So you're basically building a song around a melody and adding the notes to accompany that melody. That way you can accentuate whatever arrangement you'd like around your original melody and it gives your song a stronger presence and you can fill in the song that way. Probably best for those who never read music but know a good feel and vibe for a song and build around that sound and make it more fun for the songwriter. Very nice
that's what i've always done. When i started learning guitar, i wasn't taught the usual basic chords right away so i kinda grew up with them as less of a priority. When i compose, i hum a melody in my head and them try to get it right on guitar or piano. I get all kinds of weird chords i never studied or never even knew existed but it sounds good in the end.
This is a legitimate way to write music, this is how music came to be. I’ve recently started taking music theory more seriously, and one of the things I’ve found is that music theory is not a set of rules to define how to write music, but rather a bunch of observations and attempted explanations on why music sounds good. Music came before music theory.
That makes sense. it’s one of the cases where we actually know the egg came before the chicken but we still consult the chicken constantly to advise our songwriting
@@Scottjyeager exactly. music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive..... you dont need any music theory knowledge to write a good song, and if you dont have what it takes naturally, no amount of music theory will help you write interesting music. if you dont/cant hear it in your head first, music theory wont help you.
@@ygrekproject8038 It's simple theory, intervals, chord building, chord progression and note placing, we're not even using measures or rhythms into composition and it's a basic melody, not scales at all or defined riff, just a couple of chords and barely using melody in base of the chords by placing some notes separately (that's why the major pentatonic and only white notes bc the chord progression)
I love this. I am a bassist, and the stuff I can learn from this is fantastic. It's like figuring out how to find a new root note. If it goes well as a 3rd or 7th, then I can base everything around that sort of dynamic and it'll lend itself to the root it wants.
I've been playing guitar for over 10 years and I've never found a video like this which is so simple yet it shows a clear and alternative perspective on chord writing. I reckon you should do a part 2 exploring this idea with modes and borrowed chords too. Big ups
This is true. Sometimes we get lost in the chord analysis, while we know that we can change the chord to almost anything as long as the melody remain the same, it's just matter of taste and style.
Thanks David, yeah it's Jargon heavy for sure. I'd recommend even just google searching when you come across a confusing term. But something that might help is to check out my videos on "Building Major Scales" and also my video on "Diatonic Functions", that should help clear some stuff up. Some of that information is presupposed in this video to a degree
Wow...this made a lot of sense. I kept trying to look at it from a "you need to know this standard chord progression" technique, but this is just building on what you can sing!
great stuff, I asked this on a forum recently. I've had a nice vocal melody knocking around my head and I've been wanting to put chords to it. This explains it perfectly!
New subscriber! This is exactly what I was looking for! I ALWAYS start off with a melody - that's what I have stuck in my head. I've gotten really good at finding that melody on guitar. Now the struggle has been to find the chords to go with that melody so I can harmonize it. I see my mistake - I was trying to use chords using the melody note as the root where I should have been using the third or maybe even the sixth. Gotta go - gotta put this to use!
Thank you …I wrote 80 songs and recorded on UA-cam, Spotify etc. ..half written on piano half on quitar . The chords you are playing are lovely. I tended toward seventh chords . I wrote my songs and taught the chords to the studio session quitar player . There are different ways to play the same chords . It depends on the musician..thank you !
thank you!! i started watching a few of your videos when i was first picking up guitar and the concepts were way over my head, now i think i’ve learned enough to put some of this in to practice. lovely sounds and great explanation as always!!
Damn that's a good idea! Usually I like to come up with chords first, but then alternate one or two notes per chord before each chord change to create my melodies.
I don't know a thing about music theory and don't play any instruments, but I've been doing this thing where I've been using music software to transcribe traditional Celtic melodies by ear, and then I create chord progressions to go with them purely through trial and error. It sounds to me like I'm getting good results, but I'm curious what someone who knows music theory would think if them.
thanks man, in the clutter of youtube guitar lessons, this one is a shining example of no faff all value! keep such videos coming. new subscriber here!
