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Triads are the most necessary chord key ins music however their meaning can be disputed. Is a triad simply any 3 note chord? Or does it also need to have been made by stacking major and minor thirds? Well, as far as I can see there are 10 unique kinds of triad chord we can have and in this video I will be explaining all of them!
My video on EVERY chord symbol:.
And, an extra unique thanks goes to Peter Keller, Douglas Lind, Vidad Flowers, Ivan Pang, Waylon Fairbanks, Jon Dye, Austin Russell, Christopher Ryan, Toot & Paul Peijzel, the channel's Patreon saints!.
ASSISTANCE ME ON PATREON:.
0:00 Intro.
0:31 Significant.
1:04 Minor.
1:27 Diminished.
2:03 Augmented.
2:30 what defines a triad chord?
4:19 Suspended.
6:18 Modal.
10:05 Significant flat 5.
11:05 Why not these chords too?
14:25 Quartal consistency.
16:05 using every triad in a song.
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Another great academic discussion and useful for including Quartal harmony, too. Thank you again, David!
You are such a great teacher. You explain things so well even a new 70 year old piano student can follow and understand it. Now let’s see if I can apply it!! lol. Thanks for your vids. My favourite on you tube piano lessons.
Regarding the quartal chords, I’d love to see a video on pop songs that use them! I know of Joni Mitchell’s first album that uses a lot quartal and quintal harmony especially on the song “Dawntreader”
Good idea! I’ll add that topic to the list!
Also Tarkus by ELP is a perfect example. @@DavidBennettPiano
@@DavidBennettPiano I’d love to see that video too!
The Locrian and Lydian triads are also inversions of each other. For example, you can build both F(lyd) and B(loc) with the same notes F B C. Or a Cmaj7sus4(no5) 😛
The quartal triad also appears when you invert sus chords. With C F G you can have Csus4 or Fsus2 or G(quartal)
And the quartal triad is just a G7sus4 without the 5th – the shell voicing he alluded to earlier. I do think quartal chords fit into regular harmony, it’s just a particular way of voicing them. Add the Eb to a C Quartal chord, it’s now a Cm11 (no5), add the Ab, Cm11(b13) and so on.
And the cluster one is just an add9 without the 5th
So Quartal triode CFBb is also a Bbsu2 1st inversion
@@susansu3538 Yes. Music Theory for Guitar has a great video explaining how sus4, sus2, and 7sus4/Quartal triads are all inversions of each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgElWOI9lv8
I think trying to put a label on anything weirder than the four “regular” triades just leads to confusion. If you have four or more notes in a chord, it becomes something notation-fluid, like if you have C# G B E, you can think of it as Em#6 in the Dorian scale – useful if you’re descending chromatically from “usual” Em in a sequence like Em -> Em#7/D# -> Em7/D -> Em#6/C# or whatever, it’s often used to create a slightly uneasy feeling instead of staying on one chord for one gajillion bars. But on the other hand, you can think of it as C#m7b5 – a half-diminished secondary dominant of sorts in the key of Bm (C#m7b5 -> F#7 -> Bm is pretty cool and can be used in an interesting cadence), or maybe like Gdor6/C# if you’re a weirdo lol. The notation makes little sense at this point if you can’t see the context where and how it’s used, what role it’s playing. If you add a bunch of degrees on a chord you’re technically able to write anything that fits but that doesn’t mean you _should._ There’s a whole bunch of interesting musical maneuvers that require thinking outside the box, like tritone replacements, switching modes temporarily, etc. where the conventional system stops working so perfectly. When I first realised there can be an E# or an Fb or a B# or a Cb or even like Cbb I kinda lost my confidence when describing something musical with notes or letters.
David, apart from really knowing his stuff, explains it so well. He is such a natural teacher and had really helped me understand music theory – Many thanks David.
i agree
Same here.
Totally agree, he’s awesome.
Plus that C quartal is just an inversion of Fsus4 which is itself also an inversion of Bbsus2 etc. But such commonalities & a need for conventions really arises with 4 or more note chords.
Great video! It really opened my eyes to some of the more exotic triads and exactly how they work. For the Lydian one the first example I thought of was “Chiquitita” by ABBA which seems to alternate D Lydian and D major triads in the coda section.
The quartal harmony sounds like it really wants to resolve to an inverted F major. And the three consecutive full steps sounds very jazzy. (See Deanna Witkowski). This video is like opening a gift box I forgot to, and finding good stuff
Wow! I think this is the clearest my head has ever been after putting together so much. Easily followed every point you made. I apparently use chords often, but now understand why they are called sus and why leveraging them the way I did worked. Thanks!
I’m going to assume that you listen to this very often but you have a gift to explain in a very clear and simple way topics that are complex. Excellent video. Your content has helped me a lot to understand music theory.
There are 19 three-note chords. 9 of them have a minor second (or major 7th) in them, such as EF, 6 of them have a major second (or minor 7th) , such as FG, and 4 of them don’t have any seconds at all; they are made of major and minor 3rds. C(Lyd) and C(Loc) are the same but different inversions, and a sus4 chord is the same as a sus2 chord, but a different inversion. So he has enumerated 8 of the 19 chords. The CDE chord he mentioned is a realignment of a 9 chord; e.g, C9 = CEGBbD = CDEGBb
Damn. You are such a good teacher. It takes a ton of work to make this kind of explanation look so easy and effortless. Huge respect.
Great video!! I remember being terrified of your videos and music theory and getting things wrong in my DAW but now I am not afraid of using big jazzy chords, transcribing and naming them am still discovering and enjoying new mystery chords!
That was SO helpful! Always get stuck with this stuff, the naming, why it is like that. You made it perfectly clear, as always. Where musical brilliance and teaching skills come together…. Thanks David.
What’s funny is that I think Sus2 sounds far more pleasant and satisfying to resolve than Sus4. Then again, I also love using Lydian and b5 chords in my music, so maybe I’m just weird 😅
I believe quartal chords can fit into the tertiary system, all you have to do is invert them the way you did earlier in the video – in your example, a C quartal could alternatively be a Fsus4 or a Bbsus2 🙂
The 7th chord omit 5 was the first triad I thought of after the major, minor, diminished, suspended, and augmented chords. It was used in The Heart Asks Pleasure First from the movie The Piano.
Great work putting all the triads in one piece, it can’t have been easy making it sound that good!
If you’re a beginner, the thing you need to memorize is that “diminished” and “augmented” refer to the 5th of the chord, and “suspended” refers to the 3th of the chord. And that’s like 70% of all songs in existence 😅 then you add more notes (7th, 9th, etc) to those triads, and you win at music
3th (thirth)
I know you probably get a lot of requests but I was wondering if you could do a video on metric modulation? I first became interested when Dom Craik of Nothing But Thieves mentioned they used it in their song “Phobia”. I tried to read an article on it but I struggled to fully get it to work in my head, though I understood it, if that makes sense. Anyway, I really appreciate your videos!