WARNING

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I assume that you know how to read music.
If I'm wrong write me in the comments and I'll write a post about it.
In any case, I will attach to each sheet its played version.
Click on the sheets to hear the audio.

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Why don't we play random?

Have you ever listened to a baby playing piano? Does it sound cool or does it sound weird and not appealing?
You may like it if we are this kind of person, but normally a composer would like to make a song that gives a particular feeling. A love song, a song about sadness, a song about eating some good damn yoghurt.

Whatever his purpose might be, the simplest way to write a song is to focus on functional harmony. To understand what it is we need to talk about scales.

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What's a scale?

A scale is a set of notes played one after another, from the lowest to the highest.
Choosing a scale is similar to select a language. By choosing a scale you are restricting yourself to a particular set of notes and this gives a particular mood to your piece.
So what are the scales used more often? What are the feelings they give?

Common scales

Major scale

C major scale
The major scale has an happy and calm feeling. Notice how the seventh note leads to the eighth.

Natural minor scale

A natural minor scale
The natural minor scale has an sad and dark feeling. Try to feel the mood of this scale.

Harmonic minor scale

A harmonic minor scale
The harmonic minor scale has an sad and ethnic mood. The seventh leads to the eighth note.

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What does it means to be in scale?

When you are in scale you are playing only a particular set of notes. To be in scale means that the all the notes and all the chords you play are taken from the scale.

Let's try to understand what does it mean.

We want to write a piece in C major scale.

We want to build a triad on the first note, C. We take the notes a third apart one another.
The triad we built is C E G, C major chord.

Now let's try with the triad on the second note, D. The triad we built is D F A, D minor chord.

Similarly we can write all the other chords on the scale.

Now that we have introduced this structure, let's understand how this is useful and how it is so important in harmony.

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Functional Harmony

What is Harmony?

You don't know what harmony is? Check it out here.

In harmony we want to understand the chord progression and how the this gives a particular mood to the piece.

Harmonic Language

We understood how we can build a series of chords from a scale. Each triad is built from a note from the scale. This note is called root note.
This means that to identify a chord we just need to tell its root note; i.e. if we are in C major scale and we want to tell someone we are playing the A minor chord we can just say we are building the chord on the 6th note from the scale.

In harmony we name the chords from a scale with their root number. The number is written in roman numeral. The numeral is uppercase if the chord is major, lowercase otherwise.
In C major scale, the C major chord is I; the D minor chord is ii; the E minor is iii and so on.

Progressions

We have now talked about the fundamentals of harmony.
In the next post we'll talk about a progressions, what they are and how we can build one.

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I hope you found this post interesting.
Thanks for listening and see you at the next post!

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What is a Chord and why should I care?
What is Music Theory and why should I care?
Wonder who am I? Click here!