I’ve probably watched like 1000 music YT videos but I think this is the most useful one yet, lol. I’m pretty average at writing music and my chord knowledge is hella basic so this seems like it makes the most sense to me, to reverse engineer progressions.
@@TrevorWongMusic you're welcome! Your content has given me a lot of brilliant new ways to approaching music writing for and with my band :) hope this isn't too cheeky but it would be really cool if you could give our EP a listen? we're called the Karma Violets and the EP is called A New Low, I would love to know what you think of it and any critique would be very much appreciated :)
Hey Wesley, I'm listening to the EP now. It sounds great! I think the feedback would depend on what you guys are going for. I like the changes in texture in the song "the city". If there's one thing I think might help to support the tunes it might be using some back up vocals. I think adding in some extra vocal harmonies in certain parts could really add some extra excitement. Other than that though, really solid! Thanks for sharing.
@@TrevorWongMusic yeah I definitely agree, the band and I have been texturing out the vocals a lot more with the new songs we're writing :) I think the vocals are better towards the end of the EP definitely, we recorded At Peace in the drummers lounge haha, think that's the vocally strongest one as we all sing our own verses and harmonise
Good video. It's just that the caveat of that method is that you might end up with just a thickening of the line rather than an harmonic footing to actually contextualize the melody.
This is so old school. If you had harmonized the melody with a counter point bass line first, then harmonized the two inner voices as per the tonic center utilizing inversions to maintain good voice placement , you’d have invented Baroque music theory. Congratulations, it is a secret and a lost art, taught only in junior college music programs. I’m not kidding, a lot of musicians don’t know this stuff, just some classical and academics.
Great stuff - recommend turning up your guitar volume relative to your voice - listening in a barely noisy environment on airpods, easy to get blown out by the voice after cranking it to hear the guitar.
i believe this is the best way for a rhythmic approach to a chord progression, rather than thinking of cadences or modal harmony i see mathrock bands like delta sleep doing this a lot, they take 2 or 3 7h chords, and the rest is pure rhythmic stuff
I'm really struggling with this please help I've been playing guitar for almost 8 years but I lack of music theory and I can't come up with the harmonization of a melody
I just play what ever comes to me first and flow through what I feel. Some things come to me out of nowhere and they just keep flowing, other times I do have to sit down and work really hard to progress a riff but this does make sense I guess. Really just play what yah want, all people work differently through their creative nature.
@@DaniloSilva-pl3sq No it isn´t just a joke; although I guess i can find a similar quote from the book his wife wrote on him. For the time between Bach and Mozart the melody is just expression of the main harmonic functions; a beautiful melody is a melody that expresses clearly a harmonic content. A good harmonic progression is what develops naturally as good melody. There is more melodies than chord progressions (from the functional point of view) in this sense the function of the harmony comes first in thought, and many times this is what makes that composers do not know anymore where to go in tonal music of the classical style: they lost the underlying frame. Even before Palestrina the rulesfor the melody were already of harmonic and functional nature: you have to go towards the finalis or confinalis. More than this, i tell that harmony means the same for chords and melody, if you come back to the root of this word, that means " a good placement in the order". You can start a musical passage from any musical parameter, but is good to know how this works and wich are the outcomes of different procedures. Depending on style and chracter of your music, depending on wich moment of the music you are, one could also say that good rythm leads to good melody, or even that the right choice of instrument will tell you the best chords (cause many chords cannot be played by guitar , for example); or it can be also good if you compose just the rythm first and make everythiing come from this. A melody can accept 1000000 chords; so it tells not so much about the proper decisions that make a progression good; these are most of the times decisions about voice leading, function and chord tension (or chord density in atonal music). More details you learn with me on patreon, send your materials to me for 1$, tell me about what you want as musician then I give a precise feedback. lesson: ua-cam.com/video/PMQC6ohBcN0/v-deo.html , piece quoting Wagner:ua-cam.com/video/feYY5EdDYrk/v-deo.html, patreon: www.patreon.com/creator-home
@@DaniloSilva-pl3sq a lot of classical music is highly functional following a strict harmony. Even pieces without actual chords you can clearly hear the progression
@Xander Johns Moonlight Sonata 3rd movement has amazing melodies. I also agree that chord progression should come first; an amazing chord progression just automatically wills a myriad of great melodies into life when a suitable conduit (musician) listens to it. Melodies will be so much harder to create and be organic and inspiring when they aren't anchored to bring out the harmonic context that is already swirling around them. It's like choosing a color and then searching what flower would match that color instead of looking at the flower and listening/feeling what colors it wants to have...
