The Jacob Collier Chromatic Harmony Shift Trick

Tommaso Zillio

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Jacob Collier is one of the most divisive contemporary musicians.

Some people simply can not stand him. You’d be surprised by the hilarious hate comments I receive when I mention Jacob on this channel.

Others think that Jacob is our new music messiah. They may have a point too - look at his initials… (JC) (*)

(*) Yes, I totally stole this joke from Monty Python. Of course they were talking about John Cleese ;-)

Personally I think Jacob is an interesting musician with interesting ideas that are often misunderstood. Jacob’s ideas are often way simpler than they seem at first.

for instance, every time that Jacob does something strange (and let’s face it, this is most of the time), some self-proclaimed ‘expert’ will go: “OMG, nEgAtIvE hArMoNy!1!!”

But in reality, Jacob Collier uses very little Negative Harmony in his music - even if he helped popularize it.

And while I DO like Negative Harmony myself (I have a whole video series about it)… it’s just not the “Collier” thing to do.

So what would Jacob do?

Well, Jacob would do something completely different, way simpler, and very effective…

..and if you watch this video, in 5 minutes from now you will be able to do it too. This idea is so simple that I can’t believe nobody talked about it before.

Goes without saying that this is definitely NOT the only thing that Jacob is doing in his songs… after all it’s impossible to capture an artist with only ONE trick.

So here’s another trick that Jacob is using and will help you “Collierify” your songs:

And since I know some will be insisting for this… here’s also an introduction to Negative Harmony…

… because it’s still a cool theory that gives great ideas

If you want to be able to do all this on your guitar seamlessly and become an harmonic powerhouse without learning thousands of chord patterns or doing complex math on the fretboard… then I recommend the Complete Chord Mastery guitar course