Can you harmonize a tune with appropriate chords?

Good morning, this is Duane, and today I’d like to talk about matching the left-hand chords to the right-hand melody – in other words, how to harmonize a tune. I had a student that asked me : they said, “Duane, I just play by ear. I don’t really read music. How do I figure out : I can pick out a melody OK, but how do I figure out what chords go with it?”

In other words, if I’m playing a tune : let’s take a tune at random; “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” : how do I pick what chords to match in the left hand? As you know, you can play any chords you want on the left hand, but it doesn’t always sound good. It’s helpful to know some things about how to match the chords in the left hand, to the right hand melody.

The first thing I’d say is, watch what the melody does. The melody goes : what are those three notes? That makes a chord, doesn’t it? You don’t : you probably know that’s the C chord, but even if you didn’t know anything about chords, you could see that that forms a combination of tones. That’s the C chord; you could play that on the left hand, couldn’t you? That sounds fine. So far, so good.

Now, the note goes to A. That doesn’t sound really good there, so how would you know what note : would you put the A chord with it? That doesn’t sound right. How would you know what to use with it? I’ll tell you a secret. In any given key, there’s three primary chords; three main chords that are called family chords. They’re used more than any others. If you know what those chords are, then you can match most melodies with just those three chords.

If you’re playing in the key of C, which you are if you’re starting out like that, with the C chord, the three primary chords are the one chord, the four chord, and the five chord. The one chord goes like that, C chord. The four chord is building a fourth to put on the scale, which would make it F. The five chord builds on the fifth note of the scale, which would be G.

Let me ask you a question; the note is A. Which chord contains an A? Does the C chord contain an A? No. Does the G chord contain an A? No. Does the F chord contain an A? Yes. That matches, doesn’t it? It matches the melody note. Let’s try that. We’ll play the C chord, the F chord, now it goes back to G.

The next note that we stay on for a while is the D chord. Let me ask you a question; does : is D part of the C chord? No. Is it part of the F chord? No; it doesn’t sound bad, but it’s not part of it. Is it part of the G chord? Yes. We can use G to harmonize F.

We’re not going to worry about quick notes, in other words : see, we don’t stay on that A very long. It’s when we stay on a note that we want to make sure we harmonize it.

Let’s go back to the beginning; C, F, G. We pretty well harmonized the whole piece. What can we do to make that a little more interesting? We don’t have to just hold the note; we can play on every beat, for example. Let’s try that.

Or, we can do something like this; see, I’m just breaking up the notes. If you’re more advanced, of course, then there’s other techniques you could use. Let me just quickly talk about : if you’re more advanced, and you hear a melody like this : notice how jagged the melody is. Up, down, up, down, up, down. If we were going to draw that melody as a pattern, it would be a real jagged line, wouldn’t it? Like so.

For those that : this is for people that are more advanced. If you see a jagged line like that, you probably have a strong suspicion, if you know music theory, that you’re probably dealing with the circle of fifths. You’re probably going around the circle of fifths, and that’s exactly the case on that tune. You’re going : you’re going around the circle of fifths, which I won’t get into details. By the way, I have videos on circle of fifths on YouTube; you can just look it up.

Anyway, that was just a little preview of how you can harmonize chords on the left hand, and that was a very basic, basic lesson for those who don’t even read music, and are just getting started. If you like this sort of thing, come on over to “Play Piano” and sign up for our free newsletter on chords and chord progressions, and all things related to the piano. We’ll see you there. Bye bye for now.

Here is the video if you want to watch it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNcH8tg92P4
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