Season 1 covers the influence Baroque music has had on modern producers approach to music elements such as harmony, melody, rhythm, arrangement and more.
This episode focuses on the techniques used in the song ‘Some chords” by deadmau5. Particularly focusing on baroque harmony techniques such as the picardy 3rd.
See the progression chords on chordify here.
Welcome to explain EDM, a podcast for producers.
This season we’re looking at the influence Baroque music has had on modern producers.
Approach to musical elements like Harmony, Melody, arrangement and more.
So what is Baroque?
Well, hundreds of years ago before the classical era, the farm roads out there was a composer called Johann Sebastian Bark Bark was an organist at his local church.
At this time, he wasn’t even that popular, but he became one of the most well known.
Composers in the.
Baroque era, along with other composers like handle and tone and nowadays bark is considered.
The Grand father of classical.
If there’s one classical composer, you need to know is this guy, but how does this relate to ATM?
Well, love him or hate him.
Joel Thomas Cinnamon AKA Deadmouse has used a number of box techniques.
Many of these techniques, taken directly from baroque progressions and compositions, but isn’t under copyright infringement.
While box been dead for almost 300 years though, actually his music in the public domain so everybody can steal from him.
But how do we know it’s?
Bach that he stole.
From well, let’s look at.
Some of the techniques that Jim in new users and compare them to have some of the dead mouse compositions.
Part One first, let’s have a listen to dead. Mouse is some chords. At the introduction we hear a synthesizer play four different chords. The chords are a flat, minor, E major, F# major, and then a flat major.
Second, what’s interesting about these chords is it starts in a minor chord progression until the last chord.
What deadmouse does here is he borrows a technique from bark.
This technique is sometimes called the picketing third, or tears typicity.
This is where.
A minor chord changes into a major chord, so we have a minor to major resolution.
We actually heard this before in the in the Toccata and fugue.
Here’s one minor build up.
Second, the major resolution.
But there’s more going on in the harmony than just a change from major to minor, although it is a simple chord progression, the four chords are borrowed from a minor key, but end up in a major key at the end, so he’s actually mixing scales and scale harmonies.
We have a flat 6 chord which is R.
We have a flat 7 chord which is our F# clawed but we have a minor one chord which is our a flat minor which finally changes to a major one.
During both the Baroque and classical era, it was quite common to mix harmony between different scales.
In fact, there are three different types of commonly used minor scales.
The natural minor.
The harmonic minor.
And melodic minor.
2nd, so composers often picked and choose which chords they wanted out of the different minor scales, and sometimes even mixed in chords from the melodic minor, which included major chords.
In some chords, there’s not a defined lead melody for the beginning part, but what we do here is an emphasis on certain melodic notes within the chords.
This chord voice leading creates certain melodic changes which do sound like Melody.
Let’s have a look at how the chords.
Emphasize certain notes.
Second, when we hear the progression, we hear the chords in what’s called an inversion.
Inversion changes the order of the chords so that certain notes are on top of the corridor or on the bottom of the call.
In this case, the 3rd of each chord.
Is emphasized at the top.
This creates a really strong sound and strong voice leading.
He’s a cool progression again with the thirds emphasize an octave higher.
The whole song centers around these thirds within the chord progression.
Later we hear a lead melody and it also emphasizes these major thirds.
Part 33 rhythm.
Rather than focus on the drums, I’m going to focus on a melodic rhythmic technique.
Deadmouse users to create variation in core progression.
Rather than play all the chords on the beat.
He does something called anticipation.
Let’s have a listen.
If it was all played.
On the beat.
Second, now let’s try this into it with the anticipation.
Second situation is only used on the second chord in the progression, but it.
Creates an entirely different feel.
Still, by anticipating that cord, it surprises us.
It creates more variation rather than just having all the cords on the beat only have a cord anticipated like this offbeat, we also call this syncopation by creating more syncopation in the chord progression we create more interest.
This anticipation technique is particularly useful for chord progressions of block chords.
It’s used in.
Many, many different styles of music and can be used on more than just one chord in the progression.
Here’s an example which uses every chord anticipated except.
For the first.
Potful arrangement orphine open arrangement.
After having listened to a lot of dead mouse songs, what I noticed is he made it very easy for DJ’s to mix his tunes.
So traditionally what he would do is have an introduction with drums and that makes it easy for DJ to mix it into the next song.
Having a rhythmic thing at the beginning.
Helps to keep rhythm and it shows up on software like Serato or Traktor to keep it in.
Time in some chords.
He doesn’t do this.
He starts his introduction without any drums.
In fact, he doesn’t have any drums for the whole 1st 50 seconds.
This breaks away from his usual structure.
The introduction we here at the beginning.
Of some chords is just a solo synthesizer. Up until about the 52nd mark. Then we finally have the drums introduced. The overall structure of the song is very simple.
In classical music we usually name sections of a piece as ABCD, etc.
This is useful because often we cannot follow the normal verse, chorus, bridge structure.
So how do we analyze the song?
Well, it’s pretty simple.
There are only two parts of the song.
The part where we have the chords that we’ve.
Looked at already.
And then we have the more.
Harder part words, more rhythmic based and doesn’t have a chord progression.
Simply, if we listen to those two parts, we can hear the first part is from the introduction up until when the drums get introduced, and then around a minute 36 is where we see the B section.
So this is the second part of the song.
The B section continues and then he goes back to A and.
Then back to.
Be again, so overall we have an AABB form.
There are many other musical forms that he could have used a binary form ABA bundle from ACA or Snyder, or variations.
Forms look up musical forms.
If you want more information, another key aspect to the arrangement of dead mouse is some chords is the way it uses layering.
We only hear 1 synthesizer in the instruction in the beginning, but soon we hear layers of other synthesizers being added.
This helps us.
Sick and what we call musical texture by one minute in we’ve heard a number of different synthesizers layered on top of each other to create a much thicker, fuller sound as well as Deadmau5 has opened.
Up the low pass.
Filter to allow higher frequencies to come through another way.
That the musical.
Texture has widened this technique of adding extra layers is really, really useful.
You can simply have one synthesizer and then add another layer for tonal variation.
Classical composers used to do this as well by adding different instruments, playing the same melodies we can have what’s called title change.
The sound of 1 instrument will change to another.
Instrument thus creating.
A variation and keeping the listeners interests.
We see this very clearly at the beginning of some chords in the evolution and layering of the different sounds.
So this episode, we’ve looked at Harmony, Melody, arrangement and rhythm.
There’s a couple of things I want you to take away in harmony.
It’s useful to understand the Roman numerals and.
The analysis of the chords.
But you can also just simply.
Try inverting the chord by.
Moving the notes up.
Or down an octave to create a different voicing and you can take take from Joel and take from bar and use something like the picardy 3rd to go from a minor key to a major key and have a different resolution at the end of.
The chords in terms of arrangement remember the power of layering.
Make sure you can have different instruments playing the same melody to create a thicker, richer texture for your melodies and harmonies.
And finally, simple techniques, such as anticipation can help create rhythmic variation in your chord progressions.
That will make it much more interesting for listeners.
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