What You Can Do With Negative Harmony As A Composer [Music Theory]

Tommaso Zillio

FREE Music Theory Map

Download the FREE Map of Music Theory that will tell you what is the next topic you need to study

By entering my email address I give Tommaso Zillio permission to email me almost-daily practical and funny music theory tips for guitar. That is alright by me because I am an adult and I know how to click on an 'unsubscribe' link if I really really don't like Tommaso's emails.

Captcha code:

By submitting your info, you agree to send it to Guitar Mastery Solutions, Inc. who will process and use it according to their privacy policy.

Negative Harmony: rarely a theory of music has been so controversial and so talked about in recent times.

If you've been following this website for a while, you know that Negative Harmony is this interesting theory that has been popularized by a few modern musicians like Jacob Collier.

You also probably know that I have several videos explaining Negative Harmony and what you can do with it.

Well, here's one more on Negative Harmony... but this video is better than the past videos, if I can say so myself.

In this video not only we see together what you can do with Negative Harmony, but we also see exactly what is new and original about Negative Harmony and what is not new and original about it.

If you are interested in Negative Harmony in any way - you want to understand it, you want to use it in your own songs, you are simply curious - then you can watch the video here.

And since in the video above I mention practical examples, here are a couple more videos on it.

In this video I take a simple melody + chords and I apply negative harmony to parts of it. I also apply the borrowing chord technique to it, so you can see the exact difference between them:

And in this other video I show you how the composer Rachmaninov took a theme from Paganini (openly) and made a completely new piece of music with it... using negative melody:

There is of course much more to know on the art of writing great music - an the very first step to it is to learn how chords work and how you can write great chord progressions.

If you are a guitar player and you want to get started on this path, then check out the Complete Chord Mastery guitar course that teaches you everything you need to know about chords and harmony directly on the fretboard - no complex piano examples that you can't translate on the guitar here.

All the theory in Complete Chord Mastery is done on the fretboard, with played examples, and practical indications on how to make your rhythm parts sound great live and in studio. Check it out now!