Hi, I'm Pedro and today's episode is about creating
chromatic harmony in your music. So this is a whole world in
itself, and used with taste, it can take your music to all sorts
of places, especially if you are the kind of composer that seeks
to introduce novelty and surprise in the music that you
make. But because it's such a big
subject to cover, I'll just give you a taster for things you can
start using and experimenting with right away.
We'll be looking at some ways to harmonize chromatic melody lines
and also how you can create chromatic harmony using borrowed
chords, secondary dominance, and voice leading.
Ready Very briefly, chromatic harmony occurs when the used
chords or melody in a given passage contain notes that do
not belong to the tonality we are working with.
And that's it. If you are working in the key of
C major and if an F# sneaks in, you are now creating a passage
with chromatic harmony or melody.
And as mentioned, we'll be looking at 2 scenarios that
you're likely to find. The 1st is when you already have
a chromatic line that you want to harmonize, and the other one
is when you may or may not have a melody beforehand to be
harmonized. So scenario one.
In this next examples I included pedal notes placed at the top
and the bottom, the F# and the B respectively, and of course a
chromatic descending line from B to F in the middle register.
This is the material we are working with before we start the
harmonization process. I explored 2 ideas to harmonize
this setup. The first one was to use two
chords that when played alternately, would cover that
note from the descending chromatic line.
In this case I chose the B minor 7 and the E 9 sharp 11.
The last chord you hear is an E minor which could be the
tonality I would be going for in the following section.
So to prepare the change, I tonicized it with AB altered
chord, and the second option I explored with this setup was to
simply double the descending chromatic line in major thirds.
And since I'm doing parallel motion, I decided to experiment
with adding an extra minor third above the descending line to
thicken the harmony. All in all, it's just harmonic
planning using a major chord all the way down while using the
same pedal note on the bass to keep the harmonic color grounded
to that B. Now let's explore another way to
create chromatic harmonies by mixing 2 key centers.
The idea is that when these two key centers are put together,
they can include the chromatic descending line from B to F.
In this case, I use D&E flat major keys, and I must say that
I went over the top as when you put the notes of both scales
together, including the common tones, of course you'll get the
full chromatic scale. As for the harmonization
process, I chose to have a chord every two beats to follow the
descending chromatic line. I picked chords either from the
major or E flat major, but I did something else as well.
Because we basically mash the 2 scales together, we now can
create chord structures with notes from both keys while using
their respective available chords as reference.
Let's say I have AD major chord. I can change it to AD minor by
replacing the F# with the natural F from E flat major, or
the same D major chord with an A flat, which would be like AD
major with an added sharp 11. This way you can have chords
that don't necessarily exist in either of the keys, but can be
very handy for the harmonization process.
This type of interaction is also interesting for polytunnel
contexts, but I'll leave that to another time.
And with that said, let me show you what I did to harmonize the
same descending chromatic line. I ditched the pedal notes and
replaced it with a melody instead.
The only thing that I should add is that the G flat 9 chord
before the E minor 9 is actually the result of harmonic planning
from the E flat 9. The same chord basically moved a
minor third up. It's just to say that this is
not a chord that stems from the result of mixing the chords of
two keys, although it could since I have the chromatic scale
at my disposal. And of course, there are other
tools that you could use to harmonize this type of musical
contexts. As I mentioned in the beginning
of the video, this is a big subject and we are just touching
the surface here. But very briefly, here are three
other ways that are arguably more common to harmonize a
chromatic line using descending 5th sequence with dominant
chords, alternating between major and diminished chords, or
with chromatic medians. All right, now let's proceed
with the second scenario where we have a melody or not and
create chromatic harmony in this setup.
That is, in the key of E minor, I created a melody already
including some chromaticism, and then I harmonized it by choosing
target chords for every two bars and thus leaving space to
tonicize these chords on a second pass using secondary
dominance and voice leading to introduce even more chromaticism
in the key and generate more harmonic movement.
