Unlocking Harmony

Tell me: Do you sometimes feel a bit baffled or overwhelmed by harmony and by chord progressions in music?

Today I want to share with you two big epiphanies I had over the years which dramatically simplified things for me and unlocked playing chords by ear faster than had ever seemed possible before.

So in yesterday’s episode, I shared a clip from Tony Parlapiano’s masterclass at Musical U, where he was comparing and contrasting classical harmony with rock and pop harmony and jazz harmony.

And I thought it was a super cool, elegant explanation and demonstration. But afterwards I realszed it might have gone over some people’s heads. If you’re new to the world of thinking in terms of Roman numerals for chords and chord functions and that kind of thing, it might have just been a bit like, what is he talking about? So I apologise if so! Hopefully it was pitched about right. But I’m always conscious we have such a variety of musicians in our audience, and so that was on my mind.

And then I’ve also been working recently on the chord progressions chapter of the forthcoming Musicality book. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go to musicalitybook.com and learn about that.

But we were refining that chord progressions chapter, and in the introduction to the chapter, I shared these two big epiphanies that I had in my own musical journey around the topic of harmony.

And it made me really want to share those with you here because, you know, this is not today going to be a formal lesson in harmony. And obviously in the book chapter, we go through things step by step and do really teach it. But I just wanted to share these two epiphanies because they, for me, were a real game changer. And if you haven’t come across these concepts or these ways of thinking about things before, they could be for you, too. And if not hopefully, it will still be a valuable recap and refresher.

So these were two things which just had a huge impact on how comfortable and confident I felt with chords and harmony, and what I could actually do in terms of playing chords by ear or choosing them myself.

So going way back to kind of 2006-2007 time, before the days of Easy Ear Training or Musical U. I had been learning music for 20 years and studied a lot of music theory. And so I had studied harmony in music theory. But it was that kind of music theory textbook sense where it’s all very based on classical music and it’s all very dry and abstract, and it’s about rules and facts and learning the details of everything completely divorced from real music or how any of it sounds.

And so when I learned it, I could get the answers right, but it just seemed about analysis. It was like, look at this, dots on a staff, write in the chord functions. And I could do that, but I didn’t really get why I was doing it or what it could mean.

And it was because that aural side, the ear side, was completely missing. And this is a big problem with a lot of music theory. It’s why at Musical U, when we teach with our H4 Model Of Complete Musicality, it’s Head, Hands, Hearing and Heart. But it’s not four separate things. When we do the Head, the theory, it’s always to connect it to the Hearing and the Hands and the Heart.

It’s holistic, but it’s also integrated. And that’s because we’ve learned how vital it is to do that. And if you’re going to learn something factually, make sure you know why you’re learning it, what it means, what it implies for your music-making and the music you listen to. And so that was really missing for me.

And what it meant was I, on paper, understood harmony, as it were, but I was also learning to play chords. So I was playing guitar, I was playing piano, I was learning like twelve different major chords and twelve different minor chords, and augmented chords, and diminished chords, 7th chords, power chords, all different voicings. It just seemed endless.

And particularly if I was learning a new piece of piano music, I would look at the page and there would be, you know, up to eight notes at once that I was somehow meant to play. And there was harmony there, but it was just completely impenetrable to me. And those two worlds didn’t really link up for me at all.

It was like I learned to play chords over here and I play the chords I’m told to. And I learned some kind of analysis of harmony over here, and I can get the answers right, but I don’t know what the point is.

And I did gradually, kind of, start to get the feeling that some chords went together more often, particularly on guitar. When I was learning songs on guitar pop and rock songs, I kind of got a sense that these chords often come up together, and those chords often come up together. And then intellectually, I did understand certain chords belong to the key and I understood key signatures, and I knew, okay, those ones fit in the key, but that didn’t really help me all that much.

And it really felt like anytime I wanted to learn a new song, I just had to hope that the random chords written on the page were ones I knew how to play.

So that was, that was where I got to in terms of chords and harmony. And for, like, probably ten or 20 years, that was the limit of my knowledge. And then eventually, I stumbled into these two big breakthroughs, what I want to share with you today, and it had such a massive transformational effect on my relationship with chords and harmony and what I was able to do.

