From the course: Music Theory for Songwriters: Harmony

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Building different harmonies from a single melody

Building different harmonies from a single melody

From the course: Music Theory for Songwriters: Harmony

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Building different harmonies from a single melody

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- There are many ways to write a song. Sometimes you might come up with a chord progression and write a melody to it. Other times you might have a melody idea, or a bass line, and need to write the harmony to support it. Or you might even have a lyric written that you just start singing. There is no one set method. In this course, we focused on understanding the chords and harmony that create the structure for a song and provide the foundation for melodies. However, understanding is not enough. Music theory isn't useful to us as songwriters unless we can find ways to integrate it into our songs. So let's look at all the aspects of music theory I've shown you up to this point to build chord progressions based on a melody. While most melodies clearly outline a scale or mode when we examine them horizontally across time. If we look at them vertically, we are able to experiment with different chords beneath them at certain points. This allows us to pull the harmony of a song in and out of…

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