How to Harmonize Every Melody Note with a New Chord
("Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" Reharmonization)
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A good way to begin working on basic reharmonization is to come up with a different chord for every note of the melody. Similar to how a big band arranger would use soli techniques to harmonize a melody, as solo piano arrangers we can utilize the same harmonization techniques to harmonize a melody to a tune.
In order to come up with a new chord for each melody note 1) exhaust all available tritone substitutions and exploit all available chromatic approaches. 2) another approach is to CHROMATICALLY DESCEND into a target chord (i.e. Gb7-Fma7-E7-Eb7-Dmi7) See how we put that into practice over the first 8 bars of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" vs the basic chord changes & melody that you might find on a lead sheet. |