Finding Chords to Match the Notes In Your Melody: A Manual for Songwriters and Musicians

By Bruce Osborn

An easy-to-use guide to finding just the right chords to use with any melody. If you have ever composed a melody and then been at a loss as to which basic chords to play along with it . . . if you have ever wondered how to experiment with more complex chord substitutions . . . if you have ever wondered how the “experts” go about choosing which chords to use with their melodies . . . then this book is for you. Through the use of clear, color-coded charts and detailed step-by-step instructions, this book will show you at a glance exactly which chords are the best choices for use over any melody note in any key. In addition, the author includes extended—and often hilarious!—essays describing how he came to develop the charts included in this book, and how his interest in chords lead him to explore the chords and melody in a well-known jazz song. Finally, there are charts—one for each of the 12 notes in a chromatic scale—listing the notes contained in 26 of the most common chords.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Apr 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483409559

Bruce Osborn

Bruce Osborn has served as staff pastor for the Glacial Community YMCA in southeast Wisconsin since August 2006. He formerly served two separate churches in associate pastoral roles in Alabama and Tennessee. He was ordained into full-time Christian ministry in 1998, upon graduation from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary with a master of divinity in pastoral studies. He is also a graduate of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He lives with Kim, his wife of more than thirty-one years in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. He can be reached at [e-mail].

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Finding Chords to Match the Notes in Your Melody

A Manual for Songwriters and Musicians

Bruce Osborn

Bruce Osborn 1620 West Avenue

Ocean City, New Jersey 08226 440-935-4179

bruceosborn51@yahoo,com

Copyright © 2014 Bruce Osborn

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-0956-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-0955-9 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 04/10/2014

For rear cover author photo, thanks to JoAnne Ruscio.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction

II. How to Use the Charts to Match Chords to Melody Notes (Short Version)

III. How to Use the Charts to Match Chords to Melody Notes (Long Version)

IV. Preface To The Charts Section

V. Charts Section

VI. Preface to the Essays

VII. ESSAY: Matching Chords to Melody Notes

VIII. ESSAY: Jazz Chords and Melodies

IX: Chords and Notes Section

X: POEM: Now I Find Myself Wondering As I Have Been

This book is dedicated to:

Judy, Seth, and Lynn

and to:

Walter E. Janson, Robert Rechnitz, and Robert Andreach

I. Introduction

Imagine you’re a songwriter, and you’ve just arrived home from your day job with the local moving and storage, and you’re so exhausted that you’ve fallen into bed with your work boots still on. You’re three-quarters asleep before your head hits the pillow, but just as it does, there arrives in your head a beautiful melody, and in an instant you’re on your feet and clomping toward your keyboard/digital recording setup (purchased with the help of that miracle of modern technology, plastic), hoping to capture the essence of your inspiration before it can return to the etheric medium from which it arose. You sit down, turn the thing on, and play. You’re awake enough to know that you’re recording something relating to the notes in your head, but for now anything more than that is out of the question. You stagger back to bed, still fully clothed, and know no more until, four hours later, your alarm goes off, summoning you back to the keyboard for that short stretch of creative work you’ve disciplined yourself to do each morning before trudging off to what your mother likes to call your gainful employment, moving other people’s grand pianos, mahogany armoires, and leather settees.

But the melody you recorded the night before turns out to be just as beautiful this morning, and so, after tweaking it a bit here and there, you’re ready to begin assigning chords to it. You turn from the keyboard, pick your guitar up off the floor, and, humming the first note of your melody, strum around among the various chords you know until you happen upon one that more or less seems to fill the bill—or perhaps not. And so now… and so now… and so now what?

Because as it turns out—if you are like I was so many years ago—you really don’t have a clue how to go about finding chords to match your lovely melody, the one you’re praying will serve as the launching pad to your stellar career as a songwriter. Your formal musical training, limited to a year playing the clarinet in your grammar school band, has in no way prepared you for this moment, this moment of truth, this moment at which you must begin, through the use of chords, to give depth and body to your melody, wrapping it in a chordal matrix that will guide your (millions of) fans through the emotional journey you hope, through your work, to provide them with.

