scale, you would do this. [Music] Okay, if you're interested, pause the video and try that out, but let's keep on going.
And the way we use these half steps and whole steps to actually make a scale is something that I call the golden scale formula. And here it is: It's whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. And you can write that down if you want to, but that's going to be two whole steps, then a half step, three whole steps, then a half step. Okay, here's how to apply that. Let's say we're starting on C and we want to make a C scale. So, what we would do is we take our starting note, and then we go up a whole step, up a whole step, up a half step, then up a whole step. And then I could cross over to my third finger, do another whole step, whole step, half step. Alright, so I followed my scale formula, and I found out that the C scale is all natural notes. It's all white keys. That one's kind of easy.
So, let's do another example. Let's say I want to find a G scale. Okay, I'm going to start with G, then I'm going to go up a whole step, then another whole step, half step, whole step. I might cross over here for another whole step, and now check this out. I need a whole step here, so I'm going to go to F sharp, okay, the note right above F, and this is a whole step. And half step. So, in this case, my G scale has one black key, which is F sharp. And that brings me to the next point. Whenever you do a scale, whenever you go through those whole steps and half steps, it takes a lot of work. So, after you figure out your scale, go back and take stock of what you just did, right? In this case, I'm going to think, "Okay, my G scale was all natural notes except for F sharp, right?" I make a mental note of that so I don't always have to go back and do whole step, whole step, half step. Instead, I'm going to think, "All white keys until F sharp."
Alright, another thing to talk about with our scales is we always want to keep our alphabet intact. We always want A, B, C, D, E, F, G. So, here's why I say that. That seems kind of obvious, but let's look at this note right here, okay? Now, this could either be A sharp, right? A going up, or it could be B flat, B going down. Well, what decides whether that's A sharp or B flat is the scale that we're using. For instance, if I start on F, F, G, A, B, C. So, in this case, that would be B flat. A, B, C. I wouldn't want to say F, G, A, A sharp, C. That doesn't really make sense. The alphabet isn't A, A, C, it's A, B, C.
Alright, same thing on that G scale we just did. I wouldn't want to call this G flat because we're doing G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The moral of the story is, just keep your alphabet in order, and you're going to be fine. Quick side note: if this was like a piano technique video, we would talk more about the technically correct ways to play all these scales, right? What fingers to start on and where to cross under. That would be its own separate video. Today, it's just about understanding the mechanics of how to make a scale. So, maybe you're a guitarist, maybe you're a producer, you know, you're someone who doesn't care about playing piano in this technically great way. You can still chicken peck through your scales and find them, even if it's just with one finger, because now you understand the golden scale formula. That's all you need.
Let's do one more scale example to really bring this home. So, if we want to do a D scale, we're going to start on D. We're going to do a whole step, whole step. So, I'm going to skip over F, I'm going to go one, two. Then half step, then whole step, whole step. Here's another whole step, one, two. And half step. So, my D scale, I had F sharp and I had C sharp, okay? So, I'm going to make a mental note of that so I don't always have to come back and use my scale formula. And I'm going to play it a few times. Even if I'm just chicken pecking it, I'm gonna make sure that I internalize it on some level. Now, you know how to make a scale starting on any key on the entire piano. It's always going to be that golden scale formula.
Your action step for this module is to use that golden scale formula to figure out your C scale, your G scale, and your F scale. And an optional add-on to that assignment is to try and find every white key scale.
Alright, quick section to recap. Here, we learned that scales give us the quote-unquote right notes. We also learned that melodies come from scales, right? Any melody is just some combination of notes from a scale. And then, lastly, we also learned how to make scales with the golden scale formula.
So, let's keep going and let's talk about something new: chords. They've stricken fear into the heart of many a brave soul, but I'm being so heavy-handed. Point is, chords aren't nearly as scary as you might think. The truth is, chords also come from our scales. I'll say that again, chords also come from scales. So, just as we had "do re mi" as individual notes, we can also have "do" as a full chord. The only difference is, instead of saying "do re mi," we say one, two, three for the chords. If we're talking about our C scale, that was all white keys, right? So, what I can do is I can take the note "do," and instead of just treating it as one note, I can build a full chord off of it. I can play "re" as a melody note, but I can also play it as a full chord. I can go "mi." I'm just going through the scale and turning each individual note into a chord.
Now, here's how you do that. We take our starting note, let's say we start on "do" or one, which is C, and what we do is this: every other note, kind of shape. That's all it is. So, watch. I'm just doing every other note to get my chord. And the slightly more technical way to talk about that is we have what's called the root, or the starting note of the chord, and then we have the third, you know, if I just count up one, two, three. And then I have the fifth, one, two, three, four, five, right? So, it's root, third, and fifth is how we make a chord. So, if you like thinking about it that way, you can think about it that way. If you'd rather just say every other note, that's fine too. It's the same end result.
Now, check this out. We did "do." Let's go up to "re." Root, third. [Music] And I would highly recommend at this point pausing the video and going through and trying one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, back to one. Now, that may seem really easy, but what we just did was absolutely monumentally huge. What we did is, instead of worrying about all the hundreds and thousands of different chords out there, we narrowed it down to the exact seven that are the right chords in the key of C. So, any song that's using a C scale, the chords are just going to be some version of those seven chords. And if we take what I just played for you on the piano and we wrote that down, it would look like this. And these are what are called chord symbols. So, don't get freaked out by these. We're going to talk more about chords later on, but for now, just know this is exactly what I just showed you how to play on the piano.
