Watch me compose a functional chord progression.
I took the music out that was around 9 minutes in.
Major chart
Minor chart
Article on Diatonic Harmony https://www.artofcomposing.com/08-diatonic-harmony
Listen to the piece from the video, Pancho Villas Rides:
Do you always have to go back to tonic Chord from V. What about leaving unresolved and returning to Tonic from a IV or a II. Would that not be acceptable practice?
Both of those would be perfectly acceptable. You just have to understand the context, and how the harmonic choices effect the tension and release in the music.
Hi Jon 🙂
Would dearly appreciate a piece of advice from you regarding music composition. My main goal is to write pop music, do I need to do any ear training? Secondly, it is music composition/songwriting something innate or can be learned? Thank you, blessings x x
Ear training is always helpful. It should be integrated into everything you do, by singing, playing, and transcribing by ear. You don’t have to transcribe entire pieces, even just a single bar can allow you to grow.
Composition can be learned. I recommend you check out the free course https://courses.artofcomposing.com/courses/the-vocabulary-of-composition
And if we had to adjust them to a mode, how would we need to go about it?
This is really just for typically functional classical sounding harmony. Modes work different. I would suggest getting very comfortable moving to any chord within a mode freely at the piano and experiment with the sounds. Modal counterpoint is another beast entirely.
/Love the course but utterly lost with two things
1) What are so many of yoru examples 7 instead of 8 measures…eg sentence period
2)Why are yoru chord charts 7 measures instead of 8
3) Most importantly, i love the small ternary form example,, but the chords are co pletey undeicpherable eg what is a vii/iii???? Can you just give me a clear demosntration of exaclty what chords happen at each point
The number of measures and number of chords don’t have to match exactly. You could have one chord through the entire 8 measures if you’d like.
The notation you are referring to is called Roman Numeral analysis. You can find out more here: https://www.artofcomposing.com/08-diatonic-harmony
Hey! Could you draw up this sort of chart for Lydian or other modal chord harmonizations?
Hi Nathan,
Modes work in a slightly different way than functional harmony, so it wouldn’t exactly work the same.
So these charts cannot be used with different modes?
These charts cover functional harmony for major and harmonic minor scales. The chords don’t really work the same in other modes. You may have some interesting results trying though.