# What to do when the melody doesn't immediately match the chord?



## Hoopyfrood (Jun 13, 2022)

Hi, so I'm trying to write something in the style of Philip Glass's excellent Tales from the Loop score (eg fairly minimalist, piano and cello as a duet), and in the process I've again found myself facing an issue I've been encountering lately that I don't know what the best solution is for resolving. Basically I'm used to writing things where it's obvious when a chord change has happened, but when that's not the case I'm not sure what to do. I have questions about two scenarios:

1) In the Tales from the Loop title track, Glass uses a piano to play arpeggios as chords and uses what I'm told is parsimonious voice leading to mostly only change one note in the arp to make new chords. So I did something similar (except with a cello)
View attachment arp.mp3






I assume there's no way around using inversions like I did in chords 2 and 3, but that means that for chord two for example, you don't actually know the chord has changed until you get to the third note. So should I be trying to match the melody to Eb from the start of bar 3, or from that third note?

Second one, I've been obsessed lately with the technique I haven't been able to find a name for (if there is one) where you play a short repeating motif but only change the first note each time. Well usually I change the first note, but in this one it's the second.

View attachment piano.mp3







So similar question, whatever I end up using for chords or accompaniment, should I be matching the changes to the start of the bar or to the changing note?


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## AndreasHe (Jun 15, 2022)

Hi,

sure you can first create your ARP with variations. But I would not do it. The workflow I would recommend:

First rule: Music is about tension and release. So let's define it through a chord progression as it is the main guide for the ear.

Here I selected C min.

View attachment Mixdown.mp3








Now you can already create an arp:

View attachment Mixdown(2).mp3







Let's focus on the melody:

And yes, the beginning of the bar is a good place for the release. Means the melody inside a bar leads to the first note of the next bar.

View attachment Mixdown(3).mp3







In the background I left the chord to see what is going on.
The red squares is the release.

So what do we have now?
- The main chord builds a tension/release over the whole song as it comes back to C-min.
- The melody comes mainly back to release on the first bar.
- A melody has something that I call "micro tension" (my term). E.g. first note is not C but then it releases to C.

Let's modify the arp to make it more interesting. The progression is:

C min - C min - Ab maj - G min - C min

To have a bit more notes, I extended it to:

C min9 - C min9 - Ab maj9 - G min7 b9 - C min9

By the way, I recommend the plugin "Scaler 2" for such things.


Resulting in a more interesting arp:


View attachment Mixdown(5).mp3



Oh wait.. forum does not let me to attach another image. Will post another ...


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## AndreasHe (Jun 15, 2022)

The red is the melody now.


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## PedroPH (Jun 18, 2022)

I wouldn't worry about the chord change only becoming obvious until the third note of the arpeggio. I don't think it matters most of the time. If it sounds funny, change it.

Chords tend to change periodically. There is a "harmonic rythm". I'm not sure I understand fully the second question, but I think it's related to this. The chords tend to change periodically (e.g. at the beginning of bars).


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## waveheavy (Sep 22, 2022)

It can also be about a pattern. The following patterns get their sound from bass movement and using different note choices from a scale...


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