The best way to do this is to establish a melody around a home base note (refer to last week’s article on melody) and create a harmony that compliments the melody without interfering. As a general rule, a melody should be able to stand on its own, and a harmony should not. This is critical because you do not want to confuse the listener to the point where they do not know which is the melody and which is the harmony. There is a MAJOR difference between a melody-harmony combination and a duet… a harmony helps to accentuate the melody and is always subservient in nature. Whenever you approach a harmony, you must make sure your goal is to support the melody. Now that we have discovered how to choose the right notes for our harmony, lets take a look how to support our melody without overpowering it. Of course this is not a rule that is set in stone by any means, but merely one simple way to ensure the harmony will not conflict with the melody. Here we can see whenever we hit a transitional note, we can use a note within a 3 rd of that note in order to create a harmony that works well with the melody without butting up against it. For this melody, the harmony would look like this: With a melody of C E G F E F C, you’ll notice we have added the 4 th note of the scale, F, and we can play it safe by staying a 3 rd below the note in the melody by using the 2 nd note, D. Lets take a look at another melody, and this time we’ll make it slightly more complex. What do we do when the melody is more complex and employs the use of the strongest notes as well as the transitional notes in between? A general rule of thumb that will keep you safe is to stay within a 3 rd of the note in the melody. This way, we are using parallel motion to mimic the melody with our harmony, and ensuring the two will work well with each other. For this melody we could create a harmony that simply stays one note behind in the sequence. Because of this, we know we will be safe pairing any of these notes together with the melody without having to worry about conflict between the two. For example, if our melody is C E G G E G C, we can see that all of these notes are the strong, base notes of our scale. An easy way to start off harmonies is to pair these notes together in a combination that blends well with the lead notes in the melody. In the key of C, the root note is C, the major third is E, and the dominant note (or the perfect 5 th) is G. Lets take a look at the key of C Major (C D E F G A B C). The reason this is so important is there are certain notes that are automatically stronger than others in the scale, and these will be the basis for creating our harmony. The first thing we need to do when creating a harmony is figure out the key of the song. We will be focusing on choosing the right notes, supporting the melody and complex (3 or 4 part) harmony.
![piano song a note c note e note piano song a note c note e note](https://www.musicians-helper.com/images/Note-Names-C-to-C.jpg)
The main thing to remember with harmony is the harmony’s role is to SUPPORT the melody, not overpower it.
![piano song a note c note e note piano song a note c note e note](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/10/41/ae/1041aeee25c11a2ac485de42cd0f4fc0.jpg)
Welcome back! Today we will be following up last week’s article on melodies by taking a look at how to create simple harmonies.