And just like how painters have a certain palette of colors to work with to create a painting, what we have here is a certain palette of chords to work with to create a song. So, if we look at songs that use the key of C, we'll find that these chords are, for the most part, all we need. So, let's examine some songs together. And first up is "All the Small Things" by Blink-182, and the way they wrote it is they just did a C chord, then G, then F, then back to G. Then "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen. This is a classic, and what he did was went from C to A minor, then back to C, back to A minor. So, there, the beginning of that song is just two chords back and forth. Then "Come Sail Away" by Styx. This is a personal favorite of mine. I love this song. This is C to F to G and back to F. So, as you can see, all of those chords were included in what we found a second ago. They're all chords from the key of C.
And what's also crazy is, as we did these chords, did we have to stress and strain over, "Okay, is this major or minor or diminished or no?" Right? The scale did it for us. The scale automatically guided us to the correct chords. We're still going to talk about major and minor chords later on, but that's just to show you how powerful pulling these chords from the scale can be. Okay, now let's keep on rolling. The C scale is the easiest one because it's all white keys. Now, what makes it a little more difficult is if you have a different scale, you have to stay within that scale as you find your chords. I'll show you. Let's say we go to the G scale, and remember, that G scale has F sharp built into it. So, as we do our chords, we have to remember that it's not F natural, it's F sharp.
So, here's G, that's "do." Let's turn it into a full chord by taking every other note. There we go. Now, let's go up to "re." Same thing. Let's go up to "mi." But now, here, I would have F natural. So, instead, I'm going to stay within the scale and do F sharp. That's my three chord, then my four chord, my five chord. Again, here I would have F. Instead, I'm going to use F sharp. Then my six chord, then my seven chord. And again, I'm just doing the every other note shape. And then my one chord, every other note. All together, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one. Those are all the right chords in the key of G.
Alright, same exact thing. These are the chords that we just played in the key of G. And if we look at real songs that use the G scale, we're gonna find that the chords are there for us. First one is "Good Riddance" by Green Day, also known as "Time of Your Life," and that starts on G, then goes to C, and then goes to D. "Shake It Off" by T. Swift, that starts on A minor, then goes to C, and then ends on G. And last one is "Brown Eyed Girl." That is G, C, G, D. Now, that's not to say we can't use other chords. Of course, we can. But I want you to think of this as your starting point. And there's actually a technical name for what we just did. These are called diatonic chords. And all that diatonic chords are are the chords that naturally come out of a scale, like we just did.
Recap: chords come from our scales. Instead of "do re mi fa so la ti do," all we're doing is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Now, to make those chords, you just take every other note and keep the scale in mind. If there are sharps in the scale or flats on the scale, remember those sharps or flats when you make those chords. Your action step is to find your diatonic chords in the keys of C, G, and F. So, again, you're finding one, two, three, four, five, six, seven in those three different scales. And again, what we're accomplishing by doing this is cutting away the guesswork. We're not worried about the hundreds and hundreds of different chords floating around out there. Instead, we're finding the exact seven that we need for whatever key we're in.
Alright, let's keep going to the next section. In this section, I'm going to show you how to play like 500 different songs with just one set of chords. Sounds crazy, but stay with me, because right now we're going to talk about chord progressions. A chord progression is just a set pattern of chords that we repeat over and over and over. So, for example, we could even just take out of those seven chords we talked about last time, we could just take the first four: one, two, three, four. But by far and away, there's one chord progression that's the most common. One chord progression to rule them all. I call it the legendary chord progression, which is one, five, six, and four. With these four chords, you can play everything ranging from rock, pop, musicals. It's everywhere.
Now, remember I showed you how to find the seven chords for whatever scale you're using? And let's say we're in the key of C. We're just using all natural notes. So, the C chord would be number one, because it's a C scale. Then I'm going to count one, two, three, four, five. I'm gonna do the five chord. Then I'm gonna go from five up to six, and then from six down to four. Six, five, four. Alright, so all together, it sounds like this: one, five, six, four. Pause the video and give that a try. Believe it or not, you literally just played like 400 different pop songs. That chord progression is at the heart of anything from Disney to "The Office" to Journey. And you saw every time it was the same four chords. The only thing that changed was the melody aspect of it. I could sit here for literally an hour and just play you song after song that all use that legendary chord progression.
And what's even crazier, stay with me here, even if the chord progression isn't exactly one, five, six, four, it's usually those four chords, but maybe in a different order. For example, maybe it's one, four, six, five, or one, six, four, five, like "Heart and Soul." And these chords are so common and so fundamental that we actually have a term for them. Just like there are the primary colors, these are the primary chords. And technically, one, four, and five are the primary chords, and then six is sort of an unofficial primary chord. It's not technically one of them, but it's just as common as the main primary chords. So, I want you to think of these four as being your bread and butter.
And just to really bring it all home, now you've seen real-life examples of different chord progressions. All it is is a set pattern of chords that makes up our song. Whether that be one, five, six, four, or one, six, four, five, or one, two, three, four, it doesn't matter. Different songs are gonna use different chord progressions, but they're all based off of these concepts. And I hope you're feeling good about that. This is a really exciting moment for a lot of people. But now I'm gonna sort of throw one last wrench into the mix, and that is that obviously not all songs are in the key of C. Not all songs are going to use the C scale. But the good news is, we've already learned everything we need to know to put this into a different scale.
So, for example, let's say my song is in the key of G. Well, we learned that we have an F sharp in the key of G. So, as I go through those chords, number one, which would be G in this case, one, two, three, four, five, I just have to remember not F natural, F sharp, right? And then from five to six, six, back down to four. Six, five, four. Okay, so there it was. Very similar. I just had one sharp built into the mix. And of course, you could do the same pattern for whatever scale you're in. So, some songs do it in the key of F, one, five, six, four. Other songs might use say, a D scale, one, five, six, four. And of course, it takes time and practice to go through your scale to find those four chords, but it's always the same underlying principles. And it doesn't even matter what genre you want to play. Those four chords are a huge, gigantic part of most of the music you're going to come across.
Recap time. In this video, we talked about how chord progressions are just set patterns of chords. We talked about the legendary chord progression, which is one, five, six, and four. And we talked about the primary chords, which are one, four, and five. Your action step for this video is to find the legendary chord progression in, again, the keys of C, G, and F. Now, you can go the extra mile and you can find the legendary chord progression in your other white key scales, but for those of you just trying to get your feet wet, I would stick with those three.
Okay, in the next section, we're going to get way more into how to actually use this stuff, how to practice it, how to apply it. But before we can do that, first we have to cover how to find your key, right? How do we know what scale a certain song is using? If we can't find our key, if we can't find "do," then we can't really do anything else we talked about, right? We can't figure out what our chords are, we can't figure out where the melody is sitting. So, being able to find the key for our song is very important. And in my mind, there's three main ways to do that.
The most concrete way, the first way, is if you like using sheet music. You can literally look at the sheet music to find your key. Now, I know not everybody uses sheet music. Some people use YouTube videos, some people have, you know, maybe a friend shows them a song or a teacher shows them, maybe you play by ear. And if you're one of those other people, just wait for the next two methods. If you do use sheet music, all you have to do is learn one rule for sharp keys and another rule for the flat keys. And the rule for any key that's using sharps, any sharp key, what you do is you look at the last sharp and then just go a half step higher. So, for example, in this key signature, we have two sharps. The last one is C sharp. So, if I play that on the piano, it looks like this. To find my key, now all I do is go a half step higher, and I find that I'm in the key of D. And if you know your D scale, that checks out because the D scale has two sharps in it.
One more example. This one has four sharps, and I'm just going to look at the last sharp, which in this case is D sharp. Now, D sharp on the piano, if I go a half step higher, I get E. So, this would be the key of E, which has four sharps. For the flat keys, which is again, any scale that uses flats instead of sharps, all you have to do is look at the second to last flat in the key signature. In this particular example, we have two flats, and the second to last flat is the B flat there. So, this would mean that our song is in the key of B flat. It's using a B flat scale. Another example might be if I had four flats. Well, the second to last flat here is A flat. So, that would be an A flat scale.
Now, the only scale that this trick won't work for is the scale with one flat, because there's no second to last flat, there's just one. This one, I typically recommend that people just try to remember. And this is going to be the F scale. We talked about this a little in the scale video, but the F scale has one flat built into it, which is the B flat there in that key signature.
Okay, now, what if you're not using sheet music, right? What if you picked any other method of learning a song and you don't have it written down in front of you? Well, what I recommend is looking at the very last note of the song. Typically, songs are going to end on "do." They're going to end on the first note of the scale. Not always, but a lot of the time they will. So, looking at the last note of the song gives you a great clue about what key you're in. And there's tons of examples I could show you because again, most songs do this. If I play "Thinking Out Loud" by Ed Sheeran, and I get that last note is D, and sure enough, this song is in the key of D. Similarly, if I play "Piano Man," and I do [Music], that last note is C. So, in this case, "Piano Man" would be in the key of C. It's that simple. And again, not every song does this, but a lot do. As a matter of fact, I would say most do. So, looking at that final note really gives you a great picture of what key you're in.
Now, this last method is my favorite method. It's the most foolproof one, but it's also the most difficult, and it boils down to this: just know your scales, right? So, it takes a lot of time and practice, but once you know your scales, it doesn't matter where the song starts or ends or what it does. You can kind of just see, "Okay, if I have one flat, I know that that's my F scale because I've practiced the F scale over and over." And so, if that's what my song is sort of sticking to, that's the key I'm in. For example, let's say I'm playing "Just the Way You Are." [Music] Okay, so I found that it was a lot of white keys except for this B flat. And that is exactly what you would see in the F scale: all white keys except for B flat. So, again, not super useful in the short term, but if you've learned your scales, it's infallible. You'll know exactly what scale you're using the entire song.
There's one last sort of curveball that gets thrown into all this, which is that up till this point, we've been talking about major scales and major keys, but a song can also be in a minor key. It can be using a minor scale as well. It's nothing to worry about. We're going to get to that in a future section that's coming up, but for now, let's keep going.
Let's recap. We talked about the three different ways to find your key: number one was looking at the key signature if you like to use sheet music, number two was looking at the last melody note or the last chord of your song, and lastly, just knowing your scales, knowing what sharps and what flats are in certain keys so that you can compare to the song that you're playing. Your action step for this video is to take two songs that you already know how to play and try to find the key for those songs. Try to figure out what scale that those songs are using.
Putting it all together, we've talked about melody, we've talked about chords. Now we want to talk about the combination of those two things. So, stay with me here. This is, to me, where all of the light bulbs start clicking. Now, this is so important. This is the biggest question I get asked on my other videos. It's the biggest question I get asked teaching this in person, and it's this: "Corey, how do I know whether a melody is 'do re mi' or whether it's a one chord or a four chord?" Well, the answer is this: we have to start practicing this stuff. We want to take the time to analyze different songs and get more comfortable with this new language. And in order to do that, we have to start with songs that we already know.
Alright, so whether you learn songs off YouTube or sheet music, or maybe you take piano lessons and you have a piano teacher, you want to take a song you already know. You know where the notes are, you know where the chords are. Then we use our music theory to analyze what's going on. You know, we figure out what's the chord progression, what scale is this in? We pick apart the song and figure out what's going on behind the scenes. Every time you do that, you're gonna get more and more comfortable with this stuff to the point where it's automatic.
