 Hi guys this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson we are basically going to look at how you can form a strong bond between your melody and your harmony. Harmony is also known as chords or your chord progression and we look at two approaches for organically using the two together as either a composer or an analyzer of music or a transcriber of music as some of us call it right. So the idea behind composition is you need to have something to start with. You need to have a seed to grow into a tree so to speak. So the seed idea could either be a chord progression or it could be a melody. I'm not saying it can't be a rhythm groove. It could also be a rhythm groove but in this lesson we are sort of limiting our study to melody and harmony and how you can interact them together and this is or I've tried my best to make it as easy as possible for beginners to understand. So do stick around for the entire lesson and for those of you who have been composing or making music for a while you should find some concepts in this lesson very useful and I call these as very organic concepts. These are concepts which you need to just flow with. You don't need a book. You don't need that much theory and that much of you know you know planning to do this sort of stuff. So in part one we are going to look at how you start with chords and then form the melody through the chords and in part two it's going to be pretty much the inverse. You're given the melody as the seed idea and then you would form the chords around that or develop chords or grow chords or build a strong progression around that. So we thus as we say we are trying to develop a strong bond between melody and harmony. So before we get cracking guys it'll be awesome if you could also get your keyboards out learn with me in the lesson you can play along or you could and you should also get yourselves a book a pen and paper write down a few things and it'll be awesome if you could hit that subscribe button and the bell icon for regular notifications where you get informed of our new content which we put out on our youtube channel. So let's get rolling right now we have a concept in music called cadences which are super tiny chord progressions usually chord progressions are three or four or bigger so cadences are a great way to start approaching harmony and melody linkage. So if you take all the standard cadences in music which have been around since the time of Bach you could say back way back in the day you have a five going to one which is the authentic cadence I'm just going to use the key of D major I like that key for today so let's just do it I encourage you to do this on as many keys as possible. So authentic cadence on D would be the five to one let's first recap our scale D major two sharps right D E F sharp G A B C sharp D D C sharp B A G F sharp B D now the authentic would be the fifth degree that's A going to D or A going to D sometimes we could also play this as a dominant seventh chord to make the movement a lot more stronger the bass however goes A D A D so the authentic would be five one the plagal cadence would be four one you see it can really inspire the melody just by playing these cadences or you can do five going to six we call that deceptive cadence now it's not there in the textbooks but another kind of deceptive cadence could even be a four going to six or something going to six I guess because you're deceiving the listeners here by not playing the one resolution and you're resolving to the six which is another tonic chord instead which is the four now of D that's a G so that's plagal that's the deception there going to the six minor or deceptive that's the authentic cadence okay and last but not least you would create a very open ended sound for yourself by ending on the five chord also known as the dominant chord of the scale so that could be like that's a two E minor very nice in a pre-chorus to kind of give you that that impact to take you to the chorus la and then we go to the one chord in the chorus okay you can even do five four going to five that results back to the one right so these are all I'm not going to talk about the other cadences there are quite a few and on our youtube channel we spend a lot of time on cadences so in the descriptions you're going to find other lessons which you can definitely learn after watching this one or if some of the concepts have not been covered in depth definitely there are videos which cover them in depth so cadences is something you need to type search on our channel and just to also give you a mention on our website Nathaniel school dot com you have a section called free tutorials where we have sort of the team has taken the effort to take all of our youtube content which is ever growing and put it on our website so you can go now to the site and kind of use these easy to use filters so that might also be helpful for you the free tutorial section on Nathaniel school dot com coming back so these are all your chord options so when you have to build a melody around this each of these chords have three possible melodic landing points or three possible as we say chord tones the three chord tones are or could be your melody notes which you can sing along or play on your principal instrument so if you're a violin player you could relate to these chords if you're a singer you could relate to these chords if you're a pianist you could play the chords in your left hand and and the melody of course would be produced in the right hand so if I take let's say the plagal cadence for now which is also called in church music as the amen cadence so amen so if a person if you hear these chords the first thing is to be drawn towards the sound of these units of music which are the two chords g major being g b d d major being d f sharp a now the way the chords are also played on different instruments gives you different motivation so if you have to hear the chord like g major played as b d g g is the four of d right the plagal so if you hear this the g is influencing your brain to to sing that or to relate to that melodically because our brain tries to hear the catchiest thing possible right so that happens to be the highest frequency which is being presented right now on the piano with this inversion so you go g and then the plagal resolves very peacefully I guess back to the root so the root if you played with piano inversions so that can inspire your melody creation process that's a good way to start just take the chord tones and sing along as you play the chords see where it takes you there are no rules it's just a starting guideline it's like a tour guide I'm just a tour guide in this adventure so to speak now these are not the only chord tones available what about D D is there in both chords so if you play let's say to promote D I'll invert the g major chord to put D on top now only singing just D D is not the greatest melody on earth I think getting rather boring and monotonous so you could perhaps sing that D more rhythmically interestingly or color it up during the journey of G going to D maybe and I'm using stepwise motion to create these passing tones la la la la la la la la just using the scale tone I don't want to do I don't want to sing a wrong note I want to still sing in the D major scale but have a workflow wherein I respect my landing notes the landing note is the note which generally collides with the chord change moment so that if the chord changes every four beats then the land is going to be one two three four land two three four land two three four change like at the change point that is where the listeners here is really really attentive they've heard that chord change at the one so you need to present something important for them melodically at the one otherwise if something else happens away from the one a listener may get confused with too much of an information overload you could say so coming back