Breaking the rules of tonality, how do you do it "right"? (Page 2 of 4)

I had a teacher who said the root word in reharmonize is "harm." I think he was the same one who said the root word in analyze is "anal."

Another thing to try: hold one note and see how many chords you can spell around it whether you seem to change the key or not.

You guys are gonna make me crack music theory textbooks again…

I am terrible at this stuff, but I've always found musictheory.net to be a particularly helpful little primer.

Interesting topic.

I think that the more knowledge about harmony you have, the easier you´ll be able to break the rules. By the way, one should have the criteria to discover when the rules should be broken and whent they shouldn´t.

As it has been said here, you can give totally different harmony to a given note, and of course, on the contrary, you can create very different melodies over a given chord or over a chord progression. In theory, any sound can be preceded or followed by any sound, and any chord can be preceded or followed by any chord, being the only judgement basis, the way it sounds. Of course, there are common chord progressions and scales which fit them easily. (In fact, jazz players tend to think in scales and chords as two different expressions of the same thing). Knowing this kind of relationships between chords and melody can be useful if you want to explore new sounds and break the rules of tonality.  It could bealso  useful to know how to harmonize a given scale.

Theoretically, any note could be played in most situations, the key here is, HOW you play it. Do you play it over a strong or a weak beat? At which volume do you play it? How do you attack it? Which not precedes it? to which note it will be leaded? In traditional instruments (knowing the tecnique of the instrument) it is easier to give the proper expression to a note that does not belong to the tonality, however I think that it can be made also in chipmusic.

Finally, the disonance must not necessary be in the main melodic part, What about a disonance on the bass line? Just listen to jazz walking bass players and you´ll have a huge inspiration resource there.

I think chipmusic needs more chord tension. just take a note from a chord, and flatten it by a half step. Or put two notes a half step away from each other in the same chord, that can have fun results. Sometimes it just sounds wrong, but other times it's super cool.

Just checked this out. Yeah, you're right. It has an underlying feeling of coherency that permeates throughout, and it has moments of a clear understanding of the basic "conventional" rules, and the dissonance is meaningful. And it still has an element of "melody" to it, however disjointed.

I feel all hoity toity, but I can't describe it any other way =q

Thanks for posting that, btw.

Yeah, you're right. I should have said "Getting away from conventional western tonality" instead.

And Bach is awesome. He made a composition based on the letters of his name, (H is A, if I'm not mistaken) Edit: It's actually B. That's awesome.

Last edited by SketchMan3 (Aug 8, 2012 6:13 am)

For those who are ready;

No matter how complex your notes, there are only four functions in harmony: tonic, dominant, subdominant, and transitional. Regardless of how you make your notes or how consonant they sound, your song will still follow those for functions, even if you define a tritone stack or flat ninth as "tonic." Once you understand this, there are no rules.

It is also permissible to drive tension by a means other than harmony, such as rhythm, lyric rhyme, or outright storytelling. Just something to think about.

Seriously. I'm not even kidding-I could write theses on ZZZV chord modulations. Do you play piano?