notes without accompanying chords

Most of the church hymn books I've seen are in four-part harmony - there's a grand staff, with the sorprano or soprano & alto lines in the treble clef, and the tenor and bass in the bass clef. For those, it's just a matter of learning how to read a bit of bass clef, and identifying the chords from the note names.

If you don't have any kind of harmony though... well, don't beat yourself up that it's something you should have learned by now - harmonizing a melody can be a really, really complicated task. I'll try to give you a crash course :)

First off, divide up the music into phrases. To keep it simple, each phrase will get one chord. Once you've got a bit of practice, you can add chords (especially to the last phrase of a song, which often has some kind of harmonic resolution inside it).

Now look at each phrase, and identify the really important notes in it. Those are likely to be: the first note that falls on a downbeat, the last note of the phrase, and maybe one or two others... but you'll probably end up with no more than two or three critical notes in the phrase. These notes 'should' be chord tones - so the harmony supports the important aspects of the melody - and the others will be passing tones (or other non-chord tones... 'passing' tones actually has a specific meaning)

Next, make a list of the chords that contain these important notes. There will probably be several... if the phrase has important notes C and E, you could be looking at the triads C or Am... or maybe these are the top two notes of Fmaj7? The more you 'stretch' to find a harmony for a phrase, the more possibilities you'll have; the more possibilities you have, the harder the next step will be - and the more interesting the arrangement you may end up with!

Now you've got a list of chords that work with each little phrase in the piece. Time to see how to string those together... re-examine the phrases and look for sections. Sections want to have a building/release of tension, so the penultimate chord needs to have tension in it. Pick a chord that has a dominant function for that phrase, and then pick a chord that it resolves to for the last phrase.

Now play through some of the possibilities for earlier chords, and see if you can get them to flow well together, ending up at your dominant chord. There are a few things to keep in mind:

- chords that are naturally found in the same key will sound good with a perfect fourth/fifth interval between roots - Am to Em, Dm to G, etc.

- chords that are found in the same key will sound ok with steps between them - Em to F, G to Am, etc - but the sense of motion won't be as strong as with fifths. You can use this type of motion to keep your harmony from being all motion of fifths, though... that can get boring.

- chords in the same key that move by thirds/sixths will sound 'smooth' in their transition. Going from C-Em or F-Dm means you're keeping two notes the same between the chords. This can add variety, but don't overdo it or you'll be even more boring than with lots of seconds :)

- you don't need to stick to chords found naturally in a key. If you want to use 'outside' chords, though, you'll want to either modulate (changing to a new key for a stretch of several chords) or borrow (take a temporary chord from another key). In either case, you'll have one chord that makes the break from old key to new, and you want that to seem part of the natural flow, even though it'll sound a bit out of place. In order to do that, you need to tie that outside chord into the one before it and the one after it... there are three main ways to do this:

* - they naturally occur in the same key (if you modulate, going C-A-Em may be ok; Em and A both occur in the key of D)

* - the chord type is the same as the one before/after it (in the C-A-Em change, C and A are both major chords - this will sound better than a similar change like Dm-A-Em)

* - the chord root is the same as the one before/after it (C-Am-A-Em will sound just fine; you're using the A root as a pivot to change keys)

Notice that the first example, C-A-Em, combines two of these approaches - same bhord type/same key. You could also go C-A-E, or C-A-Eb or whatever, and just keep one approach... plenty of songs do just that for the ouside chords.

Once you're all done with that, and you've got a complete progression that works over the melody, great! Now write a completely different one :)

Really, that's the key to learning to harmonize. There are so many possibilities it's unbelievable... keep trying new approaches, and think about what you're trying technique-wise and how it ends up sounding. Structured experimentation (with simple guidelines like the ones above) and critical listening will teach you more about practical harmony than reading a dozen textbooks.

Something that really helps me when doing this is to identify not only the important notes in each phrase (as Noteboat suggests) but also the important notes in each measure.

These are usually either the first note, the last note, or the longest note.

Then I'll decompose the measure into it's component parts -- the first 2 and last 2 beats in a 4/4 time song, the first 3 and last 2 (or vice-versa) in a 5/4 song.

What I want to be able to do is have an outline of the melody comprised of one note per chord change that someone could listen too and say "hey that's song <insert name here> isn't it?"

Since I do a lot of jazz, that's usually two chords per measure. Sometimes more sometimes less, but 2 per measure is normal.