So, epiphany number one, it’s not arbitrary and it’s all about relative pitch.

So, like I described there, for a long time, everything just felt a bit random. It was like there was a whole bunch of dots on the page that I need to play, or, you know, I look up the chords for a song and there’s just a kind of random string of chord symbols on the page. And I didn’t really understand why any of them were the ones they were.

And the big epiphany was that it’s all about relative pitch. And looking back, ideally, the music theory should have clued me into this when they were talking about functional harmony and the one and the dominant and the subdominant. Like, that should have been my gateway in, but because that ear side was missing, it just didn’t happen.

So in that book chapter I referred to, it comes after… I just did the episode actually on perfect pitch, right? And that segment was taken from the chapter on relative pitch to make the point that when you’re existing in that world of letter names, everything just feels very confusing and overwhelming. And the simplification that comes from translating into relative pitch is massive, because ultimately, music is all about those relationships between note pitches.

And so just like solfa is a massive simplifier, by working in terms of scale degrees, and what each note actually means, it lets you understand the significance of each note and the character each note has and the role that plays musically. Chords are the same. And so you can look at all the chords in a key based on the scale degree they’re rooted on. So, for example, in C major, your I chord is C, your IV chord is F. Your V chord is G.

And I knew that from an analytical music theory point of view, but I never understood the musical significance of doing it. Suddenly, when you start thinking in those terms, in the relative pitch terms, you have this massive shorthand for what’s actually going on musically and how it’s going to sound.

So I’m reminded also of, it’s funny, we did a Coaches Corner episode recently where Andrew was talking about something related to this, and he said something along the lines of “I’d never realised before just how unhelpful all those chord websites are”.

And he’s right. It’s because they exacerbate this problem. When you run off to look up the chords, you get told the letter names and you play those chords, but you’re missing out on that vital piece of “oh, it’s the C, F, and G because it’s the I, IV and V, or it’s the A, D, and E because it’s that same I-IV-V progression that I just played in that other song on Tuesday”.

And when you start shifting and thinking in terms of relative pitch and the chord numerals or chord functions, suddenly that whole world of, like, infinite possibilities of what notes are being played and whether it’s a, you know, a major or a minor or an augmented or diminished or a seven, like all of that just massively coalesces down into a much simpler set of building blocks.

And that’s how we talk about it in the book, it’s “these are the building blocks of harmony”. And it turns out once you start thinking those terms, your ear wakes up and you can start hearing what’s going on.

So that leads on to epiphany number two.

Those building blocks are not all created equal, or rather, they’re not all used equally.

And so you might think “okay, we translate things into relative pitch. Big whoop. We can still be playing an infinite number of possible notes at any given time.”

There might still be any chords being used, but in fact, it turns out a vast number of songs use either just three chords or four chords, or they use those most of the time. There are basically these particular chords in the key that really underpin most of Western harmony.

And so, yes, you can have far out, wacky avant-garde jazz that does its own thing can have, you know, modern classical, chromatic music that’s all over the place. But if you’re the average musician, music learner playing rock or pop or classical or even some simpler electronic or folk music, for sure, actually, a lot of it boils down to these three or four chords.

And that’s partly cultural that, you know, we tend to use those chords, so we tend to use those chords. You know, the composer chooses them and then the audience hears them and then the next generation of composers uses them.

But it’s actually really inherent to music too. Like, if you look at the frequencies in the notes and how they resonate together and how one relates to another, there’s actually something fundamental there in the music that means these note choices make sense and they please our ear. And these ones sound consonant and these ones sound dissonant. So it is kind of integral to music itself, quite aside from any historic or cultural trends.

And so it really boils down to these three or four chords that underpin pretty much everything. And for anyone who does know a bit about this, we’re talking about the I, the IV, the V and the vi. So in C major, that would be C major, F major, G major, and A minor, for example.

