The Secret To HARMONIZING A MELODY (Rock Style)
Is there a secret to harmonizing melodies?
It’s super common for musicians to come up with a great melody by itself (seriously, just hum for 5 minutes. Five actual minutes on the clock) ...
... and then get stuck trying to find the right chords to play underneath that melody.
So, what should we do?
One option is to reverse-engineer a chord progression by looking at the notes within the melody. If one piece of a melody has four different notes in it, it would probably work best to try some chords that use a lot of those four notes.
You might not find a chord with every one of those notes in it (and even if you do, sometimes it’s best to use a different chord so that the melody will ‘color’ the chord progression with interesting notes, rather than having the progression be an exact re-statement of the notes in the melody), but you should be able to find a few chords with a couple of notes in common.
These chords are a great starting place.
The problem with this is that if we follow this strategy the whole way we might end up with a chord progression that does not sound cohesive.
We might need to make some compromises and resort to chords that make the progression flow, rather than ones with the highest number of notes in common with the melody.
To learn how to do this, watch the video below and I’ll show you how to create cohesive chord progressions that fit over your melody:
PS In this video we concentrate on harmonization in "rock" style, since there are already countless video on YT for harmonizing in "classical" or "jazz" idiom
Want to know even more about chords and harmony on the guitar? Try out the Complete Chord Mastery guitar course if you want to truly understand everything you need to know about chords on the guitar.
Video Transcription
Tommaso Zillio 0:01
Hello internet, so nice to see you! Let's say you are a rock musician, and you just wrote a nice melody. And you want to put some chords under this melody. And what you find is that there is a, there are a lot of books and tutorials on how to put chords, the sounds like classical music and the melody, and a lot of books on how to put chords and your melody, the sound like jazz.
But there is very, very little on how to choose chords to put under your melody, that sound like rock, you as a rock musician have been left out in the cold because everybody is studying classical theory or jazz theory. And very few people are studying rock theory. Indeed, even the mention of rock theory makes people go like there is no rock theory.
Okay, there is rock theory. Okay. So how do you go about that? How do you find chords, that we sound good in your style and not in classical music and jazz? Again, assuming you are a rock musician, if you're not a rock musician, that's okay. You may have other resources. But if you're a rock musician who can help you? Well, a student of mine asked me how to go about that, how to harmonize how to find the chords, rock chords for melody II wrote, and this is the answer I gave him.
Speaker 1 1:26
I have a melody, how can I build a chord progression out of that melody?
Tommaso Zillio 1:32
Mm hmm. Great, fantastic question, how to harmonize a melody, the first thing to do is to think that the opposite of the chord tones soloing. So let me explain. Chord tone soloing is when you have a chord progression, and you want to write a melody and and I'm gonna use preferentially, not exclusively, the notes of the chords.
So if you are soloing on a C major chord, with C E G, preferentially, you're gonna hit a C and E or a G, when you solo over that chord. You can use any note in any key, okay? You can literally anything, but those are going to be used way more frequently. Okay? And when the chord progression, the chord changes, so you have a chord progression, your set of preferential notes keeps changing, okay, you know, preferential notes, I'm saying right now, it's technically consequences of the chord problem.
Okay? The opposite. If you have, if you have a melody, you have a melody, you'll find chords that preferentially contain that note in the melody. Okay. All right. That's a good first approximation. Okay. There's plenty of songs out there that don't respect that. So, this is not a rule. Okay, this is not that you have to do it. And this is not a way to judge if you're doing a good job or not. Okay, plenty of songs that do the opposite. But most music in most styles, does that.
So it's a good starting point. Making Sense. Yes, fantastic. Now, if your melody is in major or minor key, you can harmonize every single note in that key using only chords one, or and five. Because once you write the notes of the first chord, the notes of the fourth chord and not the fifth chord, you cover the whole scale. You have two choices for the first and the fifth and one choice for everything else. Right? Yes, so that makes it easy, right? Good. You have a melody mind.
Can I borrow melody from an existing song? Yeah. All right.
Tommaso Zillio 4:27
And you're in E flat there. Yeah, the first one is only a flat okay. We want to say any flat Yeah, fantastic. Go any chord minor give us forget that. I don't know this one. I haven't the faintest and then I'm doing my harmonization here.
