Warning: Theory Geek

Okj so the title caught your attention, and I confess its not strictly true, but I am having quite a bit of success with this, so.....

It all started with getting bored with "textbook" work. I know my scales and modes well enough and trotting them out became boring. Boriong boring boring.

I wanted to merge the exercise work with my improvising. When I learnt my first piece of Bach I noticed that even though I played in G the phrases used in the Minuet, never seemed to come out in other settings. Somehow they were lost in a miscateregorisation of the mind.

So, I decided to strip things back. I took simply folk tunes and Played them through all keys (on keyboard). After a while I could not remember what key was the "base" key anymore, and my playing started to incorporate all those strong changes into the fingers.

The thing is, as I see it, folk tunes get to be folk tunes because they exploit changes that have strong character.

Whilst doing this I began to discover a different set of changes at work than the modes- a sort of sub species of modes, using only the strongest.

Let me explain.

Take a major scale (C) starting from the octave.

Supply a melody note C. What is the strongest chord you can put under that note? Obviously it's C - right?

Next note down is B. What is the strongest chord you can put under this note? Well that would be a G7 chord. Note: the Locrian mode would be the first inversion of this chord. So, we have two melody notes, a C and a B, and we have a V,I.
Next step What would be the strongest chord you can put under an A. Modally, this would be an a minor, but we could put a F major here. This would be the four chord which chord again would be stronger than the relative/aolian minor.

Next note is G. Obviuosly we go back to G7 here.

F comes next step down melodically, Here we use the F major (Lydian) chord.

Next is E. Instead of using the weak minor (Phrygian), we again go for the strongest chord possible and play a C major.
Aftr this we have the melody note D. Instead of playing the relatively weak D minor (dorian) we play a G7 - which includes the D as it's fifth.


So, for each melody note of the scale we have a chord. Each chord is the strongest possible and is either a 1 chord a 4 chord, or a five chord.



I will call this the "strong chord progression".


I found that most of the folk tunes (85% ish) used these ideas, or were often closely related to them.

At the end of the day this "strong progression" selection - chord for melody note, is just another tool, but I am currently finding it very useful. It often indicated the harmony better than using all the modes. You can use these changes in many ways, ascending and descending. Triadic notes from the partner chord, tend to fall in strong positions. This provides good starting blocks, good foundations.

Here are the melody notes/chords in ascending order;

C(melody note) +C major (chord) - melody note is root
D+G7 - melody note is fifth
E+C major - melody note is third
F+F major - melody note is root
G+G7 - melody note is root
A+F major - melody note is third
B+G7 - melody note is third


Note: you can invert the chords if you wish. I find sometimes using second inversion chords ghelps these strong voicings - depending on key (muddiness)

Z

Last edited by ZeroZero; 10/13/15 08:00 AM.
Win 11 64, Asus Rog Strix z390 mobo, 64 gig RAM, 8700k