Seeing you play those chord voicings makes me realize how much easier and more visual showing/playing chords on the piano is compared to the guitar tbh, nevermind how difficult those voicing are to play in sequence. I know your instrument is the guitar, but it doesn't really translate to me. As a side note, functional harmony may not be the answer to anything outside of western classical music, but the underlying concepts of leading tones for example should still be considered imo.
Great vid, but have a question. i really wanna incorporate this approach into my song writing because the way I write has always been centred around melody. but I have only been playing guitar for two years so I don't know many chord variations of the top of my head. Would it be enough to just google 'chords with 'X note' as the 3rd' and then go from there?
I wanna make an album and call it “Everything I Learned From Trevor Wong” and it’s gonna be sick
Do itt
Oh my god please do it, that sounds rad!
You cant go wong with that...
Have you done it
LMAOOOO
FACT. This is everything, and something we guitarists often overlook. Thanks Trevor!
So you're basically building a song around a melody and adding the notes to accompany that melody. That way you can accentuate whatever arrangement you'd like around your original melody and it gives your song a stronger presence and you can fill in the song that way. Probably best for those who never read music but know a good feel and vibe for a song and build around that sound and make it more fun for the songwriter. Very nice
My favorite chord progression is Amaj7-Emaj7-F#m7-F#m11-E7-Emaj7. I made it up myself and I think it flows quite nicely.
that's what i've always done. When i started learning guitar, i wasn't taught the usual basic chords right away so i kinda grew up with them as less of a priority. When i compose, i hum a melody in my head and them try to get it right on guitar or piano. I get all kinds of weird chords i never studied or never even knew existed but it sounds good in the end.
Humming a melody or beat boxing a rhythm first are for-sure the only good music writing tricks in my arsenal lol.
This is a legitimate way to write music, this is how music came to be. I’ve recently started taking music theory more seriously, and one of the things I’ve found is that music theory is not a set of rules to define how to write music, but rather a bunch of observations and attempted explanations on why music sounds good. Music came before music theory.
That makes sense. it’s one of the cases where we actually know the egg came before the chicken but we still consult the chicken constantly to advise our songwriting
@@Scottjyeager exactly. music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive..... you dont need any music theory knowledge to write a good song, and if you dont have what it takes naturally, no amount of music theory will help you write interesting music. if you dont/cant hear it in your head first, music theory wont help you.
After practicing for about a year, I feel really nice being able to understand 80% of the video
how the fuck did you understand that much with just a year, good for you bro
@@ygrekproject8038 It's simple theory, intervals, chord building, chord progression and note placing, we're not even using measures or rhythms into composition and it's a basic melody, not scales at all or defined riff, just a couple of chords and barely using melody in base of the chords by placing some notes separately (that's why the major pentatonic and only white notes bc the chord progression)
I love this. I am a bassist, and the stuff I can learn from this is fantastic. It's like figuring out how to find a new root note. If it goes well as a 3rd or 7th, then I can base everything around that sort of dynamic and it'll lend itself to the root it wants.
This guy has helped me more than any other youtuber. I am grateful that you chose to share your knowledge with us.
this video has helped my (piano) playing instantly more than any other i've ever watched. thank you
I've been playing guitar for over 10 years and I've never found a video like this which is so simple yet it shows a clear and alternative perspective on chord writing. I reckon you should do a part 2 exploring this idea with modes and borrowed chords too.
Big ups
This is true. Sometimes we get lost in the chord analysis, while we know that we can change the chord to almost anything as long as the melody remain the same, it's just matter of taste and style.
