What Are ... Polychords? A Complete Guide (AKA Slash Chords)
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- Опубліковано 2 чер 2024
- 0:00 What is a polychord?
1:08 Demonstration
2:02 The double lives of polychords
5:57 A new way of thinking of chords
6:08 Polychords and memorizing chords
6:45 Polychords and transposing chords
7:48 Polychords and smooth voice leading
9:40 Finding good polychord combinations
10:30 Major chords a perfect 5th apart
11:35 Minor chords a perfect 5th apart
12:00 Major 7th chords a perfect 5th apart
12:42 Dominant chords a tritone apart
13:54 Dominant chords a minor 6th apart
14:32 Minor and major chords a minor 3rd apart
15:25 Polychords and arpeggiation
16:19 Polychords and soloing
In this video I am going to demonstrate and go over the concept of polychords. These are chords that are made out of "simpler" chords, such as playing a C major and a G major simultaneously. Polychords give us a completely new way of thinking of music and harmony, and can be used to transpose, voice lead and memorize stuff. I will also give you some recipes for constructing "good sounding" (consonant) polychords. Finally, I'll conclude by showing how polychords can lead to some interesting arpeggiation and soloing choices.
PS
Polychords are sometimes called slash chords. Sometimes people will use the term "Slash Chords" to refer to a chord over a specific bass, which is a "trivial" polychord. You should double-check with the musician you're working with what he or she mean exactly by using slash notation.
Videos like this make the music learning journey worthwhile. I feel like I was given a new box of presents that I get to unwrap and explore.Thank you for the work that you do
This is the only way to master complex chords and remember them im sure alot of musicians think this way.Great video
What an eye opener. I played slash chords for years now, but only with simple roots or roots and fifth in the left hand. Never thought about putting two full chords together (though it seems emberassingly obvious now 😆). Especially the soloing options and the millions of possible harmonic variations make it intriguing. Plus the feasibility to explain harmonies that would be hard to grasp on otherwise! Simple and effective 👌
Wow this is fantastic! And no surprise that everyone really locks in on the particularly wonderful combination at the 14 minute mark!
What a beautiful sequence. Learning this at 3:30am cause I couldn't sleep.
The best time to learn!
thank you! ive been wanting to learn this for a long time. time to watch the video over and over again
Gives you a lot of things, clearly, thoroughly and briefly, things you may discover in years...Keep it up, your tutorials are the best here...
As usual excellent polychord theory. Sounds very beautiful and jazzy. Thanks mangold. You rock man 👍😊
Hi Mangold,
I really like your videos. Thank you for the hard work, you deserve a lot more recognition. Hope to see more videos in the future.
Thanks for your guidance in 2021 and providing another lightbulb moment.
Best wishes for 2022 and I look forward to receiving more excellent tips and instruction.
This is great. I want to explore more of the altered dominants such as Eb/A7 = A7b9#11. This has changed my way of thinking about how to build and deploy more complex chords.
Learning major, harmonic minor, melodic minor kinda scale helps find these chords and opens up a whole new perspective. Things get very intersting.
Your lessons are so clear and hopeful!
I'm not even a piano player, but learning theory and applying some of it's principles are so much easier with instructional videos like this, bass players beware, broken chords sound great over these progressions and will give you the tools to hit the ground running, I'm improvising with great voicings quicker than I ever have before thanks to you! Taking your left hand and right hand and transcribing these polychords for muscle memory to improvise works like a charm.
I am so glad that a person like you exist. You help us alot in so many ways. Because of yoru videoes, music is so much fun
Thank you for taking time to explain polychords. Will look up the video again.
Another quality video. Always interesting concepts clearly explained. Thanks Mr Mangold :)
A very-very useful lesson, thank you so much.
Thanks for another great lesson. Straight to the point.
Thank you so much for this lesson!
I note that the Hendrix chord, on a guitar E G# B D Fx, (E7#9), becomes a polychord if you rewrite the Fx as a G. You then get E G# B D G, a G chord on top of an E chord.
Thank you for this. The theory really helps especially around matching the chords🙌🏾.
I took notes on your ideas, and will work on them on the piano. But I'll watch this again to see how you resolve them. And I think there is a way to work the circle of fourths into this to really make something special.
An incredible video, thank you so much! Helped me a lot in making better sense of things!
