We're going to add another to our arsenal of shadow chords, the ii, and look at how it can be used to create a kind of magnetic tunnel back home.

Composition by subtraction is an idea explored by Brian Eno: sculpt your song out of a mass of tracks, eliminating one track at a time.

In today’s exercise, we’re going to get courageous and explore a whole new environment: the shadowy, mysterious world of the vi (or relative minor) chord.

We can think of the I, IV, and V together as our immediate neighborhood. But changing to IV can feel like starting out on a longer journey.

The most common way to return home musically is to use chords that pull toward the I. And the chord with the strongest magnetic pull home is the V (or dominant) chord.

Let's look at a technique for discovering rhythmic and melodic counterpoint that you might never have written otherwise: invisible layering.

We’re going to start with the simplest possible chord progression possible: a single repeating chord. This will clearly establish a harmonic home.