I never understand any of the vocabulary or music theory you’re talking about but goddamn I love these videos
Thanks David, yeah it's Jargon heavy for sure. I'd recommend even just google searching when you come across a confusing term. But something that might help is to check out my videos on "Building Major Scales" and also my video on "Diatonic Functions", that should help clear some stuff up. Some of that information is presupposed in this video to a degree
Trevor Wong thank you so much man I’m gonna check it out when I get off work 💕
Same here, but my emo music got better since I'm watching him 😉
Your pfp and username. Gives me nostalgia
i wanna buy the t-rex please
this is a really interesting approach to writing a song, and honestly melody is the most important thing in a song
This is great for any genre of song writing, not just math rock. You're up there with my top guitar teachers on UA-cam
Man i must say you have transformed my playing with your chord ideas and scales. Thanks man
Lost me at “be aware of the key you’re playing in” 😂
Lmfao same but I kept watching anyway
its way past my level but i think im learning something
Me too man lmao
Idk if it helps but by key he means like key signature. There are 12 keys. The one he used is C major that doesn’t contain any sharps or flats.
yep, same
Wow, this is such an awesome concept. Thank you for posting this!!
Really wish I had stuff like this back when I first picked up my guitar in middle school.
I’m so grateful for your passion for music and for sharing
Thanks for your videos and this one in particular. I wish i knew your channel waaaay earlier
even I, a self studying pianist learns a lot from this got yourself another subscriber!
Wow...this made a lot of sense. I kept trying to look at it from a "you need to know this standard chord progression" technique, but this is just building on what you can sing!
great stuff, I asked this on a forum recently. I've had a nice vocal melody knocking around my head and I've been wanting to put chords to it. This explains it perfectly!
Thanks for sharing! Another tool to add to the toolbox
Quality. Every upload. Thanks brother!
thanks joshua!
New subscriber! This is exactly what I was looking for! I ALWAYS start off with a melody - that's what I have stuck in my head. I've gotten really good at finding that melody on guitar. Now the struggle has been to find the chords to go with that melody so I can harmonize it. I see my mistake - I was trying to use chords using the melody note as the root where I should have been using the third or maybe even the sixth. Gotta go - gotta put this to use!
Smooth. Great guitarist that looks like a great human being. Thanks trevor.
I just founds gold here excellent explanation, it makes everything easy to digest. Keep it up!
Thank you …I wrote 80 songs and recorded on UA-cam, Spotify etc. ..half written on piano half on quitar . The chords you are playing are lovely. I tended toward seventh chords . I wrote my songs and taught the chords to the studio session quitar player . There are different ways to play the same chords . It depends on the musician..thank you !
thank you!! i started watching a few of your videos when i was first picking up guitar and the concepts were way over my head, now i think i’ve learned enough to put some of this in to practice. lovely sounds and great explanation as always!!
Thanks for the video!
It helps to write the chord names you're playing to better understand
Very underrated channel giving us great content for free. Thank you sir.
Thanks man, been looking for help on this 🙏🙇♂️
Took me two years with a guitar teacher, but I finally understand this video a 100% now
Damn that's a good idea! Usually I like to come up with chords first, but then alternate one or two notes per chord before each chord change to create my melodies.
God that is so amazing. Thank you for sharing. Really encourages me to focus on theory too.
Oh my god, this is amazing, you have no idea how much you've helped me.
You can seriously teach, I’m kinda blown away :)
Just discovered your vids and probably gonna watch several
Thankyou for sharing a good lesson 👏🏻👏🏻
I don't know a thing about music theory and don't play any instruments, but I've been doing this thing where I've been using music software to transcribe traditional Celtic melodies by ear, and then I create chord progressions to go with them purely through trial and error. It sounds to me like I'm getting good results, but I'm curious what someone who knows music theory would think if them.
Really interesting video ! Thank you for sharing !
thanks man, in the clutter of youtube guitar lessons, this one is a shining example of no faff all value! keep such videos coming. new subscriber here!
this needs a million views. im dead certain you just unlocked a fragment of my brain.
Bro this is the best guitar content!
