Follow Gary on Twitterĭo you like FREE DEALS? “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” eBook bundle consists of 10 songwriting eBooks that will improve your technique and help you become a consistently excellent songwriter.For some reason unknown to us, practicing scales or even just the word “scales” seems to fill musicians with as much fear and existential dread as public speaking or doing taxes. They might result in a few more clashes, requiring you to adjust your melody if you like the progression: One additional bit of advice: You’ll find that simple, basic progressions work well, and have a nice, lulling effect in pentatonic harmonizations:īut as part of your improvisations, try fitting in some altered chords, and also some non-diatonic ones… chords that don’t naturally belong to the chosen key. That should certainly give you enough of a start that will provide the inspiration to fill in most sections of a song.Īnd remember, full major scales work nicely in the same song where you’ve used pentatonic melodies, so feel free to do as you hear in “There’s a Reason”: use pentatonic for some sections, and major scale-derived melodies for others within the same song. In that previous post from June, I gave an example of what it might sound like: Create simple chord progressions and repeat a pentatonic melodic idea over each chord.Remember to try lower shapes for verse, and move them higher for chorus ideas. Improvise melodies on that pentatonic scale.This is your best way to learn the scale, and to get familiar with it on your instrument (or voice). Choose a key, and play through a couple of octaves of the pentatonic scale.So try this as one possible process for creating a song section (verse or chorus) based on pentatonic melodies: When it comes to pentatonic melodies, improvisation works really well. The 7th note B also has chords that it works well with (C, changing it to Cmaj7, just as one example), but other standard chords where suddenly hearing a B might call for careful preparation for that chord: finding a B in an F chord, for example. an A minor chord (where it acts as the 5th).an F major chord (where it acts as the 7th, changing it to Fmaj7).an E minor chord (where it acts as the root).a D minor chord (the 9th of that chord, changing it to Dm9).a C major chord (where it acts as the 3rd).Take, for example, the 3rd note E in C major pentatonic. The reason for that ease is because the 4th and 7th notes of a major scale are a bit fussy about which chords make them sound good. And in fact, you’ll often find the process of fitting chords with melody notes easier when you use pentatonic scales. ![]() ![]() The short answer is no, you can still use the same chords that you might use for any standard progression from major or minor keys. If you’ve written a melody using a pentatonic scale, how do you work out chords? If the melody is avoiding using the 4th and 7th notes, does that apply to the chords you choose as well? The verse and pre-chorus consist entirely of pentatonic melodic shapes, and it’s only in the chorus where we hear the 4th note subtly appear in descending scalewise passages. For all intents and purposes, “There’s a Reason” is comprised almost exclusively of pentatonic melodies. Pentatonic melodies are common in traditional spirituals and folk songs (“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Amazing Grace”, etc.) If you want to hear how beautiful a pentatonic melody can sound in pop music, listen to “ There’s a Reason” by American indie band Wet. So take any major scale (1-2-3-4-5-6-7), eliminate the 4th and 7th notes (1-2-3-5-6), and you’ve got a pentatonic scale: But for the purposes of this post, you won’t need to know anything more than the standard major pentatonic derived by eliminating the 4th and 7th notes of a major scale. You can dig deeper into the theory of this if you want, and learn about hemitonic scales (those that use one or more semitones) and anhemitonic scales (those that use no semitones). In C major, we’re talking about these notes: C-D-E-G-A (1-2-3-5-6). Technically, any 5-note scale that you choose will be a pentatonic scale, but the most common kind is the type you discover when you improvise on the black keys. Read More About 'How to Harmonize a Melody'
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