My first ever attempt at chord melody

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#1

Chord melody is one of the hundreds of things that I know at an intellectual level but can’t put into practice until someone ELI5 to me.

It happened this week with Marbin, a Berklee graduate youtuber who explains the coolest music concepts by insulting you and making you think he’s joking. It might not be for everybody but I like the guy’s style.

So, after watching his video on how to harmonize a melody, which explained everything I already knew on the topic (eg. “any diatonic line can be harmonized with I IV V alone” . “Modal harmonies can be as simple as I IV V with the mode root on the bass”) , I decided to give it a try with an old Melody bolero melody that I know since I was 5, so I programmed the chords over a funk beat in iReal pro and gave it a try.

In the end, I enjoyed the experience and this was the first time my harmonization kind of made sense because the melody was always there and it didn’t sound random, imho. Also, I enjoyed that just thinking about I IV V for the sake of the exercise and not so much about the official name of whatever voicings I ended up playing resulted in the organic formation of some fancy chords here and there, such as a B+ between Cmaj9 and B7, and a bunch of 9s and13s that just made sense in the moment and I think that made them sound better than my previous attempts when I was just trying to form chords based on theory alone without any creative effort involved.

Finally, here’s the original.

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#2

Nice! For whatever it’s worth, I teach chord melody often and usually the first thing I have people do, once they do know the melody and chords to the song, is simply try to play the melody while also simultaneously playing the root of the chords as half or whole notes. It’s tricky but I think a strong first step. Then later filling in the middle register with voicings.

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#3

Thank you for listening and for the suggestion, Jake! This is uncharted territory for me so any insight from more experienced chord melody players is most appreciated. ñ

I’ll definitely start adding a bass line into the mix and play around with the voicings between it and the lead.

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#4

If you’re interested in this type of thing, can’t recommend making sure you know your triad inversions. Most of the time, melody notes on downbeats be chord tones, and with inversions there’s pretty much always a way to capture the right melody note on the highest pitch of the chord by playing the right inversion.

#5

Thank you! I’m glad your suggestion aligns with what I’ve been exploring. It’s really fun and sounds quite interesting imho.

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#6

Hey that’s pretty good! NOW. Let’s get real. I don’t care how you do it, I don’t care what your sources are. You need to find as many examples as you can from videos, from albums, whatever,…of Joe Pass playing solo guitar. He’s the man. George Van Eps was really good too,…but he wasn’t human.

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#7

Appreciate the suggestions! I’m definitely trying to immerse myself in that style as I learn more about it.

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