#Liquid notes chords from melody how to

I use the Van Zandt example because it shows the two main ways that we use melody notes that don’t fit with the chord that’s under it. That’s a chord that almost always appears on a strong beat, and then you use the strong beat following it to move to a G chord: Gsus4 G |C. You likely know of so-called sus-chords: Gsus4, for example. There is a whole category of exceptions to the rule, called non-chord tones, and of those special exceptions is suspensions. Because it is a weak beat, you can use either a chord tone or a non-chord tone in your melody, and it should be just fine.īut what about that first E? Why does that work? E doesn’t exist in a B chord, and since the word it’s paired with (“need-“) is a strong beat, it appears to be violating the rule that notes on strong beats should be chord tones. That’s what you’ll see on the word “to”, represented by the red G# in the diagram above. That understanding of strong versus weak is important when fitting melodies to chords, for this reason: notes that happen on strong beats should usually be chord tones.Īnd the second part of that thought is this: notes on weak beats don’t need to be chord tones. (The uneven spacing in the strong/weak beats is simply to fit the words in) If you tap your foot, you’ll notice that the syllable “need-” is a strong beat, “-ed” is weak, “you” is strong, and so on. In songs like this, it’s fairly easy to hear that the music is organized in alternating strong beats and weak beats. You’ll notice that he plays a B chord through this first phrase, and two of the notes he sings don’t belong to a B chord (shown in red):

#Liquid notes chords from melody how to

The first two bars are all you need to demonstrate the issue: how to fit non-chord notes into a chord. So that means that occasionally you’ll be singing a note that doesn’t fit the chord.īut just to pull a classic example out of the air, how about Townes Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You.” Give it a listen and you’ll notice that most chords are held for two bars (8 beats) while the melody moves up and down, occasionally by leap and occasionally by step. Most songs will demonstrate how this is done, because most songs consist of melodies that move up and down from one note to the adjacent one. Get the complete Deluxe Bundle of 10 eBooks at a discounted price of $37.

L ooking for good songwriting content for your iPad, Kindle, laptop, desktop, or other PDF-reading device? “ The Essential Secrets of Songwriting”bundle packages will show you why good songs are good, and how to apply those lessons to your own music. Most of the time, you’ll find that melodies move in a stepwise fashion with occasional leaps, like “Blowin’ In the Wind”, for example.īut that can present you with a question: what do you do about notes in your melody that don’t happen to belong to the chord that you’re playing? Melodies that consist only of chord tones leaping about, like the melody for “America,” are rare. If you listen to Leonard Bernstein’s “ America”, from “West Side Story“, you’ll notice that practically all the notes from the melody clearly outline the chord that accompanies it:

Liquid Notes for Live uses the Max for Live standard in Ableton Live 9 to run as a MIDI effect.A bit of songwriter’s theory for today, and it’s an important lesson especially if you’ve created a melody and are at the stage where you’re adding chords. Any change to your arrangement is made in real time for all tracks, and is immediately audible for the user. From variations of an entire song or just certain segments of it to spicing it up and making it sound different from others, Liquid Notes adds the intelligence to Live that helps you to apply such changes with a click of the mouse only. This enables you to build up a MIDI arrangement in Live or to load an existing project, and to utilize the music intelligence of Liquid Notes to arrive at the sound and emotional message you are looking for. Color codes indicate the conventionality of the chords in the harmonic context. This information is presented in a simple and clean user interface: Chords appear as rectangular boxes, with a vertical slider and two rotary knobs for changing chord functions, substitutions, and their tensions, respectively. melodies, bass lines, chords, loops, rhythmic patterns). Musical adaptation (resynthesis) builds meaningful musical context from various input data (e.g. A powerful harmonic analysis atomizes even complex multi-track songs and detects their various musical elements and their correlations. It offers a controllable range of alternatives for chords and harmonies in single-track or multi-track MIDI arrangements and makes the theory of harmony fully accessible to you. Liquid Notes for Live is a songwriting assistant tool for editing complex harmonic progressions.