to the plagal so you can nominate any of these notes I've nominated the la which is the G F sharp I could do D D I could also do what's remaining now in the G major chord we've done we we need to do B where does the B like to go at least on the piano it likes to go to A because that's good voice leading that's good inversion usage so just stealing the piano concept of inversions to build melodies so at the landing point you need to respect this chord tone system and everything in between the chords is pretty much up to you it's sort of like you have two destinations but how you reach those two destinations is up to you the map will take you through different road routes I guess in so to speak so that's the melodic passing note concept while the chord tones are your destination eventually you want to land at your you know place where you want to spend some time so another nice thing to do is you have the two chords of the cadence in this case the plagal which is G to D and then you can say okay nominate one note for every chord let's say for G I will nominate B and for the D major chord a nice note to nominate would be the D because it's in the chord name of the chord so use your singing voice to try and find these notes use the piano to help you sing those notes so that's G major with a B on top but a G in the bass and then D with a D on top with a D in the bass so be aware of both the top note and the bottom note so somehow trying to get to that D so you devise your entire composition your entire melody around that principle you see I can even go down to D just by giving those giving ourselves those two pillars to play around with can you feel a lot of tonight seems to believe this method I guess and it becomes a bit catchy so you can repeat it a few more times like a lot of great songs the same melody line will go on and on also following the poetic structure or the the lyrical form which could be like an A A B C or an A A B B or A B A B songwriting model which we can go over later in another video of course so I hope that that explains things for you and this is not a lesson where you just do what I told you right you just take the concept and then explore so in this case at the beginning of the lesson I told you there are all these basic classical cadences authentic five to one plagal four to one deceptive five something four or five going to six and then half is something going to five so using the cadences you can then build melodies and there's so much more you can do a melody doesn't have to be built on two chords a cadence of two chords it can be built over maybe four four chords four chords is how many cadences at the bare minimum two cadences so maybe if I do plagal deceptive and try and build something with plagal and deceptive what do I come up with again to recap plagal is four to one deceptive is five to six watch the cadence video for more revision at the end of this video so you go so I nominated gf sharp ed of all chord tones I am singing this but keep in mind that I'm not a regular vocalist per se I don't write a lot of my melodies for singers or for me to sing I write it keeping in mind an instrument which I'm inspired by so the melody you create you could even think who should be playing that if a violinist plays that your creation process will change if a trumpet player plays that creation process will change synthesizer plays it it's going to be different right so this doesn't imply that the melody has to be done by a singer it's a melody can be done by anyone who wants to play a melody even a cello could play a melody so we've talked about this sort of correlation or this sort of way of linking melody with harmony to conclude or the second part which I have for you in this video would be what if the melody came first and then you have to extrapolate chords I think the process you're understanding hopefully by now that you just need to reverse engineer all that we talked about so far so you take the melody let's say you have a melody something like this something like that something like that okay but you see with all these melodic structures see there's all even in a melody writing concept it will land there are landing tones and the passing tones so as a chord creator you just have to focus on the landing points and leave the passing notes to either your imagination or your creativity just made that happen organically and then the construction work is only at the or the pillars are created around the landing of the melody point so now you see what chords work with a in the d major scale so you can do d major seems to work fine a major seems to work fine what are the chord in the d major scale seems to have a in it f sharp f sharp minor so I can do or a or f sharp a bit weird but it kind of works depending on how you finish the cadence so maybe I'm going to nominate a major and now you may be guessing it that feels like it wants d major at the end right and that's your authentic cadence you see it's all reverse engineered authentic what if I want to make this same melody deceptive there we go or make it a bit half-ish you see a lot of chord chord cadence is work so it's your job to now reverse engineer now the melody you write it down what are the landing notes and then you figure out the chords now you may be thinking if I don't want to compose this melody let's say I want to find the chords of an existing song can you not do it using the same strategy the melody has let's say a popular Beatles melody see what's happening there the same story the landings jude bad sad better and incidentally the important words which are landed on are also lyrically important words these are things like adjectives or proper nouns and things like that jude for instance is the name of the guy jude okay so you target that so if you have an existing song the lyrics can be your guide circle the notes of interest and then harmonize those notes with appropriate chords right so hopefully this video gives you an insight into incorporating your chords and your melody as organically or another thing as I tell students as old school as possible because back in the day before apps and before technology how are musicians doing it the Beatles were still writing the greatest songs perhaps still ever written and so was Bach back in the day and so was everyone so and even today the lot of people if you ask them how did you make this melody how did you come up with these chords I mean it's honestly something you cannot explain because making that idea creating the seed comes to all of us but we don't know how it actually happened it's based on our training yes but it just somehow comes to life and that's something you don't want to slow down you don't want to you don't want to ever figure out how a seed is made or you don't need to because you're the creator you're the you're the composer so let the seed happen however it should happen it's your job to collect the seed grow it out water it as as we as we say and then try to figure out chords for the seed melody or try to figure out melody for the seed chords so to speak right guys so hopefully you found the lesson useful do let us know in the comments what you thought about the instructional video and more lessons coming up on these topics theory cadences composition do check out some of our old videos as well which covers similar topics use the keywords to your advantage and let us know in the comments also what you'd like to learn next if you have something else in mind don't forget to give the video a like or a thumbs up as it looks like and don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell a lot of these notes per se a lot of these supplementary notes for this lesson and a lot of the other lessons which we will do and have done are waiting for you on our patreon page do consider being a member on patreon as well again thanks a ton for watching i will catch you in the next one cheers