Advanced Film Scoring Harmonic Techniques Used By John Williams

Hey, my name is Michael Whitaker. I'm a film and television composer, and have you ever asked yourself, like, how can I make my music sound more sophisticated and cool and have all those cool chords and harmonies and stuff in it? Today we're going to learn some easy ways to really, out of the bat, make your scores sound more interesting and sophisticated. John Williams used these techniques quite a bit, and we're going to break them down, and I'm actually going to show it using one of his themes that I think you'll recognize. So if you like what you hear, go ahead and hit the like button and subscribe to the channel, and let's get started. or bitonality, which means multiple key centers going on at the same time. All right, so in this first part of this cue, we actually have the melody going over a different key that's the key center. So what I mean by that is, let's take a listen to the full first part. All right, so we had right there in flutes and strings, we're going... Which is in the key of F sharp, is the theme to Star Wars, right? So underneath it, let's take the melody out, and let's discover what's going on. So we have in the strings, we have basically this B. And in the low woodwinds, we have bassoons going... So we get that. And then we have a timpani playing a low E. So that's creating B, G, E, which is E minor. Let's listen without the melody. That feels like E minor. But as soon as we superimpose F sharp major over that, we get a rather unsettled feeling, but it still sounds cool. And my advice to you is, when you're using this sort of technique, think in terms of frequency ranges. So this doing the... This E minor thing is in a lower register than when the melody comes in. If we were to try and put the melody over this, because of the way the human ears hear, we would feel that as being even more dissonant. Of course, the melody key is F sharp major. And let's listen with both those going on together. And even that riff down... is a superimposed triads. So... All those are superimposed major triads. Remember, when you're scoring, you're chopping up these themes into a single chord. Into small motifs of the theme. So... Feels happy, right? But if we reharmonize a section of that melody... Or maybe change the melody... It's more mysterious. So taking a section of the melody, we should be able to take sections of any melody we write or any theme, and we should change the emotional quality using that theme. So one of the ways, of course, is polytonality. So let's move on to technique number two. So the second technique is melodic expansion. What does that mean? Is that when we have a melody, just like we reharmonize it, and we put another key against it, the second thing we can do is put another melody against that. So we can actually use both of those techniques together, which would be have a different key center or different chords that are maybe outside our main key, but use a melodic transition underneath our melody. And as we hit melody notes, we can change the chords underneath the melody and create melodies that would go with chords that aren't inside of the key. Let's take a listen to that and how that works in this example. All right. So here, let's take out... Let's just listen to what the strings are doing, and I'll give you a couple of cool plugins you can use. One of them is Minimal by Sonic Kinetic, and they've done some pre-done orchestral loops that can create kind of a bubbling effect that you hear. Let's solo these strings. So as you can hear, the strings are moving in and out and through the chords, so they're expanding the melody above it, which is the Star Wars theme. But if I have underneath it, try an exercise where you... and take a different chord and underneath it... So it's like counterpoint. It's a melody against another melody. So hopefully that makes sense. But experimenting with other harmony through the melody notes, underneath the melody, really gives us a sense of something else and dynamically is going on. And we can even change the emotion. If this is our end note in our melody, this can be happy, or we can make it hopeful, make it sad, and change the dynamic, even holding through a melody note as we go from one character's look or from one section to another when things change emotionally in a scene. We're able to carry those emotions with this harmonic and melodic expansion. Okay, so the third technique is going to be actually reharmonizing that melody, not with a different key center, but actually using reharm techniques where we use chords that would be outside of the key. And the reason we would do this is to create a different emotion. And so I'm going to play this. You're going to hear this very triumphant version of the Star Wars theme. And then you're going to hear me reharmonize it, where it's a bit dissonant. And emotionally it's going to give the listener the sense that we're not grounded, all is not well or perfect. So let's listen to that. All right, so that's a reharmonization of the theme. So what you can do is you can change the melody notes to fit different chords. So you don't always have to play the melody exactly as written. It can become... Or, you know... And every time it lifts or moves somewhere, we're doing that because we have an emotional connection with somebody or something that's happening on the screen that we want to change the emotion. And that's a really good technique is modifying the melody so the notes are different, but we still recognize the melody, right? Even though the notes are different, it still feels like Star Wars there, but we've reharmonized it. Okay, the final technique that I'm going to talk about is the usage of dissonance versus consonance, which is a very dissonant or strident sound. You know, this sort of... Versus something that is very in the key. So without dissonance, consonance doesn't mean as much. And let's listen to how that works here. So we're going to come out of that dissonant section and we're going to play a very in the key version of the melody in major mode and you'll see it'll just feel very grounded. And we're using that to feel like the scene is resolved. There's resolution now. And so when you're scoring a film or a TV show, you're always thinking about from a character standpoint, has something been resolved yet? Or is there something to be continued? Have we figured it out? Have we solved the problem? Or is there more to come? So as we transition from scene to scene, we don't always want to come to a nice major diatonic resolution. Sometimes you want to have something that maybe... There's... Okay, we're not done yet, right? So that is a lot to think about. But it's going to help you as you transition from scene to scene where you don't necessarily want to end your theme on that major mode or minor triad that says, okay, we're done. Give us some sense of, okay, something else is going to happen. All right. I hope this lesson was helpful. There was a lot to it. And I know I kind of just scratched the surface on certain things, but hopefully it opened your mind up to some new concepts. And if you want to get deeper into film scoring, I teach it at filmscoreseminar.com where we get deep into film scoring as well as giving you the opportunity to score a lot of projects and putting you in the right direction as far as the business sense to start working as a film composer. Thank you so much. Smash that like and subscribe button, and we'll see you on the next video.