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.
