Harmonizing the Same Melody With Major, Then Minor Chords

Switching from major to minor gives your melody a whole new sound.

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The repetition of musical fragments is an important part of the structure of most songs. We like to hear things repeat; obvious things, like the basic beat and rhythms, and the chord progression. And then less obviously, short melodic ideas that go together to make a complete melody. Here’s an idea for doubling the length of a chorus melody. If you’ve got a short 2- or 4-bar idea in a major key, and don’t like the thought of simply repeating it, you can switch to a minor harmonization of the very same idea. You’re doing a simple repeat, but the minor chords give it an entirely new sound.

Here’s how that works. Let’s say that you’ve been working on a chorus melody, in the key of A major, and you’ve got the first 4 bars written, and don’t know what to do next. Something like this:

[CLICK to listen] (Opens in a new window)

As you can hear, it’s a simple harmonization using the I, V and IV chords: A  E  D  A

The relative minor of any major key can be found by starting a minor 3rd lower than the chord of the major. So since this is in A major, the relative minor tonic chord is F#m. To find the I, IV and V chords of F# minor, you simply play the chords that are a minor 3rd lower than A D and E.

The neat thing is that a lot of the time (though not all!), a melody that harmonizes well in a major key will harmonize well in its relative minor key. In some cases, the notes will form 7ths and other “dissonant” pitches, but these don’t usually pose a problem.

Here’s what that melody above sounds like when harmonized first with major chords, then using minor chords from the relative minor key:

[CLICK to listen]

So most of the time, you simply take the major progression, and lower each chord by a minor 3rd. The simpler the progression, the better it works. You may have to come up with some alternate choices if the original progression is a bit more involved.

The melody above actually harmonizes well by using the relative minor chord progression: F#m  C#m  Bm  F#m.

The reason that you would consider doing this is that it makes your melody sound fresh, even though you’re simply repeating it. And of course, there’s no reason that you must repeat the entire progression down a minor 3rd; you could choose to only change 1 or 2 chords, just enough to give the repeated melody a slightly different sound.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, pentatonic melodies lend themselves well to reharmonizing in this manner.

You can make this kind of harmonizing exercise an experiment: once you’ve written a melody and harmonized it, it might be a good idea to try your melody with different chords, just to see if there are better options than what you first came up with.

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