You’ve managed to come up with a melody. Now you’re looking for just the right harmony, or chords, to go with it. You’re kind of lost for ideas. You seem to be going back to the same old C – Am – F and G and you’re tired of it. You want something fresh. Well, this article is going to give you some different methods for coming up with harmonies to your melodies. I hope you will find these tips helpful.
Let me start off by saying that harmony can have a dramatic effect on the feel of your song. The same melody can sound totally different when you switch from a major to minor key. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that harmony is the most powerful influence on the song itself next to maybe the lyrics. For instrumental music, harmony can literally make or break a song.
So how do we come up with interesting harmonies and avoid the usual C – Am – F and G or C – G and F? Well, there are a few ways to get away from this mundane harmonic trap that we keep finding ourselves falling into.
One way is to pick a different key. A melody will sound different depending on what key it’s played in. Don’t ask me why, it just does. In fact, if you play certain songs in a different key than what you’re used to hearing them in, they just don’t sound right. Again, don’t ask me why. They just don’t. So pick a key like A or B or F sharp. Anything but C. That’ll be a great start right off the bat.
Another thing you can do is go through each chord within the key you’re in. Let’s say you decide to stick with C. You can still come up with some interesting harmonies in the key of C.
What are all the chords in the key of C? Let’s go from the first all the way to the 7th chord.
I chord – C
II chord – D minor
III chord – E minor
IV chord – F
V chord – G
VI chord – A minor
VII chord – B diminished
There you go, the 7 chords in the key of C.
What can we do with them?
If we follow the strict rules, we still have many chord progressions that we can get out of this. Starting with the tonic, the I chord as our first chord, we can go to any of the other six chords in the key of C naturally and it will sound “correct”, for lack of a better term.
So we can go from C to A minor or D minor or E minor or F of G or even B diminished and we’re okay. And from the chord we go to, we can then go to any other chord in the key of C and that will be okay as well.
In doing so, we can come up with any of the following chord progressions.
C – Dm – Em – F
C – Am – Em – G
C – G – F – Em
C – Em – G – Am
And so on and so on. I think there are something like 128 chord progressions that you can get out of those 7 chords. I haven’t actually done the math but it’s a lot of chords.
But let’s say you still want to stay away from just using all the chords that are in the key of C. You want to get a little daring and really think outside the box. This little trick will get you there and it will bring you chord progressions that you probably would have never thought about.
Let’s start with the key of C and the I chord, which is the C chord. That chord is made up of these three notes.
C, E, G.
Okay, another “rule” of harmony is that we can go from any chord to any other chord “naturally” as long as both chords have at least one note in common.
So taking the C chord above, let’s take the C itself. What chords can you think of that have a C in them?
Here are just a few off the top of my head.
F minor, A minor, A flat, C minor, C diminished, C 7, C major 7 and F major.
That’s a lot of chords that we can go to starting off with the C chord in our key of C.
But wait, we have two other notes in our C chord that we can use as launching points. Let’s take the E note. What chords can you think of that have an E in them?
Here are just a few off the top of my head.
E minor, E major, A, A minor, C# minor, F Major 7 and E diminished.
But wait, what about the G note in that C chord? How many chords contain a G in them?
Here are just a few off the top of my head.
G, G minor, E flat, G Major 7, G minor 7, G diminished and A minor 7.
So we can go to any of those chords and more from that single C chord.
But there’s more. See, depending on what chord we go to from the C chord, we can then use the same principle to choose our next chord.
So let’s say we decided to go from C to E flat. We can do that because each chord has a G in in. Well, what chords can we go to from E flat?
To answer that question, we have to look at the notes that make up the E flat chord. They are E flat, G and B flat. So, we can then go to any chord that contains any of those notes. Let’s choose the B flat. What chords have a B flat in them? Off the top of my head…
B flat, B flat minor, G flat, E flat minor, C 7, G minor and so on.
And we can continue this process throughout the entire song. So, we can end up with a most unusual chord progression, in the key of C, that looks something like this.
C – E flat – G minor – D minor – A minor – C
There you have it. Some simple ways to get away from that mundane C – Am – F and G progression that was worn out back in the 50s.
Happy harmony hunting.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim