Where to Begin - Diatonic Chords - triads in the Major Scale

Hi, it's Chris with Implied Music. We're here on a quest to fill in our sort of foundational knowledge about music. The question, where to begin? Lots of different places we can start. Obviously the most important place to start is right from where you are. You may know some things, you may not know other things. You may not know what you know. Today, I want to talk about diatonic chords. What's a diatonic chord? Diatonic chords. Well, dia is one of those Greek prefixes we use. And it actually means you hear it in words like dialysis, right? Dialect. It means passing through, right? Diatonic, passing through the tonic. I don't know if that helps us at all, but we're going to see if we can figure it out. But before we do, let's do some housekeeping. It would really help me out a lot and the channel out a lot and this whole community that we have here out a lot. If you would just subscribe right now, what we do here is music theory that's useful for you. It's not really academic, but it's a way of discussing our musical activities that's meaningful to us, that helps us think and helps us communicate with our musical bodies. It's really important that we have basic common language amongst musicians, right? We talk about what we're doing here. Also, I have a question for you because I'm approaching now, probably we'll be there by the fall, 10,000 subscribers, which is just crazy for me. Just crazy. And I'm realizing that there's extra content that I want to provide that would be considerable work for me to do. And so I'm going to begin a Patreon channel where extra content is going to be available. Many people have asked for a standard MIDI files about these tutorials. That would be a place to have something like that. That's just one idea. Maybe a discord server and group where we could exchange ideas, you know, kind of like more privately and more intimately certainly than we do on YouTube and perhaps, you know, group chats as well. Listen, I'd love to hear some ideas from you about what would be valuable to you on a Patreon page for me. I'm not an academic. I'm a practicing musician. I write music. I play music. I do music for theater. I was a ballet pianist for many years. I know what works. I know it doesn't. I know what I like. I know what I don't like. I'm an avid reader. Of course I have a music degree, but you know, I'm not an academic. What I am is a musician and I'm here to try to help you in your quest to get closer to what's truly you as a musician. All right. End of preoration. So let's talk about diatonic chords, diatonic chords, passing through the tonic. If you haven't seen the video about scales or naming notes, it might be useful to look at that. We're going to begin with this idea, the idea of a major scale. Major scales are a collection of whole and half steps. I'm playing a C major scale now, and I went whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. And when I did, I got this collection of notes and my computer correctly identifies it as C Ionian, the C major scale. Now, generally speaking, we talk about the diatonic chords as the triads whose notes are members of a specific scale. In this case, since we were in C, I'm going to play the triads that are pulled out of the C scale. I'm moving my hand up and up and up the C scale. And as I do, I get a collection of triads. Each of these is a triad. And the triad is a simple collection of three notes built by skipping a note and then skipping another note. You can see the picture of it there on the screen. And my computer identifies that chord as C. Each step of the scale has a triad and each of those triads is a diatonic triad. They have quality. That is to say, some of them have a middle note. That's a major third from C to E is one, two, three, four half steps. That's a major third. But if I move up to the second degree of the scale, D minor, that middle note is only one, two, three half steps away. It's a minor triad. It turns out the second degree of the scale in this case, D minor is a minor triad. The third degree is also minor. The fourth degree, four half steps to the third. It's a major triad. The fifth degree is also a major triad. Have you been keeping track? We've had three major triads, the chord that's built on the first step of the scale. In this case, the chord is C. The chord that's built on the fourth step of the scale, the F chord in this case, and the chord that's built on the fifth step of the scale. And if I added up all the notes in those three triads, those three, those, well, I already have a C, but I'll put it in there. And then the, hold them all down. And then the G chord, I have a B, I have a D. Let's play the D down here. I get all of the notes of the scale. These three chords encompass all of the notes of the scale. And in fact, many melodies can be harmonized with just those three chords, but there's one more or maybe two more important chords, right? We haven't got there yet. We did the one chord C, the two chord D minor. It's a minor chord. The three chord, that's a minor chord. We have the four chord, which is in this case, major and the five chord. Now it's time for the six chord, a really important minor chord. Couldn't have pop music without it. It's absolutely crucial. The minor six chord. And then a very spicy and kind of cool sounding chord. And this is where things get really interesting in the diatonic series. The next chord is the seven and the seven chord lives here on the B in this case. And let's look closely at it. There's a minor third between the root and the third. And then the fifth is not a perfect fifth like all the other triads, but rather it says B tritone instead of seven half steps. It's six and it's got a energized, spicy sound. And the truth is in the diatonic series, the triads, the chords built out of the major scale, that tritone really wants to resolve home again. And without that tritone, without that energy, the energy of the triad built on the seventh degree functional harmony, as it was practiced in Europe from like about the 17th century, just wouldn't exist. Very important sound. And without it, you wouldn't have that tension and resolution. That's like so important to functional harmony. As a little bonus piece of information, I'm going too far. I know, but it's worth doing. And I always do it. This C chord could also be played with the C on the top. The same three notes still make it a C chord. And it could also be played with the C in the middle. The same three notes make it a C chord. That's a one chord in the key of C. It's a cool looking pattern, isn't it? And it's all C. It's all the one chord. Once you are comfortable making scales on any key, you can then make triads that are built within the scale. For instance, if I decide I want to use this scale, which is the E major scale, the one chord has a black key in the middle. It's because E and then up a major third and then the perfect fifth. The two chord exists on an F sharp. All of these notes are in the key of E. All of these triads are diatonic to the key of E. You have a one chord, a two chord, a three chord, a four chord, a five chord. Here's the six, here's the seven. And back home again to one. There are seven diatonic triads in every key, just like there are seven steps of the scale. Chord progressions that use only the diatonic chord sound really pleasing and natural to our ears. Chord progressions that borrow triads from other keys sort of fall into two categories. There are what I call pleasant surprises and also unpleasant surprises or like stunning surprises. You know, it's like there's a that's like a completely acceptable, pleasant surprise borrowed chord from somewhere. And then that one is like, where the heck did that come from type of thing? And we're going to talk a little bit as we go forward and talk about how chords like interact about those types of pleasant and unpleasant surprises. Like and subscribe. I said it at the top of the video. I'll say it again. And I'm also curious to know what would be good to put on the Patreon page, right? Yeah. What more do you need? What more do you want? I hope this is useful for you guys. I'll see you next time.