Fundamental: Music Theory, Harmony

In this edition of the Fundamental series, you continue to learn the music theory and practice that forms an integral part of any dance musicians production skills – this time you will be concentrating on chords and harmony – more specifically the design of harmony, the composition, and construction of chords, chord structures and flow, progressions, and the use of pads and strings.

.
For this tutorial, you will focus on the musical theory and practical applications for the composition, programming, production, and engineering of harmony and pads/strings for dance records. Although it could be argued that some dance records do not employ harmony, many do, and those that don’t (such as Tech House or Techno) do benefit from an understanding of chord design as many producers will compose and then sample a chord to create their stabs. So the skills you will learn in this tutorial are important to your music production.

You will cover in-depth the music theory for chords. We introduce you to the theory of how both chords and chordal structures (harmony) are composed. This includes a look at how chord progressions typically evolve and how this theory applies to every chord progression. The sessions then move on to cover the principles behind chord composition, structure, programming, synthesis, editing, and processing of pads and strings in order to add the all-important harmony that can be central to many dance records.

Note: for this tutorial, you should already have a basic understanding of musical scales, as discussed in Fundamental: Music Theory, Bass.