Looking For Strong Beats to Add Chords to Melodies

If you’re a chords-first songwriter, it means that you come up with a chord progression, and then try to design a melody that goes with it. What you may not know is that if you’re a melody-first writer, you’re probably also working out the chords at the same time.

That’s because our musical brains have a way of grouping notes together that are in close proximity to each other, and imagining one chord that supports all (or most) of those notes. So even if all we hear is a melody, we also usually have the ability to “hear” chords to go with it.

If you heard the melody for John Lennon’s Imagine” with no accompaniment, you’d likely still come pretty close to imagining the chords that go with it.

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But how do we do that? What skill are we using when we can also imagine chords to go with a melody? Here are the two main steps we take:

1. We feel the pulse of the music. Music, especially songs in the pop genres, is constructed using alternating strong and weak beats. Just start singing the chorus of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”, and you’ll notice that you instinctively tap your foot. Some notes happen on the beats, and some happen between the beats. And you’ll notice a subtle tendency to think of the first beat as being stronger than the second, and then continuing to alternate in that fashion:
   
2. We group notes together in our minds, and assign a chord. Generally, we do this by taking all the notes that happen between a strong beat and the next strong beat. That gives us a chord change every two beats. But sometimes we don’t want chords to change that often, so we take the notes from two groups of strong/weak beats, or maybe four groups of strong/weak beats. And then we choose a chord that accommodates all or most of the melody notes in that group.

Some musicians can do that instinctively, without much thought. But don’t assume there’s something musically wrong with you if it takes you a while, and a fair bit of experimentation, before you get something that sounds good.

In The Beatles’ “Let It Be”, McCartney chooses to change chords generally with each strong/weak pair: every 2 beats. In the first bar, you hear him play a C major chord, while he sings several G notes, an A and then an E. The G’s and the E all fit the C chord. The A doesn’t, but that A happens on a weak beat, and so it’s not a problem.

If you’re the kind of songwriter who finds it easy to come up with chords to the melody you’re working out (mainly because you’re working them out at the same time), you can still use this process of grouping notes to find chords as a way of developing a more interesting progression.

For example, if your first melody notes are: C D E F G D C, you might instinctively hear the following chords (changing every second note): C  Fmaj7  G  C.

But you could start to experiment, and try the following:

C7/Bb  Am  Gm7  Am

Am  Dm9  G  C

F  Em  G/D  C

Whenever you experiment with changing the chords that might go with a melody, the safest bet is to change chords on strong beats. Changing on a weak beat can give interesting results, but will require some experimenting to make it work.

Written by Gary Ewer. Follow Gary on Twitter