Noteboat's advice and mine up to here are about the same. Here's a bit I think Note surely knows, but just didn't go into:

You have to know the conventions of your genre. In Jazz, for example, you really expect to hear particular chord progressions, and many chord changes are defined by the "key of the moment" not by a key signature for the song. Other genre's have different expectations. Those expectations on the part of the listener are part of what defines a piece as belonging to a particular genre.

So now, you have a melody outline and you know what expectations the listener has for the harmony in relationship to the melody.

SO . ...

back to Noteboat's method . . .

Figure out what key(s) you might be in and make yourself a chord charts. Now look at your melody outline and see if you can spot where the genre's typical chord progressions clearly and easily fit the song's melody form.

Those can give you very clear starting points to start writing in chords. Very rarely do I start trying to harmonize a melody sheet with the first note and progress in order through the song. Very often I'll find myself starting on the bridge or chorus or a verse boundary becuase that's where I can find something that gives me a firm foundation in the melody to suggest a starting point. Then I'll work forwards and backwards from that point.

The big thing I want to add though is that if you try making a jazz like chord progressions fit on top of a bluegrass tune, it'll sound more like jazz than bluegrass. You have to choose progressions that are part of the genre's "language."

Appreciate the input. Thanks.
Upon closer examination the three flats in "I dream'd I lay.." may be problematic but that's what I like most about the song - it's flattishness.
I've found at most 6 notes per measure so ...
Yes I'm sure there's a method per genre as within the celtic genre I'll probably need the drop D tuning.
So there's always some other aspects behind just a simple song in order to do it justice as far as knowing the genre scales that suit it.
Which leads to the question why is there this widespread decision by the composers/printers/compilers of sheet music not to add the chords?
Surely if the composers know what the chords are and that adding chords to the sheetmusic would be helpful to the instrumentalist there is some other reason why chords are always left out. ??
Or are they intentionally leaving the harmony up for individual interpretation?

http://www.cdbaby.com/dawnmusic

King's right about genre, of course. I was trying to write out a generic one-size-fits-all introduction to harmonizing.

In Celtic music, traditional melodies don't have traditional harmonies to go with them. Modern arrangements of tunes with guitar, penny whistle, bodhrun etc. are... well, modern :)

When you think of traditional Celtic music, it's a capella voice - or it's a single melodic line on a whistle, fiddle, bagpipes or whatever for reels or jigs (yeah, bagpipes have a drone - that's not the same as harmony!)

The guitar is a pretty recent addition to the mix.

So it's really common to just see transcribed melodies. I've got a copy of O'Neill's Music of Ireland here, and that's all it has - hundreds and hundreds of melodies, nary a chord in the lot.

Noteboat's right on that...until the '60s, there wasn't much chordal accompaniment in Celtic music (at least Irish music, as that's what I'm most familiar with). Solo unaccompanied voice (sean-nós) or solo instrumental was the norm - normally fiddle, penny whistle, flute, and uilleann pipes. When folks did play together (seisiún), then it was all melody instruments. Around the time of the '60s folk revival, the guitar started showing up with bands like the Dubliners and the Clancy Brothers. The first band I really remember using guitar in a traditional setting was the Bothy Band in the 1970s...

Probably the best way to get a feel for chords for the traditional Celtic tunes is to listen to what other guitar players are doing...Micheal O'Dohmnaill of the Bothy Band is a great player, as is Arty McGlynn (solo and with Patrick Street) and John Doyle (solo and with Solas). John Doyle has a Homespun video on Irish accompaniment which is very good. He uses drop-D (DADGBE). Like a lot of players, I tend to use standard and DADGAD. I generally come up with my own progressions for trad tunes, and many times the tune will more or less "suggest" a progression, but if you listen to other players, you'll hear some common patterns, voicings, and progressions...I spent a year or two playing guitar backup for an Irish fiddle player - you learn to get real creative fast. I also play whistle, so I knew a lot of the tunes from a melodic stand point, but many were new to me. I pretty much used DADGAD for that gig, but did use standard on occasion.

I play a lot of Celtic church hymns (and I've got a few lessons on those here at GN). Interestingly, I arranged "The King of Love My Shepherd Is" for guitar using DADGAD. I also arranged the tune for piano, and though I play it in the same key, I came up with an entirely different chord progression for the piano arrangement. Neither follow the harmony found in the hymnal, though I imagine there's probably some similarity.