Amazing lesson, a must have for any keyboard/piano player. Thanks a lot for putting this on UA-cam
Omg I've always wanted to know this! Thank you so much for explaining it!!
Your lessons are PURE GOLD. Harmony always was very hard to me to get into, but your lessons present it in a very practical way which is easy to understand by illiterate rockers like myself. Kudos to you sir, avid watcher of your material !
You left out one of my favorites. Play a dominant 7th chord in the left hand (F7), and a major triad which is a major 6th above that (D triad) in the right hand. So, D/F7. In effect it is an F13th with a flat 9.
This polychord also works even better if you just play the root and the 7th in the left hand (F and E flat) with the D triad in the right hand.
Excellent video, BTW.
Thanks Ernie. There are probably too many (good) variations to reasonably cover in any one video, but the idea is to get people to experiment, which I hope this video did!
@@MangoldProject YUP, this video and video about triton sub are like combination of sounds to experiment for whole life
Interesting, so as you said F13th with a flat 9. In this voicing the 3rd is doubled and the 11th omitted. I like it.
Scooping out that doubled 3rd and the 5th in the left hand doesn't matter functionally, brilliant.
This is gold. Thank you 🙏
Thank you for sharing this ! You teach things very understandable and clear! Great l!
Awesome tutorial!🚀🚀🔥
I have been playing these chords for decades, (especially the left-hand minor chord with a right-hand major chord)--I never knew they had a name. Fantastic video!
Well, welcome to the club then :)
Groundbreaking for me!! No more guesswork
I’ve been looking for this door to beautiful chord sequences for a long time.
Great Jazz tutorial ❤
Thank you
Man this is pure gold thanks for taking on this project. 🙏
Happy to help other musicians in their journey.
Love your explanation. Keep on please ❤️
I'm just an infant in piano but I hope to keep playing and enjoying every step of the way until I reach this lesson.Thank you so much, Teacher!!! With love and deep respect.🙂💕♥️
Yet another excellent, professionally delivered, presentation! Superb work showing how the wonderful sounding yet theoretically, and notationally, complex polychords can be conceived and played with great effect.
To any new visitors to the Mangold Project channel, I strongly urge you to have a look at the collection of videos in the ‘Piano Lessons for Beginners’ and ‘Inspiring Piano Harmony, Chord and Voicing Tips and Tricks!’ playlists - there are a few ‘secrets’ in there that will greatly help your appreciation of music theory and practice - wish these lessons had been around 20 years ago when I was first getting started with piano and theory! Just to make it clear, these videos are focused on playing and are not theory-heavy but if you know a bit of theory you’ll immediately appreciate what is being presented.
Thanks Doc :)
Thanks, this is really helpful... and a lovely example teaching progression.
Glad you found it useful.
Love your lessons. Thank you!
Awesome! Hope you learn interesting things.
This lesson is awesome 💯
So useful and professional. Thank you very much!
Glad it was helpful!
Thank you so much for this lesson
Sounds beautiful
Thank you so much for this lesson.
Hi. I am so much learning from your video. I never met teaching those theory that easily understand. Thank you
Fantastic explanation! Thank you!
Glad it was helpful!
Your videos always are!
You are simply awesome on music teaching🎉
Great video!
Thank you very much for sharing.
Thanks for this video!!!
Thanks this perspective helped me
Fantastic! Thanks!
Easy to remember this way. Got to know the formula and inversions.
Lots of great concepts in this video. Thanks for posting this!
Noticed a few comments with viewers confusing this with slash notation. I find it easier to read polychords when they are notated with a parallel line rather than a slash. (I find it less confusing because the upper chord is played with the right hand and the bottom chord is played in the left -- similar to treble clef and base clef.)
Oh I gonna learn that demo so hard
Lol same! I want to learn the demo so I can show off polychords like a boss
Progress update - can play first three chords :) yea im not a quick learner
Progress update, yep whole first line done. I get carried away and start to loop that and improv on guitar over it. Its such a fun stuff to improv over. Its gonna be a PITA to learn all of that in defferent keys tho, thats what im worried about
Beautiful ❤
Awesome video. You have a new subscriber now. Can't wait to dig in to your channel while Im in front of my piano.
Thank you so much sir ❤️🙏
So great 👍 and so constructive thank you so much
very cool! I really enjoyed this video.
Thanks, MI!
