Where to Begin - Sus Chords & Prepared Dissonance

Hi, it's Chris with Implied Music. Where to begin? It's a big question for us as musicians. We want to have understanding and knowledge of the fundamentals, the building blocks of music. I want music theory to be useful for you. Well, to that end, we've been taking it kind of topic by topic, a narrow focus on a bunch of different pieces of music theory. It's not the whole picture, but it's good to have vocabulary and understanding. We've talked about naming notes, scales, chords. We just did a unit on chord inversions. Today, I want to talk about a special kind of chord and how it behaves. I want to talk about sus chords and prepared dissonance. Well, if this is the second or third video of mine you've seen and you're not subscribed to the channel, now's the time to subscribe. I hope you'll like this video. Maybe you should just hit the like button now. Stay to the end. I'm going to have several examples, practical examples, of how to use this idea of sus chords and prepared dissonance in pop. We'll even look at a Bach piece. But first, just a quick review of kind of what we're talking about here. When we talk about triads, we basically are talking about three-note chords. And here, I'm playing them in the sort of simplest way, just as stacks. Now, those three-note chords have a root and a fifth and then a middle note, which is a third. And that middle note may be major or minor. Now, what a sus chord does is it replaces the middle note. And honestly, it's a beautiful sound. So, C major can become C sus four. I replace the middle note, the third, with the fourth. Or it could, by, you know, extension, also be C sus two. I replace the middle note with the second step of the scale. A sus two has a great sound. And it tends to want to go someplace. Do you hear it wanting to do this? By the same token, I think that the sus four wants to go down. Why does it want to go somewhere? Well, the reason it wants to go somewhere is because the interval of the second, either between the F and the G here, between the five and the four, or between the C and the D, between the one and the two, those intervals are dissonant. Dissonant intervals kind of rub on each other. And there's a couple of classes of dissonant intervals. You want to hear my most dissonant interval? This is the one I think is the most dissonant. Wow, right? That was an octave plus a half step. Another way to do that would be to fold it down. That's a minor second. It's a very dissonant interval. That's a major second. It's less dissonant, but still pretty dissonant. Now, when you use a sus chord in a sequence of chords, you're going to wind up with moments of dissonance, aren't you? I want to play you an example of something. So for about a decade, every day, literally every day, I've been playing a couple of pages of Bach chorales. And a lot of what I know about harmony and arranging comes from the experience of playing through these beautiful pieces of music. There are four voices, soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, and each voice has its own job to do. It stacks up to make chords, like right here, for instance, that G and that G bracket a B and a D. That's obviously a G chord. This is the beautiful sort of first four bars, four or five bars, of Rejoice Greatly, Oh My Soul, beautiful Bach chorale. Listen to how it works. Voicings. Even just looking at it on the screen, it's fairly easy to see there are moments where there are seconds, major seconds. Like, for instance, between these two voices here, a major second. Between these two voices here, a major second. Now, what Bach has done is he's created moments of dissonance that resolve. And he's used a very special trick called prepared dissonance to make the momentary tension of that second acceptable and then let it release. We're going to talk about how to do that because it's very closely related to how sus chords work. Listen, let's listen to the same thing on piano. It's maybe even a little bit easier to hear on just individual instrument like the piano. What makes this work is Bach has used a great trick. He's used inversions of chords and moments of tension to release. Now, let's take a simple chord progression. A minor and then the root position, D minor. And look at all these chords. They're in root position. I probably would never play them this way if I was playing a song. G goes to C. F goes to B half diminished. For those of you playing along, this is the chord progression from lots and lots of songs. But maybe most notably, I will survive. Hey, let's invert these chords so that it's smoother. So here's the A minor chord in root position. And I'll just take the two voices up at the top to get D minor. I've kept the A because it was common. Notes only move by a step or not at all. We talked about chord voicing when we were talking about inversions, and this is a great example of it. This is a much better way to play it, but I still haven't used any sus chords or any suspensions. Now that you've heard that, let's look at these suspensions. This A minor chord has an E in it. This D minor chord starts off with the E that was left over from the A chord, and then it moves to the third, to the F. In other words, I've played A minor, D sus 2, D minor. I've used prepared dissonance. The note that was dissonant has been prepared. It appeared in the previous chord. The E appears again. It's been prepared, and it resolves. And then the A goes down to the G. The dissonance was prepared. All of these momentary dissonances, the G is prepared, and it resolves to the F. There's a really strong minor second, and that minor second there is fine because the C was prepared. It sort of works. Doesn't it? Listen to it again. I'll shut up. Beautiful. The F is a dissonance. It falls down to E, and then I add the D, and the E, which was dissonant to the D, the seventh of the chord, the root of the chord, was prepared from the previous inversion. Oh, I love this. Okay, what if we use it on a really common pop chord progression, 1-5-6-4? Well, here's the root position version of that. C all the way down to G, A minor. You can see there are a few notes that will be in common between the chords, and then F. Now, let's invert the C chord. So, instead of playing it in root position, E is on top, and the C prepared dissonance goes down. In other words, what I've done here is an inverted C chord, G, C, E, is going to Gsus, and then resolving to G. It's an elegant sound. Inverted C chord, Gsus, and then resolving to G. Now, the next chord is A minor, and that D could be, we can think of it a couple of ways, it could be Asus, I think so. If I take this E down here, this is what I've done. The computer thinks it's something else, but this D is the sus, and then it goes down to A minor. This D is the sus, and it goes down to A minor. Sus4. Sus4 to 3, and then just to turn it around again, here's my C chord, and this time I'm going up. The C falls down to G. Here's my Gsus, it calls Csus2, but then we realize it's a G. It's Gsus4. Is it Csus2? It has all the same notes. Sus chords tend to be a little bit ambiguous that way, because they're dissonant. And then another sus sound to the F chord, I mean to the A minor chord, and then it releases. Sus chords can be beautiful when we put them in instrumental forms. Listen to this. It's the same chord progression. As the dissonant tones relax to the third, or whatever note they have to resolve to, it creates this beautiful propulsive forward motion. Basically, you're getting two chords for the price of one, and it is suggestive, isn't it, of melody. Like, you just know that somebody would want a top line over that. Let's listen to it one more time. And you can see where the suspensions happen. This C hung over and became the B. It's just the same trick. It's the same chord progression that we just used. I'm just playing a little figure. Gsus goes to G. Maybe move a note within it. This time we're going to go up. Sus chords. Sus 4 going down to 3. Sus 2 going up to 3. You can even suspend the fifth, or suspend the root of a chord, although it's a little less common. It can still sound really exciting. Those suspensions create momentary dissonances, and in the best arrangements, dissonances are prepared. Preparing a dissonance simply means that note that's dissonant needs to have appeared in the chord that came just before it. Prepared dissonances create elegant flow between chords and lead to suspensions that sort of propel us forward. Like I said, you're getting two chords for the price of one. It's very powerful. One of my favorite tricks. Well, I hope this has been useful. Like and subscribe. 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