And these I-IV-V or I-IV-V-vi progressions, you can have the chords in any order. And you might mix things up in the chorus versus the bridge or the verse, but ultimately you’ll find a lot of what you’re playing, it seems to be using completely different chords because this one’s in this key and this one’s in this key, and this uses I-IV-V and this one’s I-V-vi-IV. But actually, once you start tuning into that relative pitch hearing, you can hear the similarities and you can hear “oh, that’s what’s going on with the harmony. And, oh, it happens to be in that key. So these are the particular letter names”.

One little side epiphany that comes to mind. I remember talking about this with Dave Reese from Dave Conservatoire, if you know that site.

I remember talking about this with him when we first met. And I think he said it in a way that made it really hit home for the first time with me. I kind of, I knew it, but I didn’t know it, if you know what I mean.

But it was this really elegant point that you can harmonise any major scale melody with just the I, IV and V chords. So if you look at the notes of those chords in solfa terms, it would be do-mi-so for the I chord, fa-la-do for the IV chord, and so-ti-re for the V chord, I’ve just named all seven of the notes in the major scale! Do, re, mi, fa,so, la,ti.

And so any note in a melody at any given time can be harmonised comfortably with the I, the IV or the V.

That’s not to say you would necessarily use that chord. But this was super powerful for me. And I remember the first time I started playing with it, it was, you know, I was improvising a melody on the piano in a major scale, and I realised I could accompany myself straight off the bat just by choosing the one, the four or the five, depending on what melody note was playing.

And that was a bit mind-blowing to me! Because, yes, you can be more interesting, you can be more complex, there are all kinds of ways you could harmonise things, but to know that all of the notes of the major scale are contained in those I, IV and V chords, and it gives you a way to harmonise it that will sound pretty good.

That was a really big step forwards for me. So anyway, little side tangent for a mini bonus epiphany there!

But back to the main idea that this I, IV and V, optionally the vi, actually power a huge proportion of the music out there across a wide variety of genres, especially rock and pop, but also folk, also electronic, definitely classical.

You find these chords everywhere, and when you’re just looking at letter names, you don’t really realise that. And when you’re looking at all the complexities of voicings and, you know, if there’s little embellishments or alterations to the chords, you might not realise it. But fundamentally, under the hood, a lot of it is just I, IV, V and vi.

And this wasn’t just intellectually satisfying. It’s also because of this building blocks idea that if you really train your ear for just the I, IV and V, you get a massive leap forwards.

It unlocks a huge number of songs. And there are some great YouTube videos out there, I’ll link one in the show notes, and I’ll also link to an article or two on the Musical U website that talks more about this and really breaks it down for you and gives listening examples and so on.

But there’s this whole world of three-chord songs and four-chord songs that just use those chords, which means if you can recognise those progressions by ear, suddenly you’ve got that whole songbook available to you without needing to memorize them in advance, without needing to carry a big stack of sheet music around with you. If you can hear I-IV-V-vi progressions, you can play a huge number of songs by ear.

So those were the two big epiphanies for me that together let me turn harmony from this massive, overwhelming world of “you could have any number of notes at any given time, and they probably belong to the key, but we can’t say much more than that” into something super simple, which could actually become natural for me to do musically. With a little bit of ear training for chords and for chord progressions, I could suddenly start playing harmony by ear.

So number one was just, it’s all about relative pitch. It may seem arbitrary when you’re immersed in letter names and the world of absolute pitch, but actually, when you start thinking in terms of relative pitch, it all becomes much simpler and you understand the meaning behind all the chords being used.

And number two, if you focus on the right building blocks, and in Western music, that’s the I, IV, V and vi chords, a little bit of ear training goes a really long way, and it also provides a foundation then that you can build on for all of the more complex stuff you might want to tackle.

So, again, I know we have a real variety of musicians in the audience for this show, and hopefully some of that was new or a valuable refresher for you, or maybe this whole world is new to you and I’ve just opened a door that’s really exciting. I hope that’s the case. I’ll put a few links in the shownotes if you want to go further, if you want to read up on the details of everything I’ve just kind of sketched out.

But I hope those two epiphanies are valuable for you in the way they were for me, because for me, it was really musically life-changing. And as I worked on that chapter of the Musicality book and re-read those two epiphanies, I was like, oh, I should share this on the show. So I hope that’s helpful for you, I hope you enjoyed.

That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!

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