Just amazing
Nice lesson
A very good explanations! They sound good on the piano but thinking about the colours of an ensemble or a windband, polychords work very well using one chord for a section and the other for another: trumpets mute-on and clarinets under the brake..
nice mix!
Thank you so much !
Thank you!
Excellent
I always thought a notated slash chord meant you simply play first chord / bass note. So for Cmin7/F you'd play F G Bb C Eb But I usually play a melody in the right and it seems a big stretch if you have to do two triads with the left hand.
Came here to say this. A slash chord indicates a chord with a specific note in the bass. If you want to notate a polychord, you would notate it as you do fractions in Math. Meaning a chord OVER another chord with a straight line in between.
@@PieterSchlosser thank you i was going to reply same thing...he has poly chords notated incorrectly above in video
you are correct...he's explaining it slightly wrong above
Exactly. For simplicity when typing, in addition to the traditional use of a horizontal line to indicate a polychord, it has become acceptable to use the vertical divider character to indicate a polychord (e.g., A|C). But as commenters above have stated, the slash character ALWAYS indicates a chord played over over a *bass note*, NOT a polychord. I wish this presenter would correct and re-upload this video, which otherwise contains helpful information.
👌🏆😉Very helpful, thanks
Two I like are a Maj triad a fifth above a Maj 6 chord., e.g. G/C6, which gives a C Maj chord with 6,7 and 9, with no notes repeating. It sounds good in pretty much any inversion. The second is similar, G/Cm6, which gives nice voicings for melodic minor chords.
Thanks for this video. I particularly found interesting how frequently you use inversions.
Two things stand out to me after watching this video. The first is that I always thought of slash chords as one chord with an altered bass note. Stacking two chords on top of each other never occurred to me. I speak here as a songwriter and music programmer and not as a keyboard player. The second thing that stood out for me was the potential of using this for sophisticated arpeggios. That is where I saw the application of this in my own compositions if I was able to incorporate this kind of theory into my music.
The slash notation usually represents an altered bass note, but it's also used for polychords. However, there is no standard notation for polychords really, and you should be very careful to ask whoever notated your sheet music what they meant.
@@MangoldProject Thank you for your reply and explanation.
You can also refer to it as 5 over 1. I prefer to approach playing in this manner. It's just easier for me. I learned piano as a kid by ear. Took lessons later in life. Already knew the theory. It's like being unlocked. Nothing is out of my reach now. I was a good player before. I've experienced exponential growth in the last year because I knew the theory and now I understand how to apply it as a keyboard player. A totally different experience than being trained as a woodwind player or guitar player. My former main instruments. Thinking like a piano player is very different. The theory is far more important.
Amazing ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ teacher
Daym, this is over my head.
Very useful. As a bass player, I'm less accustomed with polychords. With your exemple, I see a relation with tonal theory. You take triads and cadenza and V I or I IV give C over G for exemple. Or the relative chords, C with Am etc.. I've never thought so clearly like that, thanks. Sorry for my English, I'm french 😉
I like taking this idea and applying it to melodies and accompaniments. So write a chord progression in C and write a melody in G. Kinda fun.
I love the advantages of polychords
Dont know if you rushed though the chords but example 1:38
That could be a FMajor7/ Dm7 or F/Dm9..Depends how you look at it as a poly chord
Always good to give the full example of the chord. With ear training i would be able to pick up on it but for new comers and those that look at chords like this they would wonder you have more notes then just F/Dm7 so that would be throw off to some. Other then that solid stuff
15:14 -> 'there are many others'
Well.... if you ever feel like doing a follow-up video....:-)
Cos this was a blast. Learned a ton !
Thanx for these lessons.
.
Thumbs up + subscribed.
Amazing 🤯🤯🤯
It's been 3 months since this last video. Does anyone know why. Is he on vacation? Hope you are well as we miss your beautiful interesting lessons.
