Getting Inside Harmony 1

Use harmony creatively in your playing and writing. Learn to hear and modify chord progressions, improvise effectively from chord to chord and deepen your understanding of music's inner workings.

You've been in music for years. You know how to play, but you're ready for more. Getting Inside Harmony 1 will help you with the next step: learning harmony so that you hear and recognize chord progressions and use them creatively in your playing and writing. Through a combination of activities (listening, thinking, visualizing, vocalizing, writing, and playing), you'll open your ears and deepen your understanding of the inner workings of harmony in a broad range of contemporary styles. You'll find that you learn songs more easily and can transpose them on sight. And you'll be able to equip yourself with the best chord scale choices for arranging and improvising. Mastering the mechanics of harmony's chord progression patterns is an indispensable tool for both players and writers, and will help improvisers, composers, and arrangers deepen their understanding of the inner workings of a broad range of contemporary styles including standard tunes, popular music and jazz. By the end of this course, you will:

• Recognize different chord types and standard chord progression patterns
• Find the notes that work best (as melody and as harmony) with each chord in the progression
• Create keyboard accompaniment voicings that will allow you to learn and experiment with any chord progression.
• Improvise effectively from chord to chord
• Spot and repair faulty or incomplete chord progressions often found on many lead sheets
• Modify the chord progression in a way that will enhance the character of the music and reflect your own musical expression

For more course information visit Berklee Music