So, let's say we're talking about "Beauty and the Beast" again, and it doesn't matter if you learned this off YouTube or sheet music, but either way, let's say we already know it, and it sounds like this. What we want to do then is go in and analyze what's happening. So, starting with the melody: C, D, E, F, G, G, F, E, D, C. If that's my melody, and I'm doing this within the C scale, right? I'm starting and ending on C, then C is "do." "Do" is the first note of the C scale. Now, if I go up to the next note of the scale, that's going to be "re." Then up again from "re," I would go to "mi," and then "fa," and then "so" would be the top. So, all together, that first melody is about as simple as it can possibly get. It's "do re mi fa so." Now, the next part, you can probably imagine, if I'm coming back down, it's just going to be the other way. It's going to be "so fa mi re do."
Now, let's talk about the chords. What I was playing started on the C chord, then the next chord started on E, and then the last one starts on A. [Music] And now I just wrote down those left-hand chords: the C, the E, and the A. And if we sort of go back and analyze that, well, C is the first note of the C scale, so C is going to be the one chord. The C chord is number one because it's the first note of the scale. Now, E, let's figure out what note of the scale that is. Well, C is one, so one, two, three is going to be our E minor chord here, and we'll talk about the minors and majors in a second, but for right now, that's one, two, three. Then we do the same three chord again, and then we go to A minor. So, let's figure out what number A is. Well, again, C is number one, so A would be one, two, three, four, five, six. Alright, that's our sixth chord.
And all that means is that in this case, the chord progression is one to three, then three to six. Now, remember, you don't have to always write this down. This was just to show you how you want to think about it. You want to put numbers to your chords, and you want to try to put solfege, the "do re mi," to your melodies. You want to take that extra time to go back and analyze what you're playing.
Now, you might be asking, "Well, Corey, why would I do that? You know, C already has a name, right? C, D, E. What advantage do I get out of calling this 'do re mi'?" Same thing for the chords. What's the point of calling this one and three? Why don't we just say C and E minor? That is a fantastic question. To me, if you don't ever get into the music theory side of things, you're always kind of stuck on the surface, right? And a lot of people live there. They're just stuck. They don't really understand what they're doing. Whereas if you take things to that deeper level, it's almost like you get musical superpowers.
So, just to show you a few examples, let's say I was a singer, which I try to be, but let's say I was like trying out for a part or something, and I want to sing "Beauty and the Beast." The original key is right here: "Bittersweet and strange, finding you." Okay, so I'm not a nice, kindly old woman. So, that's a very awkward place for me to sing it. What I want to do is maybe shift it to a lower key because I'm a baritone and I have a lower, heavier set voice. If I know my music theory, I can shift it from that higher key down to a lower key, maybe one that uses a different scale. And that's called transposing. When you change the key of a song. So, maybe I'd sing it here instead: "Bittersweet and you can strange, learning you were wrong." That feels a lot more comfortable than the super high one. And all I did to transpose it was I took the solfege of that melody, "do re mi fa so," and I remapped it onto a different scale. That's all transposing is.
So, that's one example of something cool you can do with music theory. Another thing you can do is just understand music better. I mentioned this a second ago, but what I want you to do is take a look at the two songs I'm putting on the screen here. We have "Let It Go" and we have "Don't Stop Believin'." On the surface, these two songs have nothing to do with each other. Literally, not a single one of those chords is the same. But again, if you're used to looking at things on a slightly deeper level, if you're thinking about your music theory, you can see that they're actually the exact same chord progression. It's one, five, six, four in both cases. The only difference is, "Let It Go" is in the key of A flat, and "Don't Stop Believin'" is in the key of E.
So, what does this mean? Well, we could do a mash-up of the two songs that would actually be kind of cool to hear. Or even without talking about something cool and gimmicky like a mashup, you'll just have a better understanding of what songs share the same DNA. You're increasing your understanding of music and how it works, and what your favorite songs do. You're seeing the commonalities between certain songs that maybe share a melody or share a chord progression, whereas if you just kept things on the surface level, if you never wanted to dive into this stuff, you wouldn't get any of those benefits.
But, you know what? I'm still not done. I want to give you one more example of a way that music theory can help you, something cool you can do with it, and that is playing by ear. So, believe it or not, learning this stuff can help you play songs just by listening to them. No YouTube videos, no sheet music, uh, you know, just totally by hearing it. So, again, a lot of people think, "Well, that must be really hard." And, you know, the truth is, yeah, it's not the easiest thing ever, but it's also much simpler than a lot of people realize. All we have to do is train our ear to hear the underlying music theory, the underlying language of music.
So, here's what I mean by that. If we go back to the diatonic chords, that one chord has a certain sound to it. The two chord has its own certain sound to it. Each chord has this distinct flavor to it that a lot of people actually can innately hear. And I'll give you an example. To most people, the sound of the one chord is the sound of the song ending, right? That's the chord that makes the song sound like it's over. For instance, if I play "Happy Birthday," I ended on the one chord. Now, listen. If I end on something different, listen to how this sounds. Okay, now that is a correct chord in the key of C. It's not like I hit an egregiously wrong note, but it wasn't the one chord, so it sort of freaked your ear out to not hear the one chord there. And if I do that in a different key, it's still going to sound the same way. Let's use like an A flat scale. All right, check this out. Guess what? The one chord still sounded like the song was over.
