First, we need to understand the Piano Roll Editor - where it comes from, and how it works.

Our first interval: The Octave.

Octaves, just by themselves, can be quite interesting. Lets play around with them a little bit here.

Lets talk a little bit about how the black keys work, and what we call them.

We use "Middle C" as our home base when working with notes. In this video we will talk about how to find it.

So far so good! We are on our way to understanding Music Theory. A little review before we move on.

Our next interval is the Perfect Fifth - slightly harder to use than the octave, but still pretty safe.

In this video we look at what it means to be "in key".

In order to find a key, all you need to do is remember this pattern!

A few examples of how fifths can work in context.

Music Theory is made up of a bunch of patterns - some of them are "moveable" - which can save you time when learning them!

The Third could be said to be our most important interval. It has 2 different types: Major and Minor.

Triads are the most basic (and most used in electronic music) type of chords. This is how to find them, and how to make them.

Music is made up of chord progressions: Sequences of chords that work together.

"Diatonic" is a fancy word that means "in the key." But it is an important concept to know when putting together chord progressions.

Another pattern to remember - this one tells us the quality (major or minor) of all the chords in a key.

In traditional music theory, we use roman numerals to label chords. We don't care about traditional analysis, but this technique is useful to us for a few reasons.

In this video, we will pick apart a track and see if we can find the chords, the key, and the chord quality for a section of it.

If you only remember one thing from this class, remember this lesson. This is the trick that will make your music sound professional.

When we build triads, we use the root, the third, and the fifth. With seventh chords, we go one more step.

We can build our diatonic chord progression sequence using 7th chords, and see how the three types of seventh chords work together.

One of my favorite examples of a major 7th chord, from a classic tune.

Dominant 7th chords (the ones we just call "7th" chords) have a very important function. In this lessons I'll show you how that works.

The Blues is a genre of music entirely built around the 7th chord. Want your track to sound a little bluesy? Use 7th chords.

The fourth isn't used to build triads normally, but you've seen it before when we looked at inversions.

The second can be major or minor, and has an "evil twin" in the 7th.

We've seen the sixth before as well - a lot! Its inversion is a third.

Now that we know how to find the key and the chords, lets dive in to another song and see if we can make sense of it.

Thats it! Thanks for hanging out - I have a few quick parting words to send you off with!

I recently made some cool (animated!) theory videos for another project that you might enjoy. Here they are!

Question 1: This might be a dumb question, but I'm confused with how to make the F# and C# chords in the D major scale for the homework. For F#, I have the A for the third, and C# for the fifth, because I still counted the whole (white on the keyboard) notes only.

Question 2: Can the root note be inverted?

Question 3: Now that i know what a key is,I've heard that few electronic songs have multiple keys (Daftpunk) in different parts of a song ie.chorus,bridge. What impact does it make ? because some people refer to it as the energy of the song....

Question 4: I'm interested in taking your course. I was wondering if you knew there were any limitations for the trial version of Ableton? For example, can I export audio tracks or save projects?

A few people have asked me about what software is around for working with notes. This is the answer.

There is so much more to learn!