you everybody my name is Jeff Schneider and I'm making a video today on reharmonization now the the melody that you just heard I'm sure you've heard it before it's mary had a little lamb and I wanted to use this particular song to demonstrate how I go about reharmonization so the first step to be harmonizing a tune is to make sure you're familiar with the melody obviously mary