Great addition, tommo!
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Nice one! I’d been looking for some good music theory resources. Just subscribed to that channel.
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Which one? Tomasso’s? Tomasso is good because he approaches it from a guitarists perspective, the only thing that I would caution a bit is that it is still taught largely from the common practice perspective so as usual it really depends on what you are trying to apply the knowledge to.
I also think he has a free ebook too iirc.
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This is a good point! Pop music (so often snobbed by jazz/rock/classical musicians) actually did a great deal to challenge the traditional “rules” of harmony.
“Simple chord loops” used in pop are a very interesting topic, here’s a video about it from a channel I like:
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Another good thing to research in the realm of that, which may get you off the ground faster is chord substitutions/borrowed chords. They are used so frequently, it is a must for writing more interesting progressions in any style.
This seems like an interesting alternative approach, I got the book but it’s on my massive pile of unread books
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This is so cool!
I took all the common-practice theory courses in college (ages ago) but these days I’m really into some simple pop songs. This is a really cool way to think about them.
To this I’d add that pop music being harmonically “simple” is a pretty new phenomena. Go back to the Beatles, and you can absolutely tell that those guys cut their teeth playing vocal jazz standards.
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I learnt a lot of theory back in college. It was all jazz based. That was many years ago now and I need a serious brush up.
I’m mostly interested in learning about key modulation techniques, the many different chord substitutions, borrowed chords, secondary dominants etc etc. I want to learn it more for my songwriting. I tend to write pretty simple stuff, but I’d like to study more and experiment with different concepts.
The downside of this is, it’s surprisingly hard to find exactly what you want with so much out there these days…
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I found this helpful because I was looking to emulate classical/baroque composers when I found the channel. There’s also the Berklee method books which I have some old copies of, if you know of some good YouTube channels that use the Berklee method that would be interesting - I prefer to have some pre-recorded examples and visuals
I had a feeling that’s what you were really after. I think in that case Narrowing your scope and doing searches for what you are going to find immediately useful is the way to go. There are a lot of YouTube vids and other resources on modal interchange/mode mixture, parallel borrowed chords etc. if you just narrow it to that one thing, I think that will get you started on the path you want to go on in terms of writing interesting progressions.
The other thing too, dont sell the normal stuff short either. You can have fairly vanilla chord progressions that sound impressive just by how you layer them.
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I’m not sure of ones that use that specific approach, but to be honest, the only real thing I recall about Berklee’s approach was terminology. I have my old textbooks from there that I’ll dig out if you want. They get pretty ridiculous the further up you go because the harmony is so far away from functional harmony it’s really left to interpretation.
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Thanks for the tip. I think that’s the way I’ll go. I had been searching for courses and books etc, but seems like a smarter idea to look for specific videos.