Music Theory by Example

By Don Stare

 

Part 1

This is designed to be the beginning of a series that shows how you can make your own music, learn some of the theory behind that process and help better understand the music you hear and like.

 

The Four components in Songs and Music are :

 

Lyrics: words spoken or sung

 

Melody: main theme or tune that tells the musical story

 

Harmony: is made up from a progression of chords giving strength and context to the melody and is the crucial element in any composition.

 

Structure:  the sections in a song and how they relate to one another.

 An example is the AABA Structure (sometimes noted that way in various fake books).

 This identifies a section A   representing a recognizable basic musical theme, which is repeated after the first section usually with different lyrics. The title of the song can usually be found in the first or last line of   section A. The section designated as B contains different chords(Harmony)and provides some relief from the musical themes of a section A. The return to a section A creates a cohesive and satisfying ending.

 

 The Verse/Chorus/Verse/Chorus Structure Another familiar structure:

 There is some contrast employed in these two sections but a verse usually will feel incomplete without a Chorus which serves as a type of climax to the verse. Unlike the B section in the previous structure, the chorus doesn’t lead into a new musical direction. The main message and title can usually be found in the chorus.

 

 Additional Song Sections referred to as Middle Eight, Bridge and Solo are used to compensate for a lack of contrast between Verse and chorus sections.

 

 Middle Eight and Bridge sections provide an alternative theme and can also be found in the AABA structure of some songs. 

 

Middle Eight structure is usually 8 bars long and provides a brief diversion before leading back to the chorus.

 

Bridge section is used like a B section providing different musicality to the piece

 

Solo usually repeats a section A, B, Verse or Chorus but is usually played by an instrument as a climatic or post-climatic contrast even though it is similar to other sections

.

Example

Let's create a piece of music using the AABA Structure.

 

For this example, we will start with a melody (although we could have started with the Harmony (Chord) progressions as well).

 I don’t have a melody rattling around in my head at the moment, so I’m going to utilize one of many techniques that more or less produce a random selection of alphabetic letters that are also used to name the tones in musical scales. Select a word or word and take the letters in the order which they occur that have the same letter as ones on the musical scale A, B, C, D, E, F, G corresponding to the notes on a typical piano keyboard and apply them to the Treble cleft on musical staff.

 

I selected the word “CABBAGE”, and applied the common letters (all of them in this case)  to notes on a Musical Staff using my sequencing software. This forming of a melody fragment will be used to determine the Musical Key based on the notes of this fragment. Any other, word , groups of words, random notes, birds singing, a person humming etc can be used to start a melody fragment. There is no law or rule here that says you can’t modify it after first listening to it prior to the key determination stage.

 

 The common letters from the word CABBAGE were entered on the upper staff (Treble clef) which represents tones we are accustomed to hearing when playing notes above middle C on a piano keyboard. I started with note C(midi note C5) which is 1 octave above middle C(Midi note C4)as the first note and followed with the A, B,B,A,G,E. Then I repeated the notes from the word “CABBAGE” but this time, starting with middle C (for some variation), then A, B, B, A, G, E. This would be Section A .This was then copied and pasted to create the second Section A for the Structure AABA.

 

Before designing the contrasting B section you can listen to what we have so far, by clicking on this link to cabbage midi

 

The reason we are stopping here is we need to determine what Musical Scale Key best fits our melody fragment, and give us the flexibility to tweak the melody fragment before creating the B contrasting section. Use the Key Selection link and follow the procedure used to determine the Major Scale Key. Close the window or press the Back arrow on your browser to return when finished. This file and others we will be using can be downloaded and used independently.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Now that you’re back and ready to move on, the key selection example has helped us determine that our melody is in the Key of C major. We now can perform any tweaking of the A section melody along with the addition of Harmony parts before starting on Section B to complete this AABA Structured form of our example piece of music.

 

Adding Harmony

We have already determined the Key of C for this piece based on our melody fragment. Now we can look at the chords that can be used to fill in the harmony using progressions that have been found to be musically pleasing for this key. There are many different ways to determine which chords to try. A simple chord chart can be used to get started. We will show other progression maps and explain how they are used and the theory behind them later.