metaharmony

hello - thanks so much for joining and welcome!

meta harmony is a way of thinking about chords - it provides value as a framework for understanding how harmony acctually works and feels. for example: complimentary colours. its really great to think of melodic and harmonic tensions as originating from the primary colours and how they mesh into the major and minor chords. (the tense blue notes / the resolved orange notes from lesson 1)

I'm really excited by the compositional possiblities here. this is explored as you progress through chapter 2 and 3 of the course. taking the families of coupled chords and applying them into the diatonic chords. (as completed in lesson 14)

im currantly starting a youtube series called 'colouring out' to explore these compositional ideas further - i find it really inspiring and useful - my goal is to share that.

in terms of the hypercube - it shows us everything. in my opinion its the ultimate form. it allows for all the interconnectedness of chords and keys in a way which shows how they work. all chords and keys are organised into thier colour families and the colours explain how all the chord movements work. All of this is in context of the diatonic key (the key cube)

in terms of memorising it - i think first aim to understand why the colour families are so powerful (by finishing chapter 2). and then digest that it's as simple as this: chords are related by minor 3rds - they share colour. thats the foundation.

i have started writing a complete handbook for the course - when this is done ill include it as a download in this course.

thats lots of information - i hope it helps, what are your thoughts from here?

great to hear.
hmm limits...great question. id like to get into microtonality one day (using more than 12 notes in an octave). im not sure if meta harmony will be able to go with us into that territory. i want to explore this one day.

and in terms of soloing - yes. looking forward to talking about this more in the future. some of the youtube content coming up in the next week will start to touch on this a bit so stay tuned.

yeah my idea. its a long story how everything came to be how it is - ill get round to talking about it one day.
the colours weren't the first thing - i had a feeling harmony was connected in a physical way - like a big house with lots of different musical rooms which connected in lots of different ways. i was trying to find out what that looked like.

I had a spinning chord wheel diagram which i was explaining to an artist friend of mine. "this wheel represents musical tensions"

and they said "ah it sounds similar to the colour wheel in art"

i realised that the 6 colours fitted ridiculously well into the chord wheel, and the meta harmony colour wheel was born.

but i wasnt satisfied by the colour wheel alone - it needed more movement and rotation that the flat wheel couldnt show. it had to become 3d.

so then came the alpha cubes and hypercubes etc.

i dont see colour with music, but the meta harmony colours are very deeply ingrained for me now.

im really glad this is working for you!
im not sure the best way for you to learn it - follow your gut - do what feels like a good idea. if buying some colouring pens and colouring in tons of music feels like a good idea go for it!

so glad this is coming together for you
so great to hear!
thank you for digging in.

im not sure i know exactly what you mean. we talk about diatonic triad movement in lesson 7 of the course - is that what you mean?

Hey thanks for the reply!

E.g. Jubu Smith who grew up playing in a gospel community. I can hear he uses diminished and triads all the time to create nice interesting harmony flow (like in the first 30 sec of the video). Could you see where he coming from with the perspective of the hypercube?

hmm
depends how you want to see it - its like superimposing triads over a chord. we're on chord 1 for example, and he's playing all these triad shapes over that single chord.

in terms of meta harmony i would just think of it as being on the chord at hand, and all the triads are just creating different tensions against that held chord.

for example if you play a C major triad with an F in the bass, it sounds like an Fmaj9. C major isnt harmonically significant in terms of function. but it makes tensions against F major.

i would think of this example as a green chord with red notes added. not a green chord with an orange chord on top. theres no orange, only green with the red tensions against the green chord.

theres always a root chord which contextualises the whole chord. all the other sounds id think of as coming from the 3 primary colours - even if a triad of another colour could be seen inside the chord.

if ive understood correctly thats how id see it

but that being said, i think blending triads together is super useful.

what do you think?