Very strong concise video lesson!!!! Thank you!!!🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾
You're all right Trevor! Good video. Not too much at once and keep it loose. Nice.
I’ve probably watched like 1000 music YT videos but I think this is the most useful one yet, lol.
I’m pretty average at writing music and my chord knowledge is hella basic so this seems like it makes the most sense to me, to reverse engineer progressions.
Just found this channel, great explanations. An in depth video about all the kinds of chords shapes you can use to stack a note would be awesome!
mind blowing!
Even if it goes fast, I like the short video, you can get the overall idea within 5 minutes and then dig in. Thanks a lot!
Saved - this is absolute gold. Such a great way to create progressions - you've earned a sub from me :)
I didn't understand 100% of the terminology but felt like I understood the concepts perfectly. Your tutorial is impressively direct. Cheers
DEFINITELY gonna try that melody on 1 string thing! That's genius.
Nice melodies 🔥 i've been playing jazz a few months and i've always wanted to get into this sort of lofi sound without it sounding out, thanks!
Thank you this was brilliant and really helpful, loving your content :)
Thanks Wesley!
@@TrevorWongMusic you're welcome! Your content has given me a lot of brilliant new ways to approaching music writing for and with my band :) hope this isn't too cheeky but it would be really cool if you could give our EP a listen? we're called the Karma Violets and the EP is called A New Low, I would love to know what you think of it and any critique would be very much appreciated :)
@@wesleyayres7017 Thanks! Oh yeah I'd love to give it a listen. I'll search it up!
Hey Wesley, I'm listening to the EP now. It sounds great! I think the feedback would depend on what you guys are going for. I like the changes in texture in the song "the city". If there's one thing I think might help to support the tunes it might be using some back up vocals. I think adding in some extra vocal harmonies in certain parts could really add some extra excitement. Other than that though, really solid! Thanks for sharing.
@@TrevorWongMusic yeah I definitely agree, the band and I have been texturing out the vocals a lot more with the new songs we're writing :) I think the vocals are better towards the end of the EP definitely, we recorded At Peace in the drummers lounge haha, think that's the vocally strongest one as we all sing our own verses and harmonise
a melody is so much more fun than a chord progression to create, its freer, 10000 times more creative and inspiring,, and even simpler.
Unless you're a jazz cat
This was very informative. Thanks so much.
Wow! Gonna write my new song using this technique for sure! Thank you so much🙏
OMG this is life changing.
Lovin the hand movement
Muchísimas gracias por este video !
Good video. It's just that the caveat of that method is that you might end up with just a thickening of the line rather than an harmonic footing to actually contextualize the melody.
Very good video, thankyou!
Great teaching and fascinating information. Thank you!
Yep, 7th chords are my friends.
They are everyone's friends. Most just don't know it.
Just discovered A7 and how it really makes a dope melody contribution.
@@Jillady try A9 now! Been experimenting with this one
@@cameronfoy3662 I’m on it like flies on shit.
@@cameronfoy3662 at sixth fret or barred on 11th?
Excellent. Thank you
Great video, man. I hope to understand all of it one day. Keep it up, Trevor! (Also, that's a SWEET ax!)
This is so old school. If you had harmonized the melody with a counter point bass line first, then harmonized the two inner voices as per the tonic center utilizing inversions to maintain good voice placement , you’d have invented Baroque music theory. Congratulations, it is a secret and a lost art, taught only in junior college music programs. I’m not kidding, a lot of musicians don’t know this stuff, just some classical and academics.
Can you do more of these but for jazz guitar
Fantastic! Love it. Thanks you.
Excellent instruction. Thank you!
This is gold!
Very nice... Well done. I subscribed.
This is SO Good. Thank you sir
Great stuff - recommend turning up your guitar volume relative to your voice - listening in a barely noisy environment on airpods, easy to get blown out by the voice after cranking it to hear the guitar.
Super well explained man. Love it.
i believe this is the best way for a rhythmic approach to a chord progression, rather than thinking of cadences or modal harmony
i see mathrock bands like delta sleep doing this a lot, they take 2 or 3 7h chords, and the rest is pure rhythmic stuff
thanks for the vid. it helped me a lot
Thank you, greetings from Argentina
Cool video! You always inspire me! I've wrote my own version of your example. 😁
Awesome! I'd be excited to hear that, definitely keep experimenting with this technique as the sky's the limit
Great video, Sir.