Answering the question And so now what? is the purpose of this book. Writing it—getting to the point at which I was able to begin writing it—has taken me half a lifetime, and I talk about that at some length in the Chords and Melody essay included in this book. If you are, like me, a process sort of person who likes, and even insists upon, knowing the why and how of an explanation, you might enjoy accompanying me on my description of what has truly been a personal and musical odyssey. On the other hand, if you are a just-give-me-the-facts-and-let-me-get-down-to-business kind of person, you might want to ignore the entire essay section and just focus directly on the charts. These describe in graphic form how and where to use—in any melody, and in any key—each of the dozen or so most common chords, and also where those chords come from and how they do what they do. (As a third option, you can, of course, skip back and forth between the two sections in any manner that pleases you.) In the essay Jazz Chords, I attempt to shed light upon some—certainly not all—of the dark, arcane regions of jazz by exploring the melody and chords of a well-known jazz song from the point of view—mine, that is—of someone determinedly ignorant of formal jazz principles.

Now I really have to wonder: If I had had access to a book such as this back at the beginning of my own musical journey, what different course might my life have taken? Of course, I’ll never know; it has been what it has been. But you need not suffer the same uncertainty! My chief goal in writing this book—beyond the purely personal and the crassly commercial—is to provide you with musical information that my own long search indicates is available nowhere else, and yet that is absolutely crucial to anyone seriously interested in understanding the beautiful, often quite magical, and yet completely logical and accessible relationship between a melody and its accompanying chords. In this goal I sincerely hope that I am successful; and I do wish you luck with your own musical ambitions, whatever they may be.

II. How to Use the Charts to Match Chords to Melody Notes (Short Version)

1.  Choose or compose a melody for which you want to find chords.

2.  Determine the key your melody is written in, and, if you wish, transpose it into the key of your choice.

3.  Determine which of the notes in your melody you want to assign chords to (usually, though not necessarily, accented, on-beat notes).

4.  The first accented note in your melody will probably have the same letter-name as the key you are working in, and it will likely also be the first note of the first chord in your melody: C note, Key of C Major, C Major chord. (Note: Rather than start on the 1 note of the first chord, many melodies begin on the 3 note—the E note in C Major, CEG, and sometimes even the 5 note, G. The chord used is still C Major.)

5.  Go to the chart page for the key in which you are working (C Major—A Minor—F Major for the key of C Major). Determine the next note for which you want to find a chord.

6.  Looking along the blue horizontal line near the top of the lower (larger) of the two charts on that page, find the box whose first note (in dark red type) is the note for which you are seeking a chord. That note, along with the two notes following it, will be the notes of the basic three-note chord for that note in that key. And in that same box, and right below those notes, will be the name of the chord.

7.  Repeat steps five and six for each of the notes in your melody for which you want to find a chord.

8.  The vertical column beneath each of the basic chords you choose contains the names of some (not all) of the possible substitutions for that basic chord.

9.  An out-of-key melody note will usually be accompanied by a chord whose letter name is the same at that of the note, or which in any case contains that note; experiment among the various chords listed under that letter name in your chord book or in the charts until you find the one that works best for you. Start simple; work your way up (or down, whatever). Don’t forget to try Minor 7, Diminished 7, and Augmented 5 chords for those out-of-key (usually transitional) notes.

10.  Deciding which chords sound right for your melody, and which don’t, is largely a subjective matter. The choices are yours. Relish your freedom!

III. How to Use the Charts to Match Chords to Melody Notes (Long Version)

If you’re at all like me and tend to panic at the

Reviews for Finding Chords to Match the Notes In Your Melody

[Norberto Ramos · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I suggest this book for all creative musicians and teachers.