So, I guarantee you, your ear wasn't thinking, "Oh, yes, in the first example, that was the tonic, which is C major, and in the second example, that was A flat." No, you don't have to worry about that. Again, no matter what scale I'm using, the sound of that one chord, whether I'm in a C scale, a G scale, or a D scale, the sound of that one chord is going to stay the same because your ear already could tell, "Okay, that's just the sound of the song being over." And now you know that that's the one chord. So, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Obviously, we could do a whole lot more on ear training specifically. And if you're interested in learning more about that, I do have a full ear training course where I walk you through my methods step by step. This is what I personally do to play songs by ear, and it's what I teach my students to get them doing it as well. But for the time being, that's just one more example of how music theory can help you.
And this was by no means a comprehensive list of all the ways it can help you, but we just looked at a few. We looked at transposing, we looked at chord progressions, we looked at ear training. Without it, all of those things are going to seem downright impossible. But with it on your side, when you study this stuff, you give yourself the tools to be able to do basically anything you want to do.
And just to recap here, we talked about how to analyze a song that you already know, then we talked about a few different ways that learning this stuff can really pay off in the long term. Your action step for this video, the way to actually get better at this stuff and finally start to understand it, is every time you learn a new song, take the time to figure out what the solfege of the melody is, the "do re mi," all that stuff. Take the time to figure out the chord progressions for the different chords. It's going to make it so much easier for you long term because you're really going to understand how your favorite songs are made. The more different songs you do this with, the more comfortable you're going to be.
Get and the more this language is going to become second nature. But just like any language, it's a little bit tough. First, you have to pay your dues. You have to start slow. The last step is the hardest one, which is just getting out there and doing it.
All right, let's take a deep breath. We've covered a lot of stuff so far, and we still have a few more things to talk about. But this is a great stopping point to recap what we've learned so far.
All right, we learned that a song is just melody plus chords. We've learned that melodies come from our scales, right? We've learned that scales are made of the golden scale formula. We also learned that chords come from the scales too. So melodies come from scales, and the chords come from scales as well. We learned that to make a chord progression, we're just taking a certain pattern of those chords. For example, one, five, six, four, the legendary chord progression. We learned the three different methods for finding our key. And the last thing we did was looked at real-life examples of how certain songs are constructed. What was happening with the melodies? What was happening with the chord progressions? And we put it all together.
All right, let's regroup. We've got two more sections left. Next up is chord types. What makes a chord major? What makes it minor? You've probably heard these terms before, so let's go over to the piano and let's talk about it. The cool thing is, major chords and minor chords are very similar. There's just one subtle difference between the two. So let's actually start with what they have in common. Both major and minor chords have what's called a fifth. We talked about that during the interval section, and all that means is I'm counting one, two, three, four, five. Now, the more technical definition is a fifth has seven half steps, but I don't really super want you to worry about that. Just realize that you can count to a fifth, and that's going to be in both major and minor chords.
Now, the difference is, for a major chord, the middle note is going to have a spacing of four half steps. So let's count it: one, two, three, four. Okay, so that's root, third, fifth. A minor chord, on the other hand, has a spacing of three half steps. One, two, three. And as you can see, that's just a one-note difference between major and minor. They're very close, but they're slightly different, and that slight difference makes a big impact on the sound. A major chord has a happier sound, and a minor chord has a sadder sound.
Now, the way you would write this out, the way you would talk about it, is that a major chord is a root, a third, and a fifth. A minor chord is root, flat third, and a fifth. And it's important to note that when we talk about sharping things or flattening things, it doesn't always mean black keys, right? A lot of the time it does, but really, all sharp means is that we're raising something, and all flat means is that we're lowering something.
So let me show you an example. If I play a D major chord, I'll just show you. This is D major, and we can double-check that. One, two, three, four half steps. So that's D major, and you can see I've already got a black key built into it, F sharp. Now, if I want to find D minor, all I have to do is flat, or in other words, lower this F sharp, this third. So I'm going to lower it down to F natural, and here we are on D minor: D, F, and A. And as you saw, it's only a one-note difference between D major, which has F sharp built into it, and D minor, which has F natural.
Now, let's apply this a little bit, and let's find some chords together. Let's say we want to figure out, say, E minor. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get E, and I'm also going to get the fifth ready, because I know both major and minor chords have this same fifth, right? One, two, three, four, five. Now, the only question is, where is the middle note? Well, for E minor, remember that's three half steps. One, two, three. So this chord would be E minor.
Now, let's say I want to find A major. Well, again, I'm going to go to an A fifth, because that's going to be the same regardless. And then for an A major chord, I'm going to count four half steps. Let's do it: one, two, three, four. A major. Now, in this case, A major is a C sharp and E. It works the exact same way on the black keys. So the fifths, let's say for instance, C to G, it works the same way. If I just sharp both of them, my fifth is C sharp to G sharp. Then all I have left is the middle note, which would be one, two, three for a minor chord, or one, two, three, four for a major chord. So, in other words, all that to say, I follow the exact same mechanics. I find a fifth, I find my middle note, depending on whether I want major or minor.
All right, now the last thing to be aware of is that these fifths are really easy to find, right? It's that kind of shape. You can just use your hand as a guide. One, two, three, four, five. But the one place where it's sort of different, if I go from B to F, what's interesting is right here, we're at a spot on the piano where there's no black key here, and there's no black key here. So it sort of throws off the spacing. And if you count it out, this isn't a fifth, because I only have six half steps. One, two, three, four, five, six. Remember, for an actual fifth, all those other ones are going to have seven half steps. But right here, we're just in a weird spot on the piano where it ends up being only six. To fix that, if I want to do a fifth on B, I've got to compensate and stretch from B to F sharp. Okay, so I hope that makes sense. All the other fifths, you can just eyeball it, it's super easy. But B is sort of this one weird one that we need F sharp to make it a full fifth. Same thing with the flat keys. I can just keep the same spacing of C sharp to G sharp, or D sharp to A sharp, same exact spacing until I get to the problem child of B. So B flat, if I go up here to like G flat or something, that's way too far. Instead, what I do is I go B flat to F, and again, all I'm trying to find is seven half steps. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
All of this boils down to the fact that, you know, C is normal, C sharp is normal, D is normal, and so on and so on. The weird one is B, B flat, and B natural. Those two are the ones where it doesn't quite match up. So just keep that in mind as you're finding your chords, that the fifths really aren't too weird unless you're on the note B or B flat.
