Where to Begin? Non-Diatonic chords for Songwriters and Epic Cinematic scores. Two Easy Tricks.

Hi, it's Chris with Implied Music. Where to begin? We've been building up our musical vocabulary. We've looked at scales. We've looked at diatonic chords. If you have a good grasp of those, today's a great day to look at non-diatonic chords. Surprising chords that appear in your compositions that have emotional impact that you can use in your songwriting or in your epic orchestrations. Great for scoring to picture or just creating a kind of a surprising and kind of exciting vibe in your music. By the end of today, I hope you'll have a pretty good sense of how to use non-diatonic chords in a couple of interesting ways. Well, if you've seen two or three of my videos and you're getting some value out of them and you haven't subscribed, now's a great time to. We're trying to build a community of musicians, of artists here who are committed to evolving their own musical understanding, building their own music theory, their own ideas about what's important about their music. I hope this is music theory for everyone. Well, let's just hop right in. I think I want to start with a little review because the foundations of diatonic chords are to some degree crucial to understanding how non-diatonic chords work for us. So every major scale, and this is the C major scale, has sort of built into it a set of diatonic triads. Those triads have an expected tonal color and an expected function as well. For instance, the triad built on the first step of the scale has what we call a tonic function. And then two other very important chords are the subdominant on the fourth step of the scale, the dominant, I'm going to add the seventh to it on the fifth step of the scale, and then home again to one. That was C, F, and G. Now, if you're a certain kind of songwriter, you may only need to use chords from this system. And honestly, they sound great. There's a feeling of expectation that is fulfilling. I just pulled diatonic chords out of the C system, and say if you're Taylor Swift, that may be all you need to do. Just because something is diatonic is part of a very predictable system doesn't mean that there aren't moments of tension, of surprising friction, of what we call dissonance. Dissonances want to resolve. There's lots of other kinds of dissonances, and this is where I want to start talking about non-diatonic chords. So a non-diatonic chord is a chord that isn't in the original system. In music of the 30s and 40s, non-diatonic chords most frequently appeared as secondary dominance or as chords moving to a new key system. For instance, I might be in a key C, kind of moving around a simple cycle 1-6-2-5. But if I wanted to go to a new key, I'd introduce a new two chord, a new five chord, and I'd be suddenly in B-flat major. The non-diatonic chords there are diatonic to a new system. That's not the kind of non-diatonic chord I'm saying non-diatonic so much that I want to talk about today. I want to talk about borrowing chords from other scales. The first great place to borrow chords from is the parallel minor. Here's C major. Here's C minor. And here's my absolute rock and roll favorite thing to do. Grab one of those chords from the minor. Let's say I have a chord progression that goes like C, A minor, F, G. I'm going to change one of those chords to its quality from the parallel minor. We could actually try several of them. Let's try the A chord. Now A is A-flat in C minor. Sounds kind of awesome. All the chords are major now. A-flat major is so bright. Olivia Rodrigo's Vampire, Radiohead's Creep, there's a number of songs that use this idea, borrows chords from the parallel minor. Here's an example. Strangely, C, E, F, F minor. Now I'm kind of doing a couple of surprising things here because that E shouldn't be major. And yet this chord progression is everywhere in popular music right now. The surprise chords act like dissonant dominant chords, don't they? They create moments of friction in our ear. Non-diatonic chords are surprising to us only because of hundreds of years of momentum that our ear has learned how chords should move. You know what? That's a good thing because my teacher, Dr. Roland Wiggins, always said, it's the expectation fulfillment dyad. Well, what we expect to happen versus what actually occurs is a big part of the narrative of composing, isn't it? As you make melodies to go with your non-diatonic chord progressions, I think you can borrow a trick from old-fashioned songwriters when they were using secondary dominance and creating new key levels. They'd stick with the original diatonic scale and only use notes that worked from that scale in the new key. For instance, here's a chord progression. C, E-flat, B-flat, F. Now, in the C chord, plenty of C notes go with it. But when I go to the E-flat, I've got a G, say, and an F. I can use those two notes in the E-flat chord. Against the B-flat chord, I'm not going to play the B-flat. I'm just going to play a G and F again, and I'm now at an F chord. All right, so I can melodicize using only the C diatonic scale with these borrowed chords. Powerful sound, kind of a 70s sound, right? Rock major chords, borrowed chords from the parallel minor, original diatonic scale only in the melody. All right, I promised you sort of some epic orchestral ideas too. Here's my favorite, chromatic medians. And you've heard the expression before, but it's a simple concept. Any given triad has three notes that can be repurposed. We can change their role. That C triad, for instance, has an E in it, right? What if I say I'm going to go right from C to E major? We've actually already seen this chord progression, and it can be really beautiful in the right context. I'm taxing my computer. Do you hear the clicks? Okay, that same C chord has a G in it. I'm going make that G the major third of E flat. Here we go. That happens. It also kind of comes from the beautiful parallel minor. We can also go crazy and do things like this. This E is the major third of C, but it's the minor third of C sharp minor. So one of my favorite progressions, C major, C sharp minor. Strings of these types of motion can be very interesting sounding. I could say go from C sharp minor and look down and say, oh, I've got a C sharp in there. I'm going to make that the major third of A major. And then I've got that C sharp. I'm going to make it the fifth of F sharp major seven. And I've got this note here. I'm going to make it the third of G minor. As I continually push to the next surprising non-diatonic chord, I've actually kind of lifted myself right out of the idea of being in any diatonic system. And in fact, in tons of cinematic writing and in the Romantic period and in sort of like Western European music history, the idea of being anchored in a specific diatonic system begins to loosen quite a bit. You follow your nose, so to speak, and choose the thing that feels surprising and fun. Non-diatonic chords open an enormous sort of vast array of possibilities, and it can be a little bit overwhelming, I guess. But I'll tell you what, you've got to just kind of start and try. Non-diatonic chords work best when there's notes in common with their neighbors. Just like any prepared dissonance, you want to go someplace in a way that feels like it's part of a path. Well, I hope this has been useful. Like and subscribe. Ding the bell and you'll be notified. I'll see you next time.