Hey mangold project or Assaf hey man I just wanted to say that I’ve been playing the piano for 15 years & to be honest I never had no one Taught me how to play the keyboard or piano u want to know who my father in the sky god taught me how to play the piano & he actually taught me the easiest way & it’s a secret that I’ve learned a long time ago so I can’t tell u what secret it is but I can only tell how I actually started learning how to get better at chord & hopefully another perspective which helped me out when I first started playing the piano when I was little so yeah but anyways assaf thanks for the video keep it up!👍
If God taught u an it’s such a secret why say anything if ur not gone share
@@anj10730 exactly...a whole Lotta commenting for nothing 🤷🏾♂️🤦🏾♂️😐
@@anj10730 because I can’t give u guys the main secret on how I started I mean sure I don’t really know too much about how to play the keyboard as an expert but all I’m saying is that I started playing the piano because I love it & it’s a passion for me & basically when I first started a long time ago I was never interested in playing the piano but now I’m interested already cuz I’m already getting there at the next level to start my own career so I don’t know about u but me personally I started playing the piano or keyboard when I was 5 years old so that’s make sense because I personally enjoy learning on my own but thanks for asking.
I play guitar but watch your channel because you clearly explain complex topics. In your example @ 7:00 you suggest it is easier to think of Eb/A7 as two seperate chords when you invert it rather than trying to find the inversions of A7b9#11. I wonder if this is also true with the guitar given the layout of the fretboard. Any thoughts?
Very good video. What software do you use for the virtual piano and grand staff display?
Hi, please teach “Big Sky” by Cooliger. Thanks so much for all of your video tutorials and thanks in advance for considering this sincere request. Greatly appreciated 🎶💞🎶
Oh thankyou great
Very nice video. I've learned a lot but I have a question. At minute 17:00 you said that G is the Lydian mode of C and it is in fact Mixolydian. Maybe you can think the C as the Lydian mode of G but not the other way. Anyways, thank you again for the insight and keep doing this wonderful videos!
To be precise, I say the G major scale contains the same notes as the C lydian mode.
Brazil thanks
I thought that the forward slash indicated a chord over a * bass* note thus the term slash chords. Polychords - from what I understand - are written as the top chord name with a line underneath and the lower chord name under that...
Thanks for the video. I'm trying to get chord extensions ( major9 min11th etc) under my fingers.....would you recommend using poly chords from the start, to learn these voicing?
It doesn't matter. Both are equally valid approaches (extensions vs polychords). You'll eventually want to familiarize yourself with both, and either sounds equally good. So just pick the one that inspires you the most and pursue it - there's no "correct" path.
Hi, Thoughts on why they sound so different when played back to front? E.G.: C/G instead of G/C? - i guess the bass note 'dominates' so now no dominant with C/G? Some general words of wisdom around why some notes 'dominate' in a chord? A doozy, i'm sure.
g is the mixolodian mode of c, not lydian ref: last seconds of video, last example on scales over polychord. No biggee, super lesson!
First. As another user also pointed out. The correct notation of polychords is one chord symbol above the other separated by a horizontal line. Slash chords are used to indicate the inversion (bass note). Second. The very reason for the existence and usage of polychords is not convenience but something completely different. Personally I find it very confusing to think about an extended or altered chord as two chords. This destroys completely my harmonic thinking, which I need for soloing and playing in general. More importantly: the very essence and reason for these constructs is missing. I leave the details of this aside here.
How do you make that piano sound so nice? When I create a midi file, it sounds super electric
Buongiorno, voglio ringraziare particolarmente per quanto pubblicato....erano anni che cercavo qualcosa di simile ma ho trovato tanto in rete ma mai così vicino e chiaro riguardo al tema degli accordi sovrapposti. Mi dispiace che ovviamente il tutto non isa nella mia lingua anche se con i sottotitoli vado un po meglio ma davvero se potessi avere la possibilità di colloquiare in italiano Le chiederei di fare più di una lezione in privato. Grazie ancora tantissimo...spero di trovare altri video simili nel suo canale a cui mi sono appena iscritto.
If I was the Mandalorian I would have probably said "this is the way". LOL Awesome man !
♥️ Grate
As a guitarist, I think it’s more valuable to learn the actual chord names. Pianists may benefit from this split way of thinking more because you can actually play completely separate chords with each hand.
That makes some sense. Polychords are more of a pianist's thing (or a composer's thing, really). Regardless, they're still an interesting way to think about complex voicings and to generate alternative voicings (e.g. by inverting one of the chords).
@@MangoldProject Yes, it seems like a valuable tool for pianists and composers. I think for guitarists it's different though.
Eccellente.
Why is the fmaj7 over the am ? Because it’s a perfect 4th? But why is it minor tho I thought only two major7 went well together