The Guitar Study Newsletter for 4/17/2002

By Darrin Koltow

Hello again! This is Darrin Koltow, webmaster from MaximumMusician.com, bringing you more music making tips today. But first, I want to thank you again for signing up for this newsletter at www.MaximumMusician.com. You can unsubscribe at any time using instructions at the end of this email.

In this issue:
== Name Change ==
== Set your font to Courier ==
== Approaches for Harmonizing a Melody ==
== From ruts to reasons ==

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== Name Change ==

They say a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet. Well, I hope that's true for newsletter names, too. The name of this newsletter is changing from the Maximum Musician newsletter to the Guitar Study newsletter. And the focus of the newsletter will be to provide tips, advice and other goodies to beginning and intermediate level guitarists. I think this is more focused. I want to hear feedback from you about this change, if you have any. Write me here.

== Set your font to Courier ==

We're going to look at some notated music in this issue, which is a challenge to do in an all-text newsletter. So set your email software or whatever else you're reading this with, to view this text in Courier New, at 10 point size. Email me if you need help with this.

=== Approaches for Harmonizing a Melody ===

- ii-V-I
- Fill in the chords (match chords to melody strong beats)
- Create bass line melody

How do you put chords to a melody? And *why* would you have to? There's so much written music available on the Net and from the library and other sources, that we could learn the chord changes to just about any tune we want for free. Except, learning the chord changes that way is not exactly free. You *do* pay a price.

The price you pay to let someone else decide what chords sound cool with a melody line is the neglect and stagnation of your own music skills. Once you learn one or several ways of putting your own harmonies to a melody, you will know how vital this is to your developing your musical abilities. And besides all that hoity-toity talk, harmonizing melodies is just darn fun. So, let's go into some approaches to put chords to melodies.

The Two Five One approach. Putting chords to a melody using the Two Five One approach means doing this: figuring out what key the melody you're harmonizing is in, and playing a Two Five One or related set of chord changes for that key. You do this one phrase at a time.

Let's do an example to illustrate this, using a tune many people know and can sing: Silent Night, the Christmas tune.

I decide to play it in A major.

I select just the first phrase, which includes just these lyrics: "Silent night, holy night" -- and no more. That's the entire first phrase.

I work out a version of the ii-V-I for A: it's a vi-ii-V-I, which means these chords for A major: F#min, Bmin, E7, Amaj. (If you're confused about this roman numeral I, ii, iii, etc. stuff, check out the Playing Guitar freebie ebook on MaximumMusician.com. Also, the Guitar Chords ebook goes into this.)

Okay, I have my melody, and I have my chords. I can now play and sing the first phrase. I'll strum 4 downstrokes for each bar, one chord per bar, to keep things simple.

Si- lent ni- ght ho- ly ni- ght
F#min    Bmin    E7     Amaj   

Make sure you play this before you read on.

Now that you've played it, what do you think? Sounds a little weird doesn't it? It's not going to make your milk curdle or your buns burn, but it's not bad. The one funky sound, to my ears, is the C# melody note over the Bmin chord. Why does that sound funky? It's all context: my ears are used to hearing Silent Night as a straightforward, major scale, diatonic, American Pie, Chevrolet tune. Such a tune is not going to have a Bmin9 chord on a strong beat, such as it is here. Now, after I listen to John Coltrane do another Christmas song, My Favorite Things, and after I listen to my favorite jazz players, I might think, hey, that Bmin9 sounds pretty hip. It's all context.

Okay, that gives us just a quickie intro to harmonizing using the ii-V-I method.

Now we're going to look at another approach to harmonizing a melody. This one is called "Fill in the blanks," and here's an example of it. We're going to use the same oldie but goodie, Silent Night.

First, we need a list of the tune's melody notes on the strong beats. What are those notes for Silent Night? I'll emphasize the strong beats with *<lyric>*

*SI*-i-*LENT*-*NI*-ight
*HO*-*LY*-*NI*-ght

If this is looking goofy to you, think of this: Silent Night is in 3/4 time: ONE two three, ONE two three. I consider the strong beats to be on ONE and three. So, when you're singing the tune, that's where the strong beats fall, beats one and three.