All right, let's do one more example. And let's say we want to find B major. Well, we're going to go to B, and we're going to remember that this isn't our fifth. In this case, it's actually F sharp. Now that we have our fifth, all we're going to do is count four half steps for our major third. One, two, three, four. There we go. B major: root, third, and fifth.
Now you know the dictionary definition of major and minor. And one quick thing to note, we're not going to spend too much time on this, but every chord can be rearranged. For instance, instead of playing a C chord as the standard C, E, G, what if we take that C on bottom and move it to the top of the chord? Then we would have E, G, C. And that's what's called an inversion. So root position is the term for when a chord is in order. We say that's in root position. But when we change the order, when we rearrange it, we just call that an inversion. And inversions are totally fine as well. They're just as valid as root position chords. But I don't want you to get too confused about that right now. I just wanted you to know that that is a thing that can happen.
What I want to do now is tie this back in to our video on finding the diatonic chords, the chords from our scale. You'll remember for the C scale, we went through do, re, and we found the one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven chords like that. Well, now let's go back and let's figure out, well, what were those chords, right? In other words, this was my one chord from the key of C. Well, what is this? Is it C major? Is it C minor? In this case, because I have four half steps, one, two, three, four, it's C major. But now check this out. If I go up to the D chord, the two chord, if I look at the spacing, look at this. One, two, three. So the two chord is actually minor, which is kind of interesting. Let's keep going. The three chord, we have a spacing of three half steps, so that's minor. The four chord has a spacing of four half steps, that's major. Five, you know, again, we could take this a lot slower and really work through each one, but this is also going to be major. Six, one, two, three is minor. And seven is actually something called diminished. You don't have to worry about that in this section. We'll cover that in a later video.
Here's where things get a little more interesting. Let's do a different scale, okay? So, for example, in the earlier video, we did a G scale and we found all the chords that come from the key of G, and we've remembered that F sharp as we went through, right? Because that's part of the scale. Now, if we look at each individual chord, we'll find that one is major, so G major. Two is minor, A minor in this case. Three is minor, B minor. Then C major, D major, one, two, three, four half steps. E minor, one, two, three half steps. Seven is diminished, and G is major, yet again, at the top.
So what I hope you noticed is that the one chord in both cases was major. The two chord in both of those instances was minor, and so on and so on, right? So what I'm getting at is that no matter what scale we use, the one chord, the four chord, and the five chord are major, and the two, three, and six chords are minor. That's going to hold true no matter what scale we're using, no matter what key we're in. And to me, this is so crazy. This is why our ear doesn't care about what scale a song is using, right? The melody, the chords, it's all based off of the same set of whole steps and half steps. So everything that we pull out of the hat, whether that be a certain melody, whether that be a certain chord progression, since it's all based off of the same thing, it's always going to sound the same to our ears, right? Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do sounds relatively the same in any scale. The one chord sounds relatively the same in any scale. For people with perfect pitch, the differences between the scales are a lot more pronounced. But for people without perfect pitch, like myself, and probably like you, we're just as happy to hear a song in one key as we already hear it in another. So earlier, I did "Happy Birthday" in the key of C, and I did it in the key of A flat, and both ways sound perfectly acceptable. And same thing earlier, when I did "Beauty and the Beast," I started in the original key and then I transposed it to the key of E. [Music] And either way, it's still going to sound like the song. That's why learning this underlying stuff is so powerful. You learn the basics again, do, re, mi for the melody, and one, two, three for the chords, and then you just apply that to whatever scale you need. And all songs in all genres are based off of those simple building blocks.
Okay, recap. A major chord has four half steps between the root and the third, and a minor chord has just three half steps. We also learned that within our diatonic chords, within our scale, the one, four, and five chords are major, and the two, three, and six chords are minor. The seventh chord is diminished. That's something we'll save for the more intermediate video. For now, just remember that word, diminished. We'll get to that later. Your action step for this video is to play every major and minor chord one at a time. So, for instance, you might start on C major and go to C minor, then D major to D minor, E major to E minor, and so on.
All right, I'll be honest with you. I debated putting this last part in the video or saving it for the more intermediate level, but I do feel that it's fundamental for beginners to understand. So we're going to talk about minor scales. People get very freaked out about these, just like they get freaked out about chords. But every major scale already has a minor scale baked into it. So the beauty is, if you can play all of your different major scales, you by default have your minor scales too. So what on earth am I talking about, right? That doesn't make any sense. Let's go to the piano and I'll show you exactly what I mean.
Now, first thing to say about minor scales is that to a lot of people, myself included, they sound very sad. They sound kind of dark and somber. Check this out. [Music] And for that reason, a lot of people prefer them. They have a sort of gravitas to them. Let's talk about how we can actually find and work with minor scales. Every major scale has a minor scale built into it, and since they're related, we call it the relative minor. Here's what I mean: to find your relative minor scale, you take any major scale you want, let's say C for this example, and you're going to find the sixth note of that scale. In this case, one, two, three, four, five, six would be A. Now, if I keep the key signature from C, so again, this is all white keys for this scale, if I keep that scale but I play from A to A, I get A minor. Watch it. [Music] Nothing really mind-blowing, nothing really difficult. All I did was kept all the white keys from the key of C, but I started and ended on A, and that is the A minor scale. And again, they're related. A minor is the relative minor of C major because they're both all white keys, they just start in different places. So the C scale starts on C, obviously, and the A minor scale starts on A.
