How to Vary the Harmony for Repeated Notes - Music Theory
TLDRThe video provides tips for harmonizing a repeated melody note, which can seem monotonous. It first explains the three diatonic chords that contain that note - as the root, third, or fifth. It then demonstrates embellishing techniques to keep interest despite the repetition, like chromatic neighbor tones, suspensions, secondary dominants, and extended chords. The goal is to distract from the repetitive melody by adding harmonic color and movement underneath it.
Takeaways
- 😀 Repeated melody notes can make harmonizing tricky, but there are solutions
- 👍 Use the 3 diatonic chords that fit the repeating note (I, IV, VI)
- 💡 Alter chords with extensions, suspensions & chromaticism for interest
- 🎵 Keep the bassline moving with passing tones to distract from repetitions
- 🎹 Use chord inversions to revisit chords without being too repetitive
- 😊 Borrow chords from the parallel minor key for color
- 🔑 Think of the repeating note as part of a secondary dominant for modulation
- 🎼 Add interest with chromatic neighbor tones & voice leading
- ✨ Extend chords to 9ths & 11ths for a juicy final cadence if you're feeling brave
- 🤓 It's unlikely you'll need to harmonize 8 repeated notes, but same ideas apply for 2-3 notes
Q & A
What is a key challenge many people have with harmonizing melodies?
-When melody notes repeat, people often struggle with how to harmonize them without just repeating the same chord. It can make the harmony feel 'stuck'.
What are three diatonic chords that can harmonize a repeated melody note?
-The diatonic chords that contain that melody note - for example if the melody note was C, the chords would be C major (chord I), A minor (chord VI) and F major (chord IV) in the key of C major.
How can chromatic notes like passing tones help harmonize repeated melody notes?
-Adding chromatic passing tones in the bassline or inner voices keeps the harmony moving and distracts from the melodic repetition, adding harmonic interest.
What options are there for harmonizing a longer repeated melody note?
-You can revisit the chord in an inversion, use chromatic neighbor tones, hint at a new chord with chromatic notes, or add embellishments like suspensions to bring more harmonic color.
What is an example of a secondary dominant used in the example?
-The Ebmaj7 chord moving to Abmin uses a D-flat to temporarily tonicize Ab as a secondary dominant.
What type of suspension is used and how does it work?
-A 9-8 suspension is used, where the suspended B-flat delays resolving down a step to the A-flat, providing harmonic tension before resolving.
What chord extensions are used in the final cadence V-I and why?
-The V11 chord builds tension through added extensions before resolving to the I chord. The flat 9 adds extra chromatic color too.
Why use so much chromaticism and chord extensions?
-It adds harmonic interest and color to distract from the melodic repetition, keeping the listener engaged.
What are some simpler options for harmonizing repeats?
-Use just the three diatonic chords, chromatic passing tones, or borrow chords from the parallel minor key. Only use more advanced harmonies if you want to.
What is the main takeaway or lesson on harmonizing repeats?
-There are multiple harmonic options for adding interest under a repeated melody note, from simple diatonic chords up to advanced chromaticism and extensions.
Outlines
🎶 Exploring Chord Variations for Repeated Melody Notes
Gareth Green addresses a common musical challenge: harmonizing repeated melody notes without becoming monotonous. He introduces the concept of utilizing diatonic chords—chords within the key—to add variety. Using the note C as an example, he explains how it can serve as the root, third, or fifth of different chords in the key of C major, offering three distinct harmonic options (I, VI, IV). He extends the idea to include the note acting as a seventh in a chord, opening up further possibilities before considering chromatic chords for additional color. Gareth aims to demonstrate these concepts through a melody comprised of repeated E-flats, showing how to maintain harmonic interest and movement.
🎹 Advanced Harmonic Techniques for Repetition
In this section, Gareth delves deeper into sophisticated harmonic techniques to handle repeated notes, specifically focusing on a melody with repeated E-flats. He discusses the use of diatonic chords in E-flat major (I, VI, IV) and introduces inversions to diversify the harmony further. Gareth also explains how adding chromatic lower neighbor tones or auxiliary notes can create intriguing harmonies that distract from the repetition. Additionally, he illustrates the concept of a secondary dominant and its role in transitioning between keys, adding further color and complexity to the harmony. This approach shows how varied harmonic techniques can effectively enhance repeated melody notes.
🔍 Incorporating Chromaticism and Suspensions
Gareth continues to explore harmonic creativity by introducing chromaticism and suspensions to enrich the musical texture. He uses a D-flat to transition into a dominant seventh chord, which leads to an A-flat major or minor chord, showcasing secondary dominants and the use of borrowed chords from parallel keys. A 9-8 suspension adds another layer of interest, emphasizing dissonance resolution and further diverting attention from the repeated E-flats. This approach exemplifies how chromatic elements and suspensions can add depth and complexity to harmonization, making repeated notes more engaging.
🎉 Creative Cadences and Extended Chords
In the final paragraph, Gareth explores the use of creative cadences and extended chords to conclude the harmonization of repeated notes. He suggests a V11 to I cadence, utilizing a flattened ninth for added spice. This technique demonstrates how extending chords and incorporating chromatic alterations can produce a rich, colorful harmonic progression. Gareth emphasizes that while not all techniques must be used simultaneously, they provide a toolbox for composers to keep music interesting, even with repeated notes. The video concludes with an invitation to further explore musical concepts through the Music Matters community.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Harmony
💡Chromatic
💡Cadence
💡Inversion
💡Suspension
💡Passing Tone
💡Parallel Key
💡Secondary Dominant
💡Neighbour Tone
💡Embellishment
Highlights
Proposed a new deep learning model called Transformer that achieved state-of-the-art results in neural machine translation.
Introduced the concept of attention in neural networks, allowing models to focus on relevant parts of the input.
Showed how Transformers can be pre-trained on large unlabeled datasets and then fine-tuned for downstream tasks, enabling transfer learning.
Demonstrated that Transformers are more parallelizable and require significantly less time to train compared to recurrent neural networks.
Highlighted the ability of Transformers to capture long-range dependencies in sequences better than previous models.
Discussed how self-attention provides Transformers with a global receptive field on the input sequence.
Explained the multi-headed self-attention mechanism which allows modeling different types of interactions between inputs.
Introduced positional encodings to enable Transformers to incorporate positional information of tokens.
Achieved new state-of-the-art results on translation, question answering, and other NLP tasks, showing the versatility of Transformers.
Sparked significant interest in attention and Transformers, which have become ubiquitous in NLP and other domains.
Enabled development of large pre-trained language models like BERT and GPT-3 that have driven progress in NLP.
Inspired application and adaptation of Transformers to computer vision, speech, and other modalities beyond NLP.
Provided a simple yet powerful general-purpose model architecture suitable for many sequence modeling tasks.
Demonstrated the effectiveness of attention for learning dependencies, alignment, and representing variable-length sequences.
Laid the foundation for the widespread adoption of attention and Transformers that catalyzed the deep learning revolution in NLP.
Transcripts
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