9ths and 13ths
okay, Just a ah, shortlist. And I think this time, uh, I want to tell you about mawr extensions we can use. We've looked at the seventh, but I want to look at ninth and 13th. Now, these are things that don't come up a ton for us to be totally honest. Um, but I want you to be aware that they exist. Ah, and that you can use them if you want to. You. Um, but I don't want to spend a lot of time on him because it will be less useful to you than some of the other stuff that we're gonna work on soon. So we've looked at seventh. Let's zoom in on this here a little bit. Okay, so we're still in e minor. And these are This is our diatonic chord progression. So all our records that exist naturally in the key of e minor with the seventh in them. Okay, so that was going route 3rd 5th 7th So we skip a note. We skipped the second we go to the third. We skipped the fourth. We go to the fifth. We skipped the sixth. We go to the seventh, right? We can keep going. We can go. We can skip eight and go to ni...
ne. Right? So you might say to yourself, but there's only eight notes in the scale. If we repeat the route, let's go back to our scale and look at it. Here's our scale. So if we go root 3rd 5th 7th were out of notes, right? Not exactly. We have to do is go up another octave. So I'm gonna copy this. Ah, lovely. Um, so now we're going E t e t eat. So we have We have two full octaves. That's an active, including that note. And that's an octave. You have two octaves now and keep going up higher. So we have root. 3rd 5th 7th There is the root again on the ninth. So now we would call that the ninth. Now, you might be saying, Wait, the ninth is the same as the second. Why don't we call it a second? Well, the seconds kind of a different thing. Um, look at seconds in a bit. Um, but more importantly, we call it the ninth because we're going to try to put it on the top. When we spell the cord. We're gonna put it on the top above all of the other notes that makes it. And ninth, um, so let's do it. So here we have, sevenths. We're gonna keep on going. So here would be the eighth on. He would be the ninth, 8th 9th I'm just going up to scale. 8th 9th 8th 8th 9th 8/9 eight ninth a night. Now we have nine cords. We would call these everything works the same. 1/7 chords. Except we have five notes now. And these are called ninth chords. Let's hear what our ninth chord sound like. Oh, so you can hear how we're getting closer and closer to jazz Sound right? Are cords were getting thicker and thicker and that makes them less, um, simple. And in most dance music and electronic music in general, pop music In general, we like our courts to be relatively simple. We'll have seventh in there, um, nineths. Less so much. But even less so than that would be 13th. 13th are come up a lot. So let's go back to our scales. We have route 3rd 5th 7th 9th 21st. We do do 11th. Ah, but more common than 11th. Oddly enough is 13th. Um, because an 11th would be 1/4 if we went down inactive in the same way that 1/9 was a second. So 11th happened. We do use 11th cords, but much more common is 1/ chords. So let's keep going. Um, 11 things would be 12 and 13 so that would be a C. So if we take that all the way down, that's gonna be 1/6. If it was low. So we're gonna add in 1/6 1 of the notes we skipped over, just like the second. So we like to add in these six. This is when we start to get real jazzy. So let's do it. Remember, I need to go up to scale degrees to get this. So, uh, sorry to chord tones to get this because I'm going to skip over the 11th for now. Um, so we left off on the ninth. Here's 10 11 12 13 11 12 13. And then I'm just gonna put these in for us. That's the 13th 13th 13th 13th 13 and 13th. Now you might think to yourself, How did I just figure those out so fast. Um, the reason is, once I did this 1st 1 then I can pretty much just count up the e minor scale right from here. And all my notes will be right as long as I keep the pattern in mind. So I was able to remember that there's only one sharp here, and it's this one. The rest are all white notes. So I just had to keep that in mind while I was growing up here and make sure that I got that note as the sharp. And that's for white nuts. So then I just counted up to scale, starting on C but counting the e minor scale neck out in my 13th chords. Okay, so let's hear these. Excellent. Let's hear the same thing down. I think I'm losing some notes in the upper register there, just from my samples. All right, so now we're starting to get really jazzy, right? Um, now we can modify these as well a lot of the time. Like in like a jazz tune. You'll see, like you'll see a cord written, and then it says flat 13. That means like you're gonna add a 13. But it wants a flat 13 swollen. It's like instead of a normal 13 flat 13 pull it down 1/2 step. That's what that means when you see flat and then a number, it means pull that down. So these are just more court options. Weaken Dio. We could flat all of these 13th and then we make a whole string of flat 13 chords on. It's gonna sound pretty weird. I wouldn't be surprised if you had to use for this trick. Show it to you anyway. Way There are some good cords in there, especially this 1st 1 I really liked. That would be E minor nine with a flat 13 is what we would call it. I wouldn't call it E 13 because it doesn't have a full 13th in it. It has a flat 13th so it's an E minor nine with a flat 13th. So what that would look like if you came across, that is, it will be written this way E minor nine and then in parentheses, flat 13. So the more numbers you see here, it's telling you degrees above this so it wants 1/9 which is nine scale degrees above E and the 13th is 13 scale degrees above E. But it wants you to flat it by 1/2 step. So that's ninth and 13th. Um, you won't come across him too much, but I think in this next thing we're going to do ah, it will be useful to us to know how to figure out these chords. So off to the next one.
In the first part of Music Theory for Electronic Musicians, we learned how to work with the piano roll editor in a DAW to make harmonies, melodies, and whole tracks. In this second part, we'll expand on those ideas. We'll work with minor keys, focus some time on melody and bassline writing, and we'll talk about how different tracks work.
In this class, we feature an extensive track analysis segment by Daft Punk, Avicii, Skrillex, and many more. In each of these segments, we'll look at their tracks on the piano roll editor. We'll talk about why they sound the way they do, and how you can use similar techniques in your own music. Each of these segments picks apart multiple elements of the song and dissects it in an easily digestiable manner.
Who should take this course?
Anyone interested in producing their own tracks. This will get you up and running and give your tracks a unique sound in no time.
This course consists of video lectures, which all contain a session in Ableton Live 9. If you are using a different program (or none at all), no worries! This isn't a class on how to use Ableton Live, and the concepts can be applied to any DAW.