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Lesson 1

Musical

Example

Lesson 1

Secret

Score

Lesson 1

Score/

Music

Adding harmony

Before we go any further with our melody, let's take another look at this simple chord chart:

Here we see the seven basic chords that can be built from the C Major scale. We can see that the C Major chord is the I chord, and the d minor chord is the ii chord. A simple theory tip is that the ii chord often wants to go to the V chord. If you look at our chart, the V chord is a G Major chord. Maybe in bar 3 we should try writing a melody built around this G Major chord. Here's what that would sound like:

The G chord works well but again we have the same problem as before - it sounds too repetitive. Yet the G chord does work well here. Maybe we should keep the G chord in bar 3 and vary the melody just a little bit. Remember, bar 2 was one scale step up from bar 1.

Maybe bar 3 shouldn't be one scale step up from bar 2. We can start on a different note from the G chord. Let's hear what that would sound like:

That does sound better, but it still feels similar to bars 1 and 2. Those bars had one phrase per bar. That means in two bars we have two phrases. Maybe the next phrase should be 2 bars long instead of 1. This will bring some variation to our form. We should also try and change some of the up and down direction of our melody:

That sounds very good now. We've also done something else new in bar 4. Here we have placed two different notes in the left hand instead of repeating the same note twice, as we did in bars 1, 2 and 3:

This actually gives us two different chords per bar, instead of the previous one chord per bar. Beat 1 of bar 4 feels like a C chord, and beat 3 feels like a G chord. (We say it "feels" like that chord because technically you need three notes to make a definitive chord).