And remember, even if you don't have a melody, you can follow
the exact same process. Now regarding the target chords
themselves, I chose them taking in consideration the notes of
the melody of course. But I must say that in this
first harmonization pass, I used a couple of borrowed chords from
East melodic minor and from D major to better accommodate the
tone for the chromatic passages in the melody.
So the first chord I chose was the E minor 9, which you can
also look at it as being the 6th degree of the G major key.
The second one was C major 9, the 4th degree of the same key.
And the next two other chords I picked were the C# hop
diminished with the natural 9, the 6th degree of E minor
melodic, and the B minor seven add 11, also the 6th degree, but
from the key of D major. Here's what I have so far.
Now that I have a general harmonic direction, I started to
workout which other chords I could use in between the target
chords. As I mentioned, I primarily used
voice leading to help me connect chords through chromatic
movement and also secondary dominance and other dominance
substitutions to guide the tonicization process.
In case you don't remember, the trick to ensure good voice
leading is to use common tones between chords as possible and
try to reduce the chord voices movement to half or whole step.
So basically what you do is to play with this aspect and use
these small gestures to add a bit of harmonic movement or
create little chord melodies if you prefer to look at it that
way, which will help you to prepare for and create smoother
passages from 1 chord to the other.
So in between E minor 9 and C major nine, the first two target
chords I use the G# half diminished to lead me to G7 at
13, a secondary dominant, which I then altered to AG9 flat 13
and resolved to the target chord C major 9.
Again. Remember that voice leading
justifies many of the chords that are being created
throughout this example. After the C major nine, I
proceeded with the F7 sharp 11, which I momentarily altered to
an F9 at 13 and back to create some harmonic movement right
before using the B7 altered to target the C# half diminished
the next target chord. Functionally, although it
approaches its target chord from a step down, this is not a
typical backdoor dominant which would normally resolve to a
major chord. So again, the usage of this
chord is only justifiable due to the voice leading to the next
chord. After this I chose the F#
altered that succeeds chromatically from the C# half
diminished and then its chord voices settle on AF sharp 7,
sharp five with a neon bass, a secondary dominant that resolves
to the target chord B minor 7. What happens next is the result
of adding a chromatic melodic line above the chord structures.
Meanwhile, I kept the pedal point on B in the base,
sustaining the harmonic tension as it approaches its resolution.
So the harmonization process revolved around choosing as much
as possible to have chord tones moving chromatically to the next
chord tone and resolved to the target chord In a similar
manner. The produced chords after the B
minor 7 and over the B pedal notes are the F# minor 6C7 and
F# diminished 7. The target chord was the G major
9. And for effect, here is the full
example, this time with the melody included.
You could definitely develop this into another section as the
G major 9 chord suggests, but my challenge to you is that you
pick it up from here and maybe try it yourself using these
ideas. The tools are here.
Now it's your turn to explore and make them your own.
And what I really hope is that you come out inspired by this
episode and go make new music. Incidentally, and since I used a
similar approach there regarding target chords, the previous
episode is what you want to hear next.
It deals with using common chord progressions as target chords or
guideposts if this approach sounded foreign to you during
this episode. And now I would like to take a
moment to share some good news. Feedspot has made a list
featuring the top 20 music theory and music composition
podcasts, and I'm very proud to announce that the Beyond Music
Theory podcast is in it. I would like to thank Feedspot
for shedding a light on music theory blogs and podcasts and in
helping to divulge the work of the many talented educators out
there. And last but not least, my big
heartfelt thank you for being part of my audience.
All right, so we reached the end of the episodes.
And if you want to learn more about harmonizing melodies or
creating chord progressions, check out the Beyond Music
Theory ebook or the online courses Creating Unique Chord
Progressions and Mastering the Art of Harmonizing Melodies.
All the links will be in the description below.
As always, don't forget to like and subscribe for more episodes
like this. Thanks for watching and until
next time.