The One Thing All Music Does That Nobody Ever Told You

[00:00:01][music] >> There is one thing that literally affects all music, but no one ever really gets told about it. At least not in a way that makes sense for music as a whole. And that concept is the concept of home. If I play you something simple like Ode to Joy, >> [music] >> how is it that that melody and those chords make sense and feel like a complete thing? And the answer is simply because of the concept of home. So in today's video, I'm going to explain exactly what that means, how it's used in music, and how it makes music make sense. So firstly, when I say home, I'm talking about the note that we want to come back to. It's the place that feels secure and rested and like everything needs to land there. So for example, if I just play you a melody and I start here on a C, if I play some other melody notes, >> [music] >> as soon as I play that C again at the end of the phrase, that feels like home.

[00:01:15]It feels like we've landed back where we started, like we've traveled somewhere and circled back around to home. If I stopped somewhere else, it sounds like you've almost stopped mid-sentence, like it needs to finish.

[00:01:27]>> [music] >> Hopefully you can tell in that melody that it feels unfinished. It feels like it needs >> [music] >> on the end of it so that we return back home again. So that's what I mean by home, but how do we know where home actually is? Well, this is where we get the concept of keys and scales. Now in music, a scale is just a set of notes.

[00:01:49]And typically in a major scale, we have one of each letter, so we can have an A, a B, a C, a D, an E, an F, and a G. Some scales have sharps and flats instead of just the white notes. So, instead of a D, you might have a D sharp, which is one up from a D, or you might have a D flat, which is one down from a D. And note one in that scale is the note that will feel like home, like we've landed somewhere. Now, if I play you all the notes in a scale, but stop on the second to last note before I land on note one, you'll feel that it feels like it needs to have note one afterwards. So, here is a complete G major scale with all the notes in G major.

[00:02:25]Now, if I stop on the second to last note, you'll feel that it needs to go home.

[00:02:32]That feels incredibly unresolved and feels like it needs to go to that G again to finish. Now, interestingly, this applies not just to melodies, but to chords, too. In any scale, we can make a chord by playing every other note in that scale. So, if I play a G scale again, >> [music] >> if I play the first note, the third note, and the fifth note, that gives me chord one in the scale. Now, pieces of music typically start and finish on chord one, so that they feel like they've returned home. So, if I play a series of chords, if I just stopped there, it would feel like it's not finished yet. Whereas, if I finish on chord one, it feels like we've landed back home again. And if you pair that with a melody as well, like in Ode to Joy, then you do feel that sense of returning home. So, this is all that pieces of music are really doing. They start at home, and they finish at home, and what happens in between is a journey to get you back there. And that is regardless of the genre of music. That is for pop, for classical, for jazz, for blues, for K-pop, reggae, any style of music that isn't just drums or playing the piano with your head, will have a sense of home and traveling throughout the music.

[00:03:58]So, I'm going to show you the levels of complexity that music can go to with this concept. So, firstly, in music, there is something called cadences, and cadences are the chords that we use in order to end a phrase or a piece because that's also ending a phrase. And cadences are essentially the punctuation in music. They're what make it feel complete and like a full stop or a period or leave it open-ended like a comma. And funnily enough, the two types of cadences that make it feel finished and complete end with chord one. We have a perfect cadence, which is chord five to chord one. So, if I use the scale of C major to demonstrate, which is just the white notes, C, D, E, F, G, A, and B, if I play chord five, >> [music] >> which is a G chord, and then chord one, that feels like a period in the music, like a full stop. And then there is a plagal cadence, which still feels like a full stop, but it feels warmer. It feels more gospel, and it's used a lot in hymns in the church, in Christmas carols, or just generally in sort of jazz or gospel music for a warmer quality of sound. So, chord four in C is F to C.

[00:05:04]Now, both of these types of cadences return home. So, if I play chord one and then chord five, then chord one, what I'm essentially doing is I'm playing home, traveling away from home slightly, and then returning home. So, if I play chord one, which is C, chord five, >> [music] >> and then chord one again.

[00:05:30]So, just to give you an example where this most simplistic version is used, if we take a look at the first five bars of Sonatina by Clementi, this is in the key of C major, and the first two bars are all just the notes from a C major chord.

[00:05:44]It's C's, E's, and G's. So, it's all C's, E's, and G's, which is this chord here, C, E, and G. This stays the same actually for the first three bars, even though in the right hand here there is a melody that runs down. It's all based around those C's, E's, and G's. We've got an E here, C here, C here, C here, and then some notes to make it sound more interesting. Then in this fourth bar, this is based around a G chord.

[00:06:07]It's got a G, a D, and then this runs down to a B and a G here. We've got a G and a D here. It's based around G's, B's, and D's with some notes in between to get you from one to the other. And then in bar five it returns to a C chord, exactly the same as the beginning. So, in this example, you are getting chord one, chord five, and then chord one.

[00:06:29]>> [music] >> Now, that is probably the most basic form of home, traveling away from home, and then returning home again. And I can do the same with chord one, chord four, and then chord one, but it'll sound like a warmer finish. So, chord one, >> [music] >> chord four, then chord one again.

[00:06:51]But most music doesn't really work like that. They travel much further and they do more interesting things before returning home. When I was in the depths of learning the piano, there are lots of tools that I wish I'd had. And that is exactly why I built an app called The Practice Room. The Practice Room is an all-in-one place where you can log your practice sessions, get statistics and insights about your playing. There are resources like theory articles, an entire pieces library with backgrounds for all the pieces, what you should be able to do before you play them, what you'll get from learning them. There are practice tools that will help you fix your playing, that will help you recognize chords in pieces of music, even a metronome. And I also do deep dive live practice clinics every 2 weeks on a very specific topic about learning the piano. So, if that sounds of interest to you, then check it out with the link in the description. Okay, back to the video. So, we can put some other chords in that gap between chord one, and then chord five, and then chord one, or chord four, then chord one, to make it sound more interesting and sort of elongate the sentence. So, let's pick chord six and two, and we'll put those in that gap. So, now we have home, we have a much longer travel where we play some interesting chords, and then we return home at the end. So, that'll be chord one, >> [music] >> chord six, chord two, chord four, and then chord [music] one.

[00:08:10]So, now we have essentially a complete sentence. Now, for this, I'll use the example of Für Elise, because Für Elise does both of these two things. It starts with just chord one, chord five, chord one, and then it sort of elaborates and puts some more interesting chords in the middle. So, this is actually in the key of A minor, so chord one is A minor, and it starts with that exact chord.

[00:08:31]Chord one, chord five, >> [music] >> chord one, feeling like we've landed home.

[00:08:38]Same again, chord one, chord five, chord one, feeling like we've landed [music] home. But, then it does something interesting. It adds two chords in to travel further, and you'll feel that in the music. So, then you get a C chord, G chord, an A chord, which is chord one, and then an E chord, which is chord five.

[00:08:59]>> [music] >> Chord one, chord five, chord one, and so on. So, the music is always playing with the idea of being at home, traveling away from home, and then returning to home again. But, the more interesting question is, how far can you actually travel? Well, the answer is quite far. Let's say I am using a C major scale, and C is >> [music] >> chord one for me, and C is a note one.

[00:09:27]Well, if C feels like home, chord five and chord four, they feel like traveling a little bit, but we can return home from those pretty easily. And then beyond that, there are the other chords that we can use in the scale, chord two, chord three, chord six, and chord seven, which we can use to fill in that gap.

[00:09:44]So, between us starting at home and ending up at home, we're going somewhere more exotic in between. But, we can go even more exotic still, and that would be to change key or start using a different scale, and different chords, and that's going to make us feel like we're traveling even further from home, because we're really starting to move location. We're no longer using the same notes that work well together, but we're moving to a completely new landscape.

[00:10:07]So, if I play chord one in C major, chord four [music] in C major, chord two in C major, but then shift up to a different key, now I'm really far away from home. And although that particular example was not the most subtle example, this is how songs and pieces are made much more elaborate and more interesting. So, I'll give you a couple of examples of how this is done using less classical pieces, so you can see how this applies to all music. And the first one is by someone called Stella Jang. I've completely butchered the pronunciation of her name, but I'm a musician, not Korean, so and yes, musician is a nationality. Anyway, despite her being Korean, she actually wrote a French song called L'amour Les Baguettes Paris. And that sounds something like this.

[00:11:02]>> [music] >> So, this once again is in the key of C major, so just the white notes, and it starts on chord number one, which is a C chord.

[00:11:21]>> [music] >> Then we get chord number three, so it's traveling.

[00:11:26]Chord four, which returns to chord one.

[00:11:31]Chord one, >> [music] >> chord three, chord four. This time we go to chord five though.

[00:11:39]Then we change key to A minor. So, after this [music] chord five, we move up.

[00:11:46]So, now we're in A minor and this is our new home temporarily. Then it goes to chord [music] six in A minor before playing chord two in C again, so we can return [music] home, chord five in C, and finishing on chord one in C.

[00:12:00]So, this is a much more complex example because we're not just playing chord one, traveling to chord five, and then back to chord one again. This time we start at home and we still finish at home, but what happens in between is we travel away a little bit, return home, travel away a little bit more, change key, travel even further before then working our way back to where we started. So, I'll play it once more and I want you to see if you can feel the return to home both in those small moments at the beginning, but also the larger full phrase return to home at the end.

[00:12:53]Now, for the second example, I'm going to play you the song Yesterday by The Beatles, but it's a jazz arrangement of the song. And this is in the key of F, so therefore it's using an F major scale, which is F G A B flat C D and E.

[00:13:06]So, it's all the white notes except it has a B flat instead of a B. And that sounds like this.

[00:13:13]>> [music] >> Now, hopefully at this point you can guess which chord it starts with, and that is chord one, which is an F chord in this case. And you can actually hear in the melody where it goes GFF, the G feels like it's falling to the F because the F is note one, and that feels like home.

[00:13:51]Then we travel through an E minor chord, then an A7 chord, which actually changes key for us to a D minor chord, and that's why this feels like we're settling somewhere.

[00:14:03]Because A is chord five in D, so D becomes our new home, and we're landing there via chord five. Then we travel back to chord two [music] in F, then chord five in F to land back in chord one in F.

[00:14:19]Then we change key again to D minor using that A7 once again, exactly the same as before. Then we get a G chord followed by chord five in F, and then chord one in F.

[00:14:30]>> [music] >> So once again, this entire phrase ends in chord five to one in F, which is what we expect. It started in F, it ends on an F, and in between we're traveling quite far away from home by changing to D minor twice, and then returning back to F to land at home again. But the piece of music is centered around that F chord being home, so that we can travel away and it feels like the music is developing in some way. It's pretty much the same as any version of a story, a book, a film, or anything like that. to establish home, the starting point, so that the journey that happens throughout the music is relative to where you were before. And then at the end of the piece of music, we return home having learned something from the journey we just took.

[00:15:11]So the next time you look at a piece of music, try and work out where home is, and when it's traveling away and then returning to home, because that will help you shape how that piece of music feels and understand it much better. And in the meantime, if you would like seven pieces of invaluable advice from me, then head on through, and I will see you there.