Piano Video Lesson: Why You Must Know The Perfect Authentic Cadence

You're watching LivingPianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin with the power of the perfect authentic cadence. Have you ever heard of that before? Well, I'm going to show you way more than that today and what you're going to learn here today is going to help you with your sight reading, it's going to help you with your memorization of music, and it will help you with your improvisation. It's that basic and important. It's unbelievable. And I'm surprised I have not done this video before because it's so important. So what is a perfect authentic cadence? Well, in its simplest form, it's something like this.

So just basically a five to one with some passing tones. What I'm going to show you today is even more valuable. It's essentially how to establish a key with your primary chords. What are primary chords? Primary chords are your major chords. If you go up your scale and play chords in all the scale degrees, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, you have major chords on one, four, and five. The other chords are your secondary chords, your two chord, your three chord, your six chord, or minor, and your seventh chord is the one diminished seventh chord, the outlier.

So the one, four, five, and in this case, five, seven, add the seventh. For the dominant seventh, the most powerful chord there is because it establishes the key right there with one chord. So here's a great voicing for your basic four part perfect voicing resolutions, note leadings, distance between all the classic harmony rules. Why are these rules there? Because they sound good. That's why Bach wrote this way and Beethoven and Mozart and Schumann and Schubert and all the great composers basically write this way. And we, as musicians, we analyze all this great music and realize the truths behind it, the gems of truth that date back to the Bach chorales. So here's the basic chord progression, one, four, one, six, four, which is a one chord with G on the bottom, the fifth on the bottom, in this case G, because I'm going to do it in C major, five, seven, one. Once again, one, and look at this nice voice leading and the space between the bass and the tenor because it sounds better than...

It doesn't sound very good that way, does it? The four chord, the one, six, four, that's a C major chord with G on the bottom, and five, seven. Now you notice it's five, seven. It's got the root, it's got the seventh, it's got the third, but there's no fifth. Why would that be? Because to get better resolution, doubling the root and leaving out the fifth can help to avoid the four going up to five because it really wants to go down to three. Listen how nice it sounds.

If you use the five, add the fifth of the chord, the two goes up to one, the F goes up to G, and it's just not good resolution. It doesn't sound as good. Now why is this chord progression so basic and intrinsic to music? To knowing all your primary chords and how to establish a key is enlightening in your music because it automatically makes you understand the harmonic underpinnings of all the music you play, read, or for improvisation. So you can do the same chord progression in all keys.

Now you can also do it in the minor keys, etc.

Now once you get comfortable with all your keys, you can start expanding your repertoire of chords. A substitution for a four chord is a two chord in the first inversion, a two six.

So instead of, you can go, or you can spice it up even further with what's called a Neapolitan six. What's that? A Neapolitan six is like the two six except it's a major triad built on the flatted second degree of the scale.

Flatted second degree, major chord, the six inversion, put the D flat on top.

It's almost like your two six chord with these two notes flatted. So now you have this flavor.

So once again, one four two six, Neapolitan six five seven one. And then you can go to and you know, you can get to the point where you can modulate using a five seven of another key. For example, if you use the D seven, D is the five seven of G.

And instantly you can go to G major, start in C major.

Now the D seven, the dominant seventh, the major triad with a minor seventh, and there we are in G major. And you want to go to F major.

The C seven goes to the F major. What am I talking about? The dominant seventh, the five seven is the secret to modulation.

Anytime the key changes, it's pivotal. These five seven chord is almost always responsible. Sometimes a diminished seventh can accomplish it too, but there's nothing that's stronger than a dominant seventh chord. What is a dominant seventh chord? It's a seventh chord built on the fifth scale degree. So if you're in C major, one, two, three, four, five, build a chord on the fifth scale degree.

And what do you got? You got a major triad and a minor seventh.

The only places exist in the scale, you can play all your other seventh chords. Your one seven is major, two seven is minor, three seven is minor, four seven is major.

The major minor seven, your dominant seventh chord.

Six seven is minor, seven seven, half diminished. Why half? Diminished triad, minor seventh.

So that power of the dominant seventh can't be stressed enough.

When you're playing a sonata movement, how does it modulate to the dominant in the X position? I don't know how many of you know about this, but if any of you play sonatas, there's modulation there. There's modulation in so much of your music. What is modulation? Changing keys. You start with a piece and has no sharps or flats, then suddenly you got F sharps all over the place. You're in G major. What gets you there? The D dominant seventh, which is the dominant of G.

So try to play this chord progression at all keys. I promise you, you'll get tremendous benefits in your playing. You'll understand your music on a deeper level. You'll be able to learn music more quickly, read music more effectively and improvise music. Try it out for yourself and let me know how it works here at livingpianos.com, your online piano resource. We'll see you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/why-you-must-know-the-perfect-authentic-cadence/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

Thank you for your comment, question or request!

Comment/Question deleted successfully.

Post a comment, question or special request:

Comments or questions must be between 3 and 10,000 characters long.

You may: Login  or  

Otherwise, fill out the form below to post your comment:

Add your name below:


Add your email below: (to receive replies, will not be displayed or shared)


For verification purposes, please enter the word MUSIC in the field below

---