But let's do another example, because that one was kind of easy. Let's say we want to find the relative minor of G major. Well, as we remember, the G scale has an F sharp built into it. We talked about that a little bit in the scale video. So as I go to find my minor scale, I need to remember that I'm going to have F sharp. Okay, so hang on to that, and let's count up to again, the sixth note of our G scale, and that's going to show us what our relative minor is. So if you can count to six, you can do this. Watch, G is one. One, two, three, four, five, six. All right, so the relative minor of G major is E minor. Now, as I go through, all I have to do is remember the key signature from the key of G. I have to remember that there was an F sharp as I play through this. So watch, here's E, and I'll go up, not to F, but to F sharp, just like the G scale. E, F sharp, G, and then everything else is pretty easy after that. [Music] So there we go, that's my E minor scale. And just to drive it home one more time, the G scale had F sharp right there, and the E minor scale also has F sharp. They're related. It's the same scale, basically, but starting in different places. And the cool thing is, this basically means if you know your major scales, you already know the minor scales as well. All you have to do is count up six notes and start there.
Now, what you might have noticed is that finding the relative minor is a little bit of an indirect way to find a minor scale, right? We take a major scale, then we go to the sixth note, then we start on that. So the question I get asked immediately after showing people that is, well, Corey, how do I just sit down and say, bam, this is a C minor scale, right? How do I just go right to the scale I want and play it? Well, you're in luck. There's a way to do that as well, and this is called finding the parallel minor. And all that means is we're going to keep the starting note the same, going from C major to C minor, and I'll show you how to do that right now.
So again, let's say we have C major, and I want to find C minor, the parallel minor that also starts on C. The way I do that is I flat the third, the sixth, and the seventh. This works for any major scale. Just flat three, six, and seven, and you automatically get your minor scale. Check this out. Here's C. One, two, and I'm gonna flat the third note. So that's three, four, five, six. So I've got to flat that. Seven would have been B. I've got to flat that. And one. So again, I took my C scale and I flattened three, I flattened six, and I flattened seven. Let's do another example. Let's say we're in the key of A major, and we want to find the parallel minor. So again, going from A major to A minor. Well, the way we're going to do that is we're going to take the A major scale, and I'll play it like this so you can see it better, but I'm going to flat the third, sixth, and seventh notes. One, two, three, I'm going to lower that. Four, five, six, I'm going to lower that. And seven, lower that. And it turns out that A minor is all white keys. And at this point, you may realize, well, hey, I already know that scale. We already talked about A minor, it's all white keys, right? Exactly. Whether we find it from C major using that relative minor method, or whether we find it from A major using the parallel minor, the end result is the same. And I know that might seem a little bit confusing, but really, it's more tools in your arsenal. There's two different ways to find any minor scale. You can use the relative minor. In this case, we went from C major, went to the sixth note, and found A minor. Or you can use the parallel minor method, which is where you start on the exact same note and just flat three, six, and seven from that major scale. They're both perfectly valid. It's just a question of which one you prefer to use.
Okay, now just when you thought you were safe, I'm gonna throw one last thing at you, and that's this. For our minor scale, we have a couple alternate versions that we can use that give it a little bit more flavor. So, in other words, the major scale, there's really only one version of that. But for the minor scale, there's three different versions of minor scales. The first one is the one that we've already talked about, that's called natural minor. And natural minor is referring to the minor scale that is the default, right? Sort of the starting point, the one that we just covered. Now, to add a little bit of flavor, what we can do is sharp the seventh note of a minor scale, and that's what's called the harmonic minor scale. So, for example, we learned that A minor is all white keys. But what I can do is I can go from A natural minor, which is our starting point, and instead go to A harmonic minor, which is where we sharp the seventh note. Watch this. One, two, three, four, five, six. Here's seven. So I'm going to sharp it. And that's A harmonic minor. It's nothing too crazy. That's just a one-note difference, but it does change the sound of the scale. Check this out. For a lot of people, that sounds sort of Egyptian, right? You have that interesting kind of exotic sound. But the reason the scale was invented was to give us a little bit more pull. The natural minor scale, if you look at the top two notes here, it ends with a whole step. So the whole step doesn't have quite as much pull. If I'm playing something in A natural minor key, that's okay. But if I do the harmonic minor, if I have G sharp instead of G natural, listen to the difference. It's just a little bit more definitive, a little bit more final, as opposed to the natural minor scale, which has a G natural. Different sounds, both very useful. But I wanted you to be aware that there are a couple different types of minor scales.
That said, there's one last one we're going to talk about, and I almost don't want you to worry about this one. This is one that if you're playing modern music, you're not going to really come across it a ton. But it's called the melodic minor scale. And the melodic minor scale sharps six and seven on the way up, but does the natural minor scale on the way down. So you heard that right, it's different depending on which way you're going. But I'll show you how it goes. One, two, three, four, five. I'm gonna sharp six. I'm gonna sharp seven and then hit my top note. And when I come back down, it's the same as the natural minor scale. All white keys. Here it is, all together.
