America: Harmonization Project: Part 2

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman, and in this lesson we're going to be looking at ways to take your harmonization project to the next level. Let's get started by looking at the lead sheet. Alright. On my own, here is the harmonization that I came up with. Remember, I want you to choose chords that sound good to you, so please don't go through and just copy my chords. I'm just, I'm using this as an example. I hope that your chords are different from mine, because today another thing I need you to do: 'Arranged by' if you ever see this in a piece of music, it's saying that the melody wasn't created by this person. An arrangement is when a musician takes a melody as it is, and then turns it into something new by adding harmony and writing out some notes that your accompaniment can play to make the melody sound even fancier. So you're going to put your name up here for 'Arranged by'. You are the arranger, or you're going to be the arranger of this song. So when you make an arrangement, one of the first choices you get to make are, what chords am I going to use? Now, if you've already done the previous lesson, you've done this step already. Now on your own, hopefully you've figured out chords. Again they don't have to match my chords. Now if you haven't done this yet, please pause the video. You can go back to the previous video if you need some help, or on your own choose chords for each of these boxes, but make sure that you like how those chords sound with the melody. How you'll know you like it is use your right hand to play the melody line. Use your left hand to play the chords, and see how they sound together. Now assuming you've already done that, then you're ready for our next step, which is going to be we're actually going to write out the notes the left hand is going to play. In the past when we've done a harmonization, we've just let you improvise what the left hand does by looking at the chord symbols, but when you do an arrangement, it's most common to actually right out the exact notes you're going to play so anyone else could not just improvise the chords, but actually play your arrangement, your version of how to play those chords. And you know by now that there's lots of ways you can do a chord. We have an E-flat major. We can play it in a blocked style or we could do a broken chord. See, I'm taking the notes of E-flat major. There's lots of ways we could do that. Now since this is a patriotic song, I want a nice strong sound. That's why I'd like to start with a block chord. And I can see that this is going to last for 2 beats. So I'm just going to draw an E-flat major chord, and make it last for 2 beats by making it a half note, and my flats are automatically taken care of by my key signature. So I don't have to draw the flats in front of the notes, and now I have 'my coun-', and then on 'try' I need an A-flat major chord. So I could do it like that, but I feel like that's too big of a jump. So I'm going to use an inversion of A-flat major. Here's first inversion, here's second inversion. Second inversion flows really nicely from this I chord. I like how that sounds. So I'm going to use this, so I look at the notes I have. I have an E-flat. I have an A-flat, and I have a middle C. Now, when notes are above this middle line of the staff, that's when the stems go down, generally. That's the rule of thumb. Notice that these notes are stem up, and that's because they're below this middle line, but because they don't want the stems to stick up too far off the staff. Once you hit that middle line, the stems flip down. And that's why I'm drawing my stems down, is these notes are all above this middle line. Now if you have some notes above the line, some below, you just use your judgment, but as a rule of thumb we try to keep the stem pointing towards this middle part of the staff just so it doesn't stick up. Look, if my stem went up it's going to crash into 'My' of 'My country', okay. We don't want that. 'My country' doesn't want that either. So, so far I've used blocked chords. You know what should we do for this B-flat? Let's see here. I mentioned last time that this B-flat, I like that sound in root position. Notice I could do first inversion. But that doesn't have quite as strong of a sound to me. I like the strength of that root position chord. But now I'm starting to get bored of just blocked chords the whole time. So what can I do on ''tis of thee,'? I'm going to show you something fancy we could do. Notice what I did? ''tis of thee,'. See how these notes are stepping up here? What I just did is one of these fancy techniques I said I was going to show you. So we're going to start off with this blocked chord ''tis,' and then 'of thee.' Doesn't that sound nice? So my left hand's also going to step up, but not playing the exact same notes. I'm going in similar motion, but I'm playing a C D. What interval from here to here? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, that's called a tenth, basically an octave plus a third. Okay, and we've seen before that thirds going in similar motion can sound really beautiful. While tenths can also sound really beautiful. ''tis of thee.' I really like how that sounds. Now when I get ...