Picardy 3rd – You’ve Heard It In “Greensleeves” & Other Songs

Good morning! This is Duane, and today we’re going to begin a new series called “Good Stuff You Really Ought to Know About Music”, and it’ll just be a series of very short videos, each video probably 2-3 minutes long, but it’ll cover lots of different stuff about music theory, stuff you really ought to know about music and piano playing. The first subject we’re going to take up is called the Picardy 3rd. No doubt you’ve heard it, but you may not have known what the name was. Let me play “Greensleeves” quickly here as an example. By the way I just used four chords there. D Minor, C, B Flat, A 7th and D Minor. I play the whole thing with just those four chords. The bridge has a few more. There’s an F, C, B Flat, A 7th, F, B Flat, A 7th, and then the final chord could be - you would expect it to be D Minor, but what happens, it usually ends in D Major. You’ve heard that haven’t you?

That’s called a Picardy Third when the song you’ve been playing in a Minor key or a modal key ends on a major chord, that’s called a Picardy Third. A very minor thing, but it’s good to know, and all pianists have free will, so if they play a song in minor they can end it in a major chord if they want to. Some songs like Greensleeves, you’re just going to build in that way. That’s all you need to know about the Picardy Third and we’ll see you tomorrow with another “Good Stuff You Really Ought to Know”. See you then. Bye bye for now.

Here is a Wikipedia article about the Picardy Third: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picardy_third

Here is the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgzCtNu391I&feature=youtu.be

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