Chord Progression Secret: MELODY FIRST

hey everybody welcome back in this video I'm going to show you guys how you can use melody to write a nice sounding chord progression so without further ado let's get started alright the technique that we're looking at today is really simple and it's the idea of writing a chord progression starting from melody rather than functional harmony or a series of rules where we say things like the 5 chord must go to the 1 chord and so on so for this technique all we're going to do is form a very simple melody on the upper structure of the guitar and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna treat each one of these melody notes as the upper structure in a series of chord voicings that we're gonna form beneath each of the melody notes in other words once we've created the melody we're gonna harmonize it by stacking notes beneath it so let me demonstrate and first things first we want to pick a key to write in and we want to be very aware of the key that we're playing in so that we have a good sense of the chords that we can use and also the type of shapes that we can use in this case we're gonna play in C major next up we want to write the melody and it's best if you can do this on a single string preferably the g string the B string or the high E string so here's an example of a melody that we're gonna work with and I just want to mention that I'm not attaching any specific rhythm to this we're just gonna focus on the notes and this one's on the g string and we've got the notes C D G an e which has a nice little pentatonic sound so next up we want to harmonize each one of these notes by forming a chord beneath them and as a quick side note I just want to say that you can think of this technique too as being like a thickened line technique so all we're doing is thickening this line with chords anyways when it comes to the chord you can experiment with any shape as long as the highest note is your melody note so for the first chord we had C as the melody note and we can try these shapes perhaps in a minor 7 chord g 7sus4 maybe C major 7 or E or C / e chord we've in a root position C chord and finally at D minor seventh chord so for me I think I like this D minor seven chord here and as a quick side note if you can treat your melody note as the 3rd or the 7th of whatever chord you're gonna form that usually is gonna sound really good so I think of that as a quick and easy trick that you can use anyways let's try harmonizing the melody using 7th chord shell voicings and once again the melody sounded like this so with seventh chords once again it sounds pretty good to me anyways before we move on I want to give you ears another example of this so here a couple of versions of the melody harmonized by some different chord shapes and first up we're going to start with some first inversion triads once again where I could try harmonizing the melody with some more random chord shapes here like or perhaps even all sauce cards okay before I wrap up I want to show you guys one more example of this but this time we're gonna put the melody on the B string here and we're gonna have it be a variation or development on the first idea all right if you recall our first melody was like this and for a second melody we're gonna do something like this alright so now we've got a sixth note sequence and what we want to do is form a new chord progression which elaborates on that first set of sounds that we had before so for this melody let's apply the exact same technique we're going to treat each note in the melody is the upper structure in a series of chord voicings so for the first note in the melody we have the note e and we can harmonize it with these shapes say D minor 9 or major seven North C major seven here so I like this one here and for the next note we had this G here and we can just kind of sequence a shape up like that the last note did that one here so I think I like these three chords and these will work to harmonize the entire thing so we could try this [Music] so now that we have a new chord progression we can actually combine it with the original so let's do exactly that starting with the first any one [Music] individual [Music] so for the second chord progression I'm pretty happy with how this turned out it's just a variation on the first idea which is a little thicker and the melody has progressed it a little bit and if I want to continue writing this idea adding more chords and adding more melody then I can just continue to use the techniques that we've talked about today and if I do that that'll definitely lead to something that's more fleshed out and longer okay yeah so that's all I have to say on this technique today I hope you guys give it a go I really recommend you guys use it as it's easy and it really leads to some nice and natural chord playing alright folks so there you have it if you like this video then please make sure to like share and subscribe as I put out a new video every single week and if you want to support the channel then please consider checking out my patreon page where for as little as $1 month you guys all have access to some bonus content like at our tabs lesson notes chord diagrams and other little goodies like that and honestly the patreon page really helps me out as it allows me to get some extra quipment to make these videos better and finally sot guitar lessons through skype there's a link to my email address in the description below yeah thank you all for watching and I'll catch you guys in the next video [Music]

Channel: Trevor Wong

Views: 233,903

Rating: 4.9593725 out of 5

Keywords: midwest emo, math rock, guitar chords, music theory, guitar lesson, emo music, post rock, educational, music education, how to, jazz guitar, jazz theory, open chords, twinkly chords, emo revival, chord progressions, songwriting tips, songwriting, composition, neo soul guitar, guitar, electric guitar, indie rock, shoegaze, ambient music, american football, twinkle, music composition, composition lesson, rock guitar, shred guitar, indie, punk rock, neo soul, jazz chords

Id: NaMmHqJI6UI

Length: 5min 57sec (357 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

This is probably one of my favorite ideas you've shared as the concept is a bit grander in that it's a frame to connect different pieces of music.

Learning the concept is way more functional than just the basic structures. Kind of like enclosure notes. They teach you to pull from outside the simple ideas you've learned and connect them in new ways.

[u/Mursing101]

I understand the concept of building a chord over the melody, but how do you build all your different chords? Do you always use your melody note as the root note in the chord and then just experiment with the different chords that can be made?

The concept of building chords is still pretty foreign to me at this point. I'm looking for a simple explanation on how to build chords