Amazing lesson, thank you!
Wow!! thank you!!
Nice vid, Trevor! Cheers 🍻
great video, super helpful!
I'm really struggling with this please help I've been playing guitar for almost 8 years but I lack of music theory and I can't come up with the harmonization of a melody
thank you! very helpful
I just play what ever comes to me first and flow through what I feel. Some things come to me out of nowhere and they just keep flowing, other times I do have to sit down and work really hard to progress a riff but this does make sense I guess. Really just play what yah want, all people work differently through their creative nature.
Congratulations
LMAO NO CHILL
"melody secret: chord progression first" Bach
Is it just a joke? I would like to know about this
@@DaniloSilva-pl3sq No it isn´t just a joke; although I guess i can find a similar quote from the book his wife wrote on him. For the time between Bach and Mozart the melody is just expression of the main harmonic functions; a beautiful melody is a melody that expresses clearly a harmonic content. A good harmonic progression is what develops naturally as good melody. There is more melodies than chord progressions (from the functional point of view) in this sense the function of the harmony comes first in thought, and many times this is what makes that composers do not know anymore where to go in tonal music of the classical style: they lost the underlying frame. Even before Palestrina the rulesfor the melody were already of harmonic and functional nature: you have to go towards the finalis or confinalis. More than this, i tell that harmony means the same for chords and melody, if you come back to the root of this word, that means " a good placement in the order". You can start a musical passage from any musical parameter, but is good to know how this works and wich are the outcomes of different procedures. Depending on style and chracter of your music, depending on wich moment of the music you are, one could also say that good rythm leads to good melody, or even that the right choice of instrument will tell you the best chords (cause many chords cannot be played by guitar , for example); or it can be also good if you compose just the rythm first and make everythiing come from this. A melody can accept 1000000 chords; so it tells not so much about the proper decisions that make a progression good; these are most of the times decisions about voice leading, function and chord tension (or chord density in atonal music). More details you learn with me on patreon, send your materials to me for 1$, tell me about what you want as musician then I give a precise feedback. lesson: ua-cam.com/video/PMQC6ohBcN0/v-deo.html , piece quoting Wagner:ua-cam.com/video/feYY5EdDYrk/v-deo.html, patreon: www.patreon.com/creator-home
@@DaniloSilva-pl3sq a lot of classical music is highly functional following a strict harmony. Even pieces without actual chords you can clearly hear the progression
@Xander Johns Moonlight Sonata 3rd movement has amazing melodies. I also agree that chord progression should come first; an amazing chord progression just automatically wills a myriad of great melodies into life when a suitable conduit (musician) listens to it. Melodies will be so much harder to create and be organic and inspiring when they aren't anchored to bring out the harmonic context that is already swirling around them. It's like choosing a color and then searching what flower would match that color instead of looking at the flower and listening/feeling what colors it wants to have...
This was so helpful
this went from 0 to advanced in less than a minute
Thank you Trevor!
So many youtubers gesticulate because someone told them to do it. If you don’t normally do it then don’t. It doesn’t work.
MY EARS HAVE BEEN BLESSED?!! Wow
Absolute gold
Thank you- I’ll give that a go as I grow.
Seeing you play those chord voicings makes me realize how much easier and more visual showing/playing chords on the piano is compared to the guitar tbh, nevermind how difficult those voicing are to play in sequence. I know your instrument is the guitar, but it doesn't really translate to me. As a side note, functional harmony may not be the answer to anything outside of western classical music, but the underlying concepts of leading tones for example should still be considered imo.
Great vid, but have a question. i really wanna incorporate this approach into my song writing because the way I write has always been centred around melody. but I have only been playing guitar for two years so I don't know many chord variations of the top of my head. Would it be enough to just google 'chords with 'X note' as the 3rd' and then go from there?
Great 😊 lesson
This is amazing.