All right, now we've talked about finding the relative minor and the parallel minor, and we've talked about three different types of minor scales. Once you're in that minor key, the first way is the natural minor, which is the naturally occurring minor scale. The second is the harmonic minor, where we sharp the seventh note to give it a little bit more pull. And the third minor scale is the melodic minor, which is different on the way up than it is on the way down. At this point, we're not really going to do anything new with minor scales, but I know you probably might be feeling like a little bit lost, a little bit hazy. So let's just do one more example where we tie this all together. Let's say we want to find the G minor scale. Well, for this example, let's go with the parallel method, right? We're going to go from G major and we're going to use that to find G minor. Okay, so here's G major, we know that. And now what we're going to do is we're going to flat the third, sixth, and seventh notes. Okay, one, two, three, we're gonna flat that. Four, five, six, I'm gonna flat that. And seven, I'm gonna flat that as well. And here is my G minor scale. I have two flats, B flat and E flat, going from G to G. And now that we have the starting point of our natural minor scale, now we can do some of those alternate versions. So let's say I want to go to G harmonic minor. Well, I'm just going to sharp the seventh note. One, two, three, four, five, six. And here's seven. So I'm going to sharp it. And that's G harmonic minor. If I want to find G melodic minor, well, I'm gonna sharp six and seven on the way up. Watch. One, two, three, four, five. Here's six, so I'm gonna sharp it. Seven, sharp that. And G on top. Then on the way down, it's the same as the natural minor. All together, here's that G melodic minor scale. And again, I don't really want you to worry about the melodic minor all that much. I mainly tell my students to focus on the natural minor and the harmonic minor. Those are the two you're going to use the most often.
Now, you might be wondering, well, how does this affect the chords, right? We talked about pulling the diatonic chords out of the scale. So now that we're in a minor scale, does that sort of change it? Does that throw it off? And the answer is, not really. Essentially, we do the same thing. The chords from the key of C are the same chords for the key of A minor. Only instead of calling C one, we're going to call A minor one, and then everything else just sort of follows out from there. In other words, A minor used to be six, but now we're just going to call it one. Then the B diminished chord would be two, and C would be three, etc., etc. It's the exact same seven chords, but we've just relabeled them.
I know this section was a doozy. I know it was a lot to take in. But now we've made it to the action step. What I want you to do is find the relative minor of C, F, and G major, and then I want you to find the parallel minor of those same scales. And of course, an optional add-on to this action step could be finding all of your minor key scales from A through G.
Phew. Okay, at this point, we've equipped ourselves with a ton of information. We've learned a lot of new things. But now the question is, well, how do I use this? How do I apply this stuff? And ultimately, it depends on what you want to do. If you're a songwriter, well, let's say we want to write a song in the key of, I don't know, D. Now we know how to find a D scale. [Music] So now we can also know what all the right chords are, and we can get to work, right? Maybe I'll find a chord progression I like, like one, five, six, four. But the point is, I have the tools to create chord progressions now.
Let's say we want to play songs by ear. Well, now that we know about do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do, and we know it's going to apply to any scale, all I have to do is train those sounds. So, for instance, do, ti, do, do, re, do, re, do. Then maybe I go do, ti, mi, do, mi, do. And I start working those sounds into my ear. Then maybe I graduate to full melodies. Do, re, mi, fa, so, fa, mi, re, do. Once I do that work of really getting the hang of those seven syllables, it's going to work on any scale. So I could change to the key of, I don't know, E flat. [Music] Ooh, mega. It's going to sound more or less the same way. So I just get comfortable training up those sounds.
Or maybe, let's say I want to improvise. I want to be able to make stuff up on the spot. Well, all I would do in that case is pick a scale. For instance, in this case, I just picked F, and I'm gonna stay within that scale and just play notes, just make stuff up, see what happens. [Music] Right? And I'm purposely trying not to do anything too crazy. I'm just, I'm playing through my scale. I could go up, I could go down, I could skip, you know, all the options are open to you. You just have to dive in and practice whatever it is you want to get better at. And as you practice those things, everything we talked about is going to make more and more sense.
And just to sort of put a bow on everything that we talked about, whether I'm ear training, songwriting, improvising, just playing music for fun, whether I'm in the key of C or A minor or purple, it doesn't matter. It all boils down to, you guessed it, these two things. Now, of course, there are tons of examples of songs that break these rules, right? Places where composers or artists stepped outside of that framework and did something a little different. As a matter of fact, there's other more advanced concepts that sometimes step outside of what we just talked about. We can talk about all the extra stuff in the intermediate and advanced videos. But for now, just think of this as being your default, your starting point.
Final recap. We learned that a song is just melody plus chords. We learned that melodies come from our scales and how to make those scales using the golden scale formula. We also learned that chords come from scales as well. We learned about those diatonic chords that we just pull out of our scale. Then we learned about chord progressions, which is where we just take a certain pattern of those chords, for example, one, five, six, four. We learned the three different methods for finding our key. We learned about how to put it all together and make a full song out of both of those elements. And then we went ahead and talked about chord types like major and minor, and we figured out that major chords have four half steps and minor chords have three. We talked about how one, four, and five are always major, two, three, and six are always minor. And the last thing we did was we figured out how to make a minor scale based off of a major scale, and there's two ways to do that. There's the relative minor, and there's the parallel minor. And that once we find our natural minor scale, there's a couple of alternate versions as well, which are the harmonic and melodic minor.
If you made it this far in the video, you are a champion, and I want to hear from you. I want to hear if it made sense. I want to hear if there's parts that I need to explain a little better. So let me know. Any and all questions are definitely welcome. If you did find this video helpful, definitely leave a like, drop a comment down below, and subscribe to the channel. It really does help with algorithm stuff and it helps to get this in front of more people. That's it for me today. Keep on rocking, and I'll see you next time.