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Piano Lessons: How to "Match Chords up with Any Melody", Chapter 2 (Video Overview)

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"How to Match Chords up with Any Melody", Chapter 2

[Partial Transcript of this piano lessons video below...]

Welcome to chapter two of the piano lesson series titled "How to match chords up with any melody". If you were in a college music theory class, the title of this chapter would be something like "Early Advanced Harmonization Techniques"! Whoa, that's a mouthful. But it's actually pretty accurate - the stuff that we might dig into in this chapter and beyond really falls into the realm of music theory.

This is one of those lessons that's going to involve lots of information that really separates those who are well rounded musicians from those who just like to play tricks or a few licks on the keyboard. I'm not trying to scare you off, I just want to let you know that when you get into harmonization, and advanced chord substitution, it's a bit like the classes that pilots have to sit through - lots of study about weather patterns and aircraft hydraulics blah blah blah - but when those fighter jocks take to the sky, they know what's happening, why it's happening, and how to be the most effective pilot they possibly can.

So strap on your wings and we're going to dig in to the second chapter of how to match chords up with any melody... Or if you like, "Early Advanced Harmonization Techniques"!

If you haven't yet gone through Chapter one, make sure that you spend some time and do that. We looked it foundational techniques that allowed you to find the key of the song, the mode of the song, and then the most common chords to pick from in that key for any given melody.

In chapter one, we focused on the three most common chords found in the major mode or the major key. We lightly touched on the three most common chords found in minor keys, but I didn't show any examples in minor keys. We spent a lot of time finding the three most common chords in the song "Amazing Grace" which was in the key of C major.

In this chapter, we're going to start looking at some advanced concepts. Specifically, we're going to take a look and something called simple chord substitution. In upcoming chapters, we'll take a look at more advanced chord substitution, which will include higher chord extensions, the "Tri-tone" substitution, chromatic movement etc. But this chapter, chapter two, is another foundational building block as you learn "How to match chords up with any melody".

Before we dig into the very interesting concept of simple chord substitution, I want to quickly go over the three most common chords in minor keys, or minor modes. We won't spend a lot of time here, but it's important so let's take a quick look at it.

For an example, we'll use the song "Poor Wayfaring Stranger", which is in the key of D minor. Because you went through Chapter one, you already know how to find the key and the mode of a song, so we're just going to quickly look at the three most common chords that show up in minor keys.

For a snapshot review, I'm going to punch in a bit of the video from Chapter one here - just the short section where I talk about what chords are available in major and minor keys, then we'll apply it to this song.

Now I just want to take a little side trip here about the V chord in minor keys. The V chord is minor, but sometimes it can be a major chord. You'll see this happen in this song that were going through in all explain why - it's a pretty important concept that has something to do with what's called the "leading tone", so check it out.

But let's ignore that exception for just a minute and look at those three basic chords:

To find the first five notes of the D minor scale, we've got to use the technique called the tetrachord plus a whole step. Since you went through Chapter one, you know this actually gives us the first five notes of the D major scale. We also studied how to find the sixth and the seventh note of the major scale. It's very simple - the sixth is a whole step up from the fifth, and the seventh is a whole step up from the sixth. So here's the entire D major scale.

[Piano Lessons Video Here]

To change those notes into the notes of the D minor scale, simply lower the third, the sixth, and the seventh. This gives you something called the "D natural minor scale". Why throw the word "Natural" in there? There is a reason, and will go over that very soon.

Make sure you stick with me on this, this is foundational material that you'll really want to nail down. Now by simply building triads, or three note chords on those scale tones, we come up with these chords:

d minor, e diminished (by the way, the diminished triad is exactly the same as a minor chord, but it has both the third and the fifth lowered half a step - look at that. That triad "E Major" would be E, G sharp and B right? By lowering the G# to G we would have an "E minor" chord. Then by lowering the B to B flat, we have an "a diminished" chord. So now you know what a diminished chord is!)

Backing up, the one chord is d minor, the two chord is e diminished, the three chord is F major, the four chord is g minor, the five chord is a minor, the six chord is B Flat major, and the seven chord is C Major.

Like any language, music has some rules and has some exceptions. Remember I talked about how the V chord in minor keys can sometimes be major? Let's take a look at that and see how it plays out.

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is that the steps to find which of these three chords from a minor key will fit with any melody are the same exact steps that we went over in chapter one when we were working with a major key.

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