Music Theory

So music theory can be very daunting at first. There's a lot of Concepts that are very overwhelming. But for my experience unless you're like reading sheet music or composing concertos in like Neo classical or contemporary music most of the stuff. You really don't need to know. So today I will just show you like the basic concepts if you're making mostly like modern music such as like pop EDM, so whatever you like drawing your notes on your giw have you ever noticed that there's a panel on the side basically this piano letter notes.

The size is called the piano roll. It's basically a display allows you to record or drawing your midi notes. Now piano roll doesn't only mean a prince pianos home. They can play anything that you like depending on the plug-in that you load up and your GA W like a violin or a drum kit or even we are sound such as this gay.

So looking at a piano keyboard layout and music theory there are twelve notes in music the white keys represent these letters and The Black Keys represent these letters and we call these letters notes each note has. Own independent Sound Skills scales the collection of notes that sound good together when played in the sequence and the most common types of scales using modern music are major and minor scales.

So let's take for example C major as you can here see major sounds happy major scales in general sound happy. Now, if you want to make the scale minor you would take the third the sixth and the seventh and lower them a half a semitone and you will get your minor scale in this case. The Sassy minor minor scales in general sound sad and.

Depressing swords are collection of notes play together. That's basically the requirements of a chord is you need three or more notes to be considered as a chord. Let's make a major chord starting in C. So if we start at c as a root note, and we want to make C major you need a third and a fifth. So the third in the key of C would be e and the fifth note in the key of C would be a g.

So if we play it together. That's a major chord and sounds happy Flappy Slappy. Now. If you want to make it a martyr cord, you would take the third lower it a half step then if we play it together you get your minor chord. So chord progressions are succession of nose. Starr played in a harmonious way before we can understand chord progression.

So I drew all the chords used in the c major scale. Also, you'll notice there are Roman numerals on the bottom. Teeth Roman numeral start from 1 to 7. We're not going to go into much detail on the Roman numerals for all you got to know is it capitalized Roman numeral represents a major chord a lowercase Roman numeral represents a minor chord and a Roman numeral that contains a circle represents a diminished chord.

So this is all the cords that are available in the c major scale. In modern music such as like future based pops and pop trap. You name it the most common numerals used in these chord progressions are 1 4 5 and 6 and their use in different variations. You can mess around with these numerals or you can mess around with other numerals.

Aren't really commonly used. It's up to your preference together. So now you can't go an idea about how scales and chord progressions kind of work. So how would we use these Concepts when making a track? So I'm going to make like a small drop and before we actually started we first have to figure out our Tempo.

I'm not going to go into details about time signatures are tempos. I'll be for another video. So I'm just going to assume you kind of know it I'm going to probably aim for probably a Porter Robinson Styles probably like 90 BPM.

That's a pretty good Tempo already loaded up a piano patch and you see this is kind of like how I go about when making a track I usually like to start off with the chord progression before we can figure out a chord progression. We first have to figure out what key. Are we going to make this track in?

I'll go keep it simple. I'm going to stick with C major. I'm going to come up with like a chord progression and we'll see what happens. I'm

going to make some adjustments and quantize these notes because this is EDM.

As you can see all I'm using is just the one the 4 the 5 and the 6 chord and know what I like to do when I'm making chords is I usually take the third and make it an octave higher. So instead of getting this to sound like this. It actually sounds like this. So that's our corporate Gretchen. So we're going to start and get our sense.

I'm not going to go into sound design. This is not a sound design tutorial. I'm just going to copy this and just paste it here.

Sounds all right, but it kind of sounds too kind of weak. So what we can do we can add. Probably a another saw cord out of serum this time. I'll just make like a simple saw cord and we can copy this one if it here and we can make this an octave lower. Yeah, it's some weight. It still sounds a bit empty and the low end.

So what we can do is create a sub base because this is EDM and usually what I do is I just copied the chords and I just remove the third and the fifth on all the four. So I just get the root of the chord. I just make this also an octave lower.

You getting where this is going. So if we heard all together.

Of course, the mix isn't well, that's what we're aiming for right now, but the chords sound very boring. So here's what we can do. So let's just take the Silent One patch instead of chords. Let's make these into sixteenth notes. We had the. Turned off. We're going to turn this on.

Okay now sounds a bit moving because well this is what the preset is and now we're going to add more notes added more notes to the court to make it more interesting. This is what it sounds like

you see now, it sounds a lot more better like if we heard it. Or

so here are the coordinates for the chords that are used for this chord progression. Now if these names look very confusing don't really worry about it. I'll give you some tests when it comes to making chords. So take for example the c major chord if we add a seventh we would have a C major 7th chord and if we add a 9th we would have a c-major 9 the same idea goes with a minor chord taking.

Meyer, for example we can add a seventh making this A C minor 7th adding a ninth C minor 9th. We can also add a 13th making this A C minor 13 now taking the c major chord again. We can also make this a suspension chord we can take this e and drag it to a d so if we play it we would have a ccs to the to standing for D being the second note in the c major scale.

Now if we take this D and move it to an F if we play it. We would have a thesis for or meaning F being the fort note in the c major scale a C6 scored similar to a C major 7 chord. All you're doing is adding a sixth now this - knowing that you see on a chord in my chord progression that basically means an added nine.

Piano letter

Basically, you just added a nine to that chord. So taking this C6, for example, if we added a ninth you would have a see 6-9 now it's getting somewhere. I'm going to add like a simple beat pattern. Typical 4/4 beat if you know what I mean every snare will be on the second and fourth beat or each bar.

And every kick will be on the first and third beat for each bar and I'll just add like some Riley. Of course, if we wanted to make this more interesting we can add a side chain. If you don't know what a side chain is basically matches starting as a volume knob is basically lowering the volume than raising the volume and it really make way we can also control the Rhythm using the right slider which allows you to control the amount of side chain that happens if that sounds kind of confusing imagine the sidechain like a rhythmic no, keep in mind our time signatures and.

Over for right now. We're in the rate of 1 over 4 1 over 4 cents for a quarter note in music theory it takes four quarter notes to equal one bar. So the plug-in will continuously do the side chain four times each bar. And that will give you this sound

we can change the rate. Let's say 1 over 16 1 over 16 standing for sixteenth note in music theory it takes sixteenth. Tikal one bar so the plug-in will do the side chain continuously 16 times for each bar. This gives it a future bass C type of sound if you listen to it. I hope this gives you Insight of what music theory is and how it's used in making music.

I highly recommend, you know, basic music theory they'll be a lot easier to make music and you don't have to keep guessing a lot. If you want to learn more about music theory. There's a great course offered by Milan. I want to thank milotic's for sponsoring this video Lux just releasing music.

Theory course goes more in detail on scales from a scales pentatonic scales and core progressions. You can find it in the link below for a limited time. It's free. So get it while you can we want me to make more videos kind of like this. Let me know and I'll see you in the next video.