So it is Doesn't that sound like the song is not meant as disrespectful and it's not that you cannot transcribe it. I never heard the song. Okay. What I will do personally in this situation like me, I'm having those three notes. And those to me sound the one two and three have a minor key. And the first thing they have was put in, in a rock or metal context on text will be. I'm harmonizing the first repetition with the first chord. The second repetition with a six chord.
Okay, so in this case, it would technically be C flat. It's like a B. Makes sense? Yeah. I mean, that doesn't sound like the song was different or and then he was saying goes down is going down to start. Yeah, so he's hitting the seventh No, the flat seventh note of the, of the key which I will harmonize as the flat seven. flat seven chord. Yeah. Okay, which in this case is D flat. Okay, now, what am I doing? I'm doing two things. One, I am trying to match the notes in the melody with the notes in the chord. Two, I picked up the style of the song.
Okay, which you can tell from the melody, okay. And then trying to use a typical chord progression for that style. It's very typical for most metal to have a chord progression, like, first chord. First, chord, the key minor six plus six, plus seven, to one or any combination thereof. Or, okay, you're practically right, all the Iron Maiden discography using these three chords? Which again, I mean, it's a compliment to Iron Maiden because it takes a lot of creativity, do nearly all the songs in discography with the same three chords and do occasionally the fourth.
Okay. Makes sense? Yeah. So I'm trying to match this thing. If you were telling me this, this was a jazz song, or you plug it in. Okay. It wasn't been a different chord progression. Okay, I will do it in a different way. You need I wouldn't have think this is a minor chord, I wouldn't think these something like that I would have started with a major chord with a sharp 11 with a is the three notes with a different note that these will sound like a major chord with a sharp 11, meaning I would have used in this case, the C flat note immediately.
The first note is the third major third of the chord. And any of it will have gone down from there and not diatonically or something like that to create a more typical chord progression for jazz. All right, okay, so I'm trying to match those two things. So how do you do it one, you get a learn a few chord progression typical of the style you like, I mean, you already do if you learn a few songs, so you're already doing that it's really there's not nothing special, learn a few songs, you're gonna find patterns. Remember, there's think of them not as I don't know, a minor f g.
But as the first chord in a minor key, the five C's could be minor keys that it doesn't matter in what key you are, you can spot out the patterns in all the keys to match the northern melody to the to the note of the chord and see if you take one of those typical chord progression and your melody, is there any match not only on the single chord from the whole progression, okay? It takes a bit of knowledge then, and a bit of trial and error, but that's how you do it.
All right, okay. Now, occasionally, you're gonna find that you take a typical chord progression of the style, like, you have a melody, there is really not a match in theory, but when you play it, it still sounds okay. Even if a note becomes dissonant. It still sounds okay. That's good, too. Okay, it hasn't done it yet. We have to satisfy the theory. And sometimes the notes can temporarily be dissonances over a chord and they become constants in the next chord or stuff like that.
And then sometimes the match doesn't seem to make sense at first, but it makes sense musically. Okay, to sometimes just pick a typical chord progressions limit under the melody and see if it works. You'd be surprised how many time it works. It's crazy. All right, okay. Yep, that's pretty much how you do it. Okay. There is always more than one way to do it. Always, always, always. If none of these work, then go back to the first thing I was saying.
You tried to harmonize using one, four and five only. In an E flat minor, that's the first. As I said that you have a choice on the first note because again, ask me the note knowing that I have Okay, let's work through all Yeah. Because I'm always lending on these first note of the key. And I have two choices. I pick first one and then another. Right. Okay. Of course, you can also harmonize it literally every single note. It depends on many chords you want in your progression.
Speaker 1 10:23
Yeah, I personally like to try to stick with like the target notes. Yeah. Notes, because that's what's being emphasized on the emotion side.
Tommaso Zillio 10:31
Yes, you can totally do that. So it depends on many chords you want sometimes you want a chord per note. So the chords are changing really fast, you just keep changing. But most often you decide which one are the important notes in your melody and which ones you want to support and you ignore everything else, like you were saying. Okay, so those are the guidelines. All right, the rest is experiences session.
Speaker 1 10:50
All right. Okay. Yeah. On a side note, then then the melody note, doesn't matter if it's like a root, the third, the fifth of the chord.
Tommaso Zillio 11:01
Could be any, okay. It could be it could even be the seventh. Occasionally. It's even a dissonance. That's sort of what I was saying. You'll go occasionally. See if the chord progression is very strong and the melody strong, even if they don't go perfectly together. It may still work. That's the idea. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you.