Step by Step Song Writing Guide
(20 Aug 03)
Expanding Harmony by Using 7th Chords
The introduction of the dominant 7th chord - What we've learned so far is the method that musicians starting using hundreds of years ago. We still compose music the same way today. We have learned to stretch harmony a bit but the basic idea is the same. At first the composers of that period where mostly limited to either roots, thirds or fifths as their melody notes but, as with all art, things began to change.
Probably Bach and some other cats around that period (the Baroque period) started to include 7th chords in their harmonizations. They mostly made the V chord into V7 chord and left the other chords as triads. I would guess that what happened is this: since the V chord and viio chord both resolve to the I chord so strongly, the viio chord often followed the V chord before resolving to the I chord. Play it and you'll see.
Take a good look at the G and B diminished triad above and you will realize that the B diminished triad looks a lot like a G7 chord without a root:
The G7 chord probably started to replacing the G and Bdim chord progression. They sort of got combined.
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Expanding Harmony - As the years went by, musicians started taking Bach's lead and expanding harmony by using seventh chords. Let's build seventh chords to replace our triads. All we have to do is go a step further than we did earlier, in addition to the first, third and fifth notes of the scale, we'll also include the seventh note in the chord:
If we do the same things for all the notes in the C major scale we will get the following 7th chords:
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Let's examine the harmonized 7th chords in the major scales. While the I, IV and V chords were all simple major chords when we harmonized the scale in triads, when we harmonize the scale in 7th chords we find that the I and IV chords are maj7th chords while the V chord becomes a dominant 7th chord. The viio chord becomes a min7b5 chord.
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Choices - Creating a series of 7th chords simply gave them one more choice for their melody note. Besides the root, 3rd and 5th, they got to use the 7th of the chord as a melody note. Instead of three chord choices per melody note, they got four. Previously we only had the choice of three chords for our C melody note, now we also get the addition of the Dmin7 chord:
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Melodic Analysis - Let's try the melodic analysis thing again. This time we'll be checking our melody note against the diatonic 7th chords. Here are the rules:
Analysis 3: Try to figure out what chord tone each melody note is. I've included a few of the answers already: for our first chord, the melody note is a C which is the b7th (minor7th) of the Dmin7 chord. Try it yourself, answers at the end of the lesson.
Harmonization 2 - Using 7th chords will give you a very adult sound. Sometimes the addition of just one 7th chord in a sea of triads will do wonders for one of your compositions. As far as melody notes go, roots, 3rds and 5th are very strong tonally. Generally using a 7th as a melody note will give you more of an ambiguous sound but sometimes ambiguity works very well. Check out the example below. Again, try to sing the melody while you play the chords. Oh yeah, forgot to mention, I took some liberties with the V chords. Think about it a little and you'll figure out what I did.
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Song writing time - I would suggest that you take a some time here and write some simple songs using the methods we've studied. Here are the basic guidelines:
1. Write your melody from the major scale.
2. Chose your chords from the same harmonized major scale.
3. Make sure your melody note can be found in the chord somewhere (1, 3, 5 or 7).
4. Try to have some fun.
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