Let's now get the melody notes for those beats. We're in A major, just for the heck of it.

*SI*-i-*LENT*-*NI*-ight
 E        E    C#

*HO*-*LY*-*NI*-ght
 E     E   C#

Okay, now we need another list: all of the chords in our key, A major. Here are the seven chords:

A major, B minor, C# minor, D major, E7, F# minor, G# half-diminished

Only 7 chords. Think about this for a second. Think of how many times you've gotten frustrated with figuring out *the* chords for a tune because "there are just too many chords!" First of all, there's no figuring out *the* chords for a tune, only *a* set of chords that sound good to *you.* Second, while there are zillions of chords sitting on the shelves of the harmony supermarket, you can get what you need for most tunes in three or four "aisles." Most of the time, that means choosing the chords that are *diatonic* to a major key. For Silent Night, those are the chords just listed. Okay, enough sermonizing. Back to our harmonizing.

Are you ready to make another list? Let's do it. Now that you have the chords for A major, and the list of notes for the strong beats for the melody, do this: For each melody note, list the chords in A major that contain that note.

Let's do the first strong melody note: note E, on "*Si*-lent". What chords in A major contain the note E? Let's see, E is the root in E7, it's the 3rd in C# minor, it's the 5th in A major. Take it one more step: it's the 7th in F# minor 7. So, out of the 7 chords in A major, we've narrowed down our short list of possible chords for this melody note to just 4 chords. Can you see how picking out chords for melodies is getting easier and more straightforward?

At this point, you simply choose one of the four chords to play. Which do you choose? *Any* one that sounds best to you. Your ear is the judge. And you don't need to settle for any one chord. Practice the tune with each of the four different chords. Build flexibility and variety into your playing.

The foregoing illustrates all of the steps needed to apply the "fill in the blanks" approach to harmonizing a melody. Let's present a bit more of the song with its chords, so we can say we're actually teaching music here, and not just "music theory."

Silent night, holy night
C#     A      C#    A


All is calm, all is bright
G#hd   E7,   F#m7   A


Round yon Virgin mother and child
D          D     C#m        A


Holy infant so tender and mild
D          D     C#m        A


Sleep in heavenly peace
Bm       G#hd     F#m A


Sleep in heavenly peace
F#m      E7       A

(No offense to writers and lovers of Christmas tunes, but one of these days we'll do something more up-tempo. I.E. Rock! The hitch is paying homage to the great gods of copyrighting and licensing.)

In case you were wondering, the G#hd means G# half-diminished.

Let's do one more approach to harmonizing a melody. You can never have too many strategies for harmonizing. When one doesn't work for you, you go to another.

This strategy I'll call Bass Melody. That means treating the bass line as though it were a melody that's just as important as the top melody. To compose this melody, I like to use the main melody to work against, or work with. The two melodies should complement each other, which just means they should sound good when you play them together. You can test this by singing one while playing the other.

Let's summarize the steps for Bass Melody harmonizing, and apply the steps to Silent Night.

Working one phrase at a time,
- Get the main melody in your head by singing it a few times.
- "Twist" the melody. At key points, where the main melody goes up, make the bass melody go down, or vice versa.
- Play this new melody in the bass. Play it enough so it becomes automatic, and you don't have to think about it.
- Sing the melody while you play the bass melody. Make adjustments to the bass melody as needed.
- Once you're happy with both melodies, fill in the harmonies by treating each bass note as the root of a chord.

(I have to tell you, this singing one melody while playing another is not easy -- at first. *I'm* having a tough time with it, so don't feel bad if you are too.) I'll just give you the first couple of parts, and let you experiment with the rest.

Silent night, holy night
C#m Bm  A E7  C#m B A E7

All is calm, all is bright
D      Bm    C#m  B  A

There are lots of approaches for putting chords to melodies. You don't want to have just one. And you'll want to put your own twist on each strategy or approach you use. Using something right out of a text book (or newsletter!) can get you started with a method, but crafting the method to how *you* work makes the method a millions times more useful.

I want all of you newbies out there to email me with any questions you have about harmonizing melodies. And I want you semi-newbies who are digging this stuff and want more, to pick up my Guitar Chords ebook on the site. We do a harmonization of a complete tune in one of the chapters. And besides sounding pretty cool, you get to learn a simple procedure to make your *own* cool sounds by putting chords to melodies.

== From ruts to reasons ==

I got a letter yesterday from a reader who wants to be a studio musician. I think it might be informative to share that letter and my response with y'all. Here we go:

Darrin:

Hi. I'm really stuck. I would like to be a session musician when I leave school but I'm in a rut right now. If you could give me tips on what to practice I would be very grateful.

Thanks.

J.S.

Hi, J.S. I did a wee bit of research on your question. You said you want to be a session musician, so I went to the "top" to discover exactly what's needed to do that. Here's how Berklee College of Music describes a session musician:

[Begin quote]
... The main responsibility of the Session Musician is to back up the leader of a group ... and to play in the manner that the leader wants. He or she must be responsible, reliable, and easy to get along with, in addition to being a good musician. Sightreading and proficiency in more than one instrument are important. A session musician may work on various types of projects, including television and film scores, records, demos, jingles, or industrial gigs.
[end quote]

(Source: http://www.berklee.edu)

I offer that quote because I honestly don't know all that much about session musicians, except that they need to be exceptionally good players, and must be able to adapt to widely different styles of music.

I might be able to offer some more practical tips on getting out of your "rut."

First, ask yourself how you know you're in a rut? Which specific exercise, scale, arpeggio makes you groan and say, "Oh, man, I gotta shake out of this." Once you can identify which exercise is making you feel this way, you can focus on adding variety to that exercise.

Also, think of this rut as an action signal from your mind. Your mind is telling you, "I'm not satisfied with this. I'm not getting what I need." Being in a rut means that you're not giving your mind the input it needs to feel engaged in or involved with a challenge. You *do* have things that make your mind say, "Oh yeah! This is the stuff! I can't play this song/exercise/arpeggio/scale *yet*, but you bet your Aunt Bippie that I'm *going* to play it. I'll do whatever it takes." Think back to the last time you got a rush like this, and find out *exactly* what it was about that experience that produced the rush. Was it figuring out a particular song, chord or cadence? Was it playing along with a certain record? Was it stretching your fingers in a way they've never been stretched before?

Also, the rut could mean that your musical goals are not defined correctly. Ask yourself questions like the following: "What exactly are my goals? What's so great about them? Why am I choosing *these* goals?" If your only goal is to be a session musician, and you don't see that goal as being available to you any time soon, you're probably going to experience a lack of motivation, which is another way of saying "rut." The solution is to break that big goal down into milestones that drive you to take action.

To set milestones for becoming a session musician, find out exactly what things such a musician must know: which styles, scales, rhythms, chords, etc. are needed. *Write* these things; list them. Then, to get over the possible sensation of overwhelm from looking at such a list, copy just the first five or ten items from that list onto another list. For each of those items, ask yourself, "just how am I going to make learning skill X as fun as possible? Exactly how will I know I've achieved X?"

Let's simplify, and outline a simple plan to get you out of your rut. Identify exactly what music making activity gives you the biggest rush, and figure out how to inject the essence, core or center of that activity into your current unsatisfying actions.

I hope some of this helps and that I didn't talk your ear off. There's more info on turning your ruts into reasons to achieve your goals in my ebook the Maximum Musician. MM shows you how to set musical goals that are both challenging and realistic, break those goals down into manageable milestones, consistently motivate yourself to greater musical heights, make scales and other exercises fun, see what's holding you back, how to move forward, and a whole bunch more. MM is available now at www.MaximumMusician.com.

That's it for this week. I hope you're ready for more info about chords and guitars and success next week, because that's what I intend on delivering. And you know why? Because helping you be a better player is helping me become a better player. Seriously. Do you know that since starting MaximumMusician.com, my enthusiasm, my musicianship and my chops have moved light years ahead of where they were? I want to thank you for that. In fact, stay tuned, because the better I get, the more I'll share my success with you. This means exercises, midi files, mp3s, ebooks, and more. The sky's the limit. Yet, to borrow from the late great George Harrison, we can also feel great by "Cheer[ing] Down."

'Til next week.