Hey everybody, welcome back.
In this video, I’m going to show you guys how you can use melody to read a nice-sounding chord progression.
So, without further ado, let’s get started.
Alright, the technique that we’re looking at today is really simple.
And it’s the idea of writing a chord progression starting from melody, rather than functional harmony, or a series of rules where we say things like the five chords must go to the one chord, and so on.
So for this technique, all we’re going to do is form a very simple melody on the upper structure of the guitar.
And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to treat each one of these melody notes as the upper structure in a series of chord voicings that we’re going to form beneath each of the melody notes.
In other words, once we’ve created the melody, we’re going to harmonize it by stacking notes beneath it.
So let me demonstrate.
And first things first, we want to pick a key to writing.
And we want to be very aware of the key that we’re playing in so that we have a good sense of the chords that we can use, and also the type of shapes that we can use.
In this case, we’re going to play in C major.
Next step, we want to write the melody.
And it’s best if you can do this on a single string, preferably the G string, the B string, or the high E string.
So here’s an example of a melody that we’re going to work with.
And I just want to mention that I’m not attaching any specific rhythm to this, we’re just going to focus on the notes.
And this one’s on the G string.
And we’ve got the notes, D, G, which has a nice little pentatonic sound.
So next up, we want to harmonize each one of these notes by forming a chord beneath them.
And as a quick side note, I just want to say that you can think of this technique as being like a thickened line technique.
So all we’re doing is thickening this line with chords.
Anyways, when it comes to the chord, you can experiment with any shape, as long as the highest note is your melody note.
So for the first chord, we had C as the melody note, and we can try these shapes, perhaps in a minor seven chord, g seven, sus four, or maybe C major seven, or D, or C over a chord, or even a root position, C chord.
And finally, a D minor seven chord.
So for me, I think I like this D minor seven chord here.
And as a quick side note, if you can treat your melody note as the third or the seventh of whatever chord you’re going to form, that usually is going to sound really good.
So think of that as a quick and easy trick that you can use.
Anyways, let’s try harmonizing the melody using seventh chord shell voicings, and once again, the melody sounded like this.
So seventh chords, once again, sound pretty good to me.
Anyways, before we move on, I want to give you your ears another example of this.
So here are a couple of versions of the melody harmonized by some different chord shapes.
And first up, we’re going to start with some first inversion triads.
Once again, work attracts harmonizing the melody with some more random chord shapes here like or perhaps even all sauce chords.
Okay, before I wrap up, I want to show you guys one more example of this.
But this time, we’re going to put the melody on the B string here.
And we’re going to have it be a variation or development on the first idea.
Alright, if you recall, our first melody was like this.
And for a second melody, we’re gon na do something like this.
Alright, so now we’ve got a six note sequence.
And what we want to do is form a new chord progression, which elaborates on that first set of sounds that we had before.
So for this melody, let’s apply the exact same technique. We’re gon na treat each note in the melody as the opera structure in a series of chord voicings.
So for the first note, in the melody, we have the note E, and we can harmonize it with the shapes, say, D minor nine, or major seven, or C major seven here, so I like this one here.
And for the next note, we had this G here.
And we can just kind of sequence a shape up like that.
The last note is that one here.
So I think I like these three chords, and these will work to harmonize the entire thing.
So we could try this.
So now that we have a new chord progression, we can actually combine it with the original.
So let’s do exactly that.
Starting with the first one annual general.
So for the second chord progression, I’m pretty happy with how this turned out.
It’s just a variation on the first idea, which is a little thicker, and the melody has progressed a little bit.
And if I want to continue reading this idea, adding more chords and adding more melody, then I can just continue to use the techniques that we’ve talked about.
And if I do that, that’ll definitely lead to something that’s more fleshed out and longer.
Okay, yeah.
So that’s all I have to say about this technique today.
I hope you guys give it a go.
I really recommend you guys use it as it’s easy.
And it really leads to some nice and natural chord playing.
Alright, folks, so there you have it.
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Yeah, thank you all for watching and I’ll catch you guys in the next video.
Bye.
