I've been challenged today to explain one simple concept in five levels of increasing complexity.

My topic harmony.

I'm positive that everybody can leave this video with some understanding at some level.

How's it going?

Good.

Cool.

So do you know what harmony is?

It's when people sing together and it sounds nice?

Yeah, that's 100% correct.

Have you ever heard a song called Amazing Grace?

It's a good one.

The melody on its own just goes that melody on its own is kind of lonely, right?

And no one really knows how it feels.

So which one did you prefer?

The second one?

Awesome.

And why did you prefer that one?

Because it sounds better?

Yeah, that's great.

I can decide how I want this melody to feel and the more notes there are, the more exciting it is, that's what musical harmony is.

Does that make sense?

You're the best.

Thank you.

Have you ever heard of harmony?

Yes.

Okay, so what do you think harmony is?

I think basically it's like one person has the lower voice and like girl usually has the higher voice and then they blend it together.

I like it.

That's absolutely correct.

Harmony is about injecting melody with emotion so that ultimately you leave home and you return home and you've learned something along the way.

So a nice place to start is with the idea of a triad triad is a three part harmony basically.

So that's a triumph.

So this track is called C major.

So have you ever heard of this idea of like major chord and minor chords?

Yeah, so this is C major and then this is C minor.

So the feelings are different, right?

Yeah, it feels like dark and spooky.

Yeah.

How does this one make you feel happy?

Joyful?

Yeah.

Like so amazing grace.

You start with F.

If I go, there's right now, I don't know where I am and my job is to get back home, but to make it to make this cord makes sense.

So I might go, oh man, that sounds really good.

I was surprised like happened my job as a harmonizer is to find that narrative and make it make sense.

That was interesting because I didn't think that that would work together because there were two completely different sounds, but then like it just made it happen and it just was like amazing magic essentially.

What harmony is is like a language, right?

And so as with any language, the more words you're capable of speaking in the language, the more you can say.

All right, so in harmony, this might be how many notes you can think to add to accord to make it feel a different way.

Have you ever heard of the circle of fifths?

Okay, that's great.

On one side we have a lot of the notes which make us feel brighter.

You know like these kinds of these really bright sounds and the other side is a lot more to do with the darkness of a key center.

So we're home and f but imagine we're taking a quick visit to B flat, but then the sun comes out.

Oh yeah, what notes would you suggest?

I add F.

F Is a great one.

Yeah, and if we keep going in that direction.

Yeah, yeah.

And then you got it.

Yeah, so this is really, this is like a gleaming blade or something, you know?

Let's play this tune.

Amazing Grace, let's play it in its simplest form.

All right, so we're gonna start F.

Right that ship B flat.

See, Yeah.

Nice.

Okay, cool.

Let's try one more version where we add some colors.

Alright, so let's visit the B flat with a bit more imagination just to see how things feel.

Alright, let's do it.

So it's F major seven, but it's over A, Which is F.

seven over a B flat major seven with an energy in it.

F major seven with an E and a D.

And a G D -7 with the GNN sea sauce.

Oh, mine are nice.

B flat major G seven.

Shell major seven like that.

So what harmony does is just gives us even more tools to tell those stories.

That's awesome.

One.

Nice emotional device when it comes to harmony is just thinking about how to arrive somewhere, you know, it can be so sparse, it could be so rich and it can be really emotional.

So this idea of the overtone and undertone in the harmonic series.

How much do you know about this?

Only until I started listening to singing barbershop quartet and as I was a violinist as well, then I finally understood the idea where the overtone series came from that if a bunch of singers were to nail accord or have it perfectly tuned the overtones, you would hear a tone that necessarily wasn't being produced by one of the amazing about harmonies that it exists in nature.

So take the harmonic series of the note.

F.

For example, you have the octave and in the fifth and the fourth and then the but that's a little bit sharper, that's fine.

And then the intervals get increasingly small beneath that note, you have the undertone series, which essentially is like a reflection of something in the same way that when a tree grows in nature, you have the branches which go upwards in the roots which go downwards.

So it's quite a nice thing to think about this being the key center, the floor, the ground and then these two different directions of ways in which it can express itself and the differences in the sensations without lots of the time.

I think when it comes to re harmonization, harmonization, people think that the solution to the problems come when we add more notes, I think that people forget that you can work with the notes you already have by just rearranging them.

Just the simple idea of inversion, inversion of the simple triad of F major.

So what was that now?

How how home do I want to go here?

You know?

Is there another verse to come?

Because I can do, I can delay the gratification of going home first of all, just by using inversions even before we add notes to the chord.

One thing that I was very joyful to discover is that every single melody note works with every single bass note.

Mhm.

So demonstrate that.

Yeah, so this is the note F.

F.

Major, F.

Minor, G.

Flat major seven G.

Flat diminished G.

Flat minor major seven G minus seven G sauce.

G seven, G seven sharp 11.

And then G seven with a flat 13.

A flat sauce, A flat major seven, A flat major seven sharp five with a sharp 11, essentially what that demonstrates is that every note and every bass notes are compatible.

So once we realize this it's like that's great.

Now what should we do?

What what what what what am I supposed to do?

And sometimes the paralyzing thing when it comes to arranging there are too many options.

Too many things are possible.

So that's when it becomes super, super important to be aware of what you want to try and say emotionally, you know, but what about negative harmony?

The dark side.

So essentially the way I apply negative harmony would be this idea of polarity between the undertone series and the overtone series or, you know, the one side and the other side, the perfect in the plague.

The feeling of a minor player resolving is so moving.

You know, and it's just it's a good alternative to something.

Like it's funny, you know, you're doing that make something in a major key sound like kind of a wistful sad song, right?

You know, you change the feeling of what otherwise would if you would tell a kid that this is a major song, you should be happy.

Exactly, yeah, No, for sure.

And you know, F major can be something you arrive in from, if you arrive in F.

Major from D.

Flat, then it's like the sun's come out, right?

But if you arrive in F major from a major, then it's like the sun's gone in.

So there's a lot about context.

I think once you have a language it's about using it and applying it in those emotional ways.

I think that's what makes the difference.

A lot of people will see you as somebody who's drank in Harmony their whole life.

They've seen so much Harmony heard so much harmony.

How do you make the choices?

There's so much that's possible when you know stuff, how do you how do you have the courage to make a choice?

It comes from just your life experience and and that moves you in a certain direction, how it gets expressed many times.

It's a complete surprise, I find it fascinating music to think about, you know, say I arrive in a place if I'm going I'm going to D flat major and there was something you once taught me, you taught me this song called Don't Follow the crowd.

Oh yeah, and there's that chord, it's not a dominant chord but it functions as a dominant chord but it doesn't matter because you're still going to the place you're going to write, it's something like, right, right, right, right, right.

So this cord being like a major seven with the shop five and a natural like there's no dominant thing but at that moment I'm coming from here and I want to forge some some solution.

I get myself in a situation.

Yeah.

Yeah right.

That haunted me for days because you know, I just wouldn't think to use that cord in that situation.

Yeah.

And there it was and yeah, you know, if you read the rule book that's not in it.

Yeah.

And this is what I learned from the great chris chris Anderson.

Yeah.

The idea of going to deflect cord Normally it does a dominant like a flat 7th, But back in the 20s they also used to do things like oh yeah, you know, so it's it's always coming yeah.

Coming from just just below the key from C with the 7th.

Yeah.

And we don't normally say AC 7th and a flat seventh related.

Yeah.

You know, because some of that so many of the notes are different because you got this and you gotta go exactly right.

It gets gnarly, right?

Yeah.

But if you voice that correctly then you're safe.

You can get all all of those you can get away with it.

Yeah.

The other thing uh that I like that we both do on occasion is to be on the court.

We want to arrive at with the bottom part of our structure and the court before the arrival court to have that on top.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

And that's not because like emotionally it's almost like I'm here, I'm arriving here.

But if the basement is the same, it's like this inevitability about it was there all along Makes a pool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like one thing is moving in one direction, one thing has arrived.

So it's this tension and it's glorious.

I love thinking about these things emotionally.

Just because that's a feeling I know that feeling in my life, music is that different from life?

No.

You know, and I think that's probably the greatest attraction to those of us who play music.

Was there ever a point in your life when you were younger where you felt like you had consistently fell back into the same habits, you'd find I'm not gonna play the same thing again.

I had a really great experience when I was working with Miles Davis.

I felt like I was in a rut playing the same stuff and I was getting depressed because of it.

And Miles said something to me.

I thought he said don't play the butter notes, right.

And so I thought, what do you mean by that?

So you thought he said butter butter, No.

And he said bottom, But you thought he said butter.

Yeah.

And so I said I think what could butter b, what is butter?

Then?

I started thinking what are the obvious notes?

For example, in accord.

The obvious notes are the third and the seventh.

So I said, oh maybe if I leave those out, it changed everything for me from that moment on I got more applause that for that so long that I did the whole week, wow, I wouldn't play the voicings I play today if that had not happened, That's amazing.

I've been using this to an amazing grace.

And so we could play a bit of that if you want to.

We could talk about some stuff.

I've been doing an f.

Yeah, thanks, thank you.