Colour and change
The third harmony course for people who play. What lies beyond the major field — the minor key and its three fields, borrowed chords, tritone substitution, modulation — and the two families of scale you improvise over all of it with.
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1. Major and minor
- Two ways of being related
The relative shares the signature and changes the centre; the parallel keeps the centre and swaps the material.
- Three scales, one key
The minor field is not a table: three scales overlap, and the choice is made bar by bar.
2. Colour
- Borrowing from the parallel
What happens when a song in major takes a chord from the minor, the four commonest borrowings, and why the flat in the numeral matters.
- The dominant a tritone away
Two dominants share one tritone, and swapping them turns a leaping bass into one that falls by semitone.
3. Change
- Leaving the key for real
The cadence is the test that separates changing key from passing through a chord from outside.
4. Scales to play with
- The scale where nothing is wrong
Five notes with no semitone and no tritone, why nothing clashes, and the price: nothing pulls either.
- One altered degree, and the chord that holds it
A mode is not the major scale started elsewhere: it is a scale with one degree different from major or minor, played over the chord that holds it.