Music Composition DUMmIES

Chapter 10 Chapter 10: Composing with Chords ........................................................................... In This ...

There are two types of major chords: Diatonic chordsare built from the seven notes of a major key signature. The letter name of ...

Minor ninth Minor seventh flat fifth No matter which key you’re in, each of those specific chords comes with its particular so ...

Major seventh ..................................................................................... Major seventh chords are “pr ...

Dominant seventh .............................................................................. Dominant seventh chords are “sas ...

Minor sixth .......................................................................................... Minor sixth chords are “d ...

Ninth..................................................................................................... Ninth chords are “ene ...

Diminished .......................................................................................... Diminished chords are “dar ...

Minor 7, flat 5 / half-diminished........................................................ There are two different names for the ...

It is also important to note that the character of a chord is strongly depen- dent upon its surroundings. For example, a dark an ...

The examples in Figures 10-16 through 10-18 use the C major chord to illustrate. If you already have a melody, you will find the ...

Rhythmic Movement .................................................................................. When composing with chords, ...

Chord Progressions ..................................................................................... One way to easily build ...

As far as these rules go, they just mean (in the case of major chord progres- sions) that a ii chord (such as D minor if you’re ...

Authentic cadences ........................................................................... Authentic cadencesare the most ob ...

Deceptive or interrupted cadences ................................................ A deceptive cadence, or interrupted cadence, ...

Half-cadences are the only ones that don’t end this way. With a half-cadence, the musical phrase ends at the point of tension — ...

You can use tones from within the chords (called, as we mentioned, chord tones) and string these tones together in various ways ...

If you step away from the tone before stepping back to it, it is called a neigh- boring tone (Figure 10-27). Using chord changes ...

Figure 10-28 shows the example again with all the non-chord tones we added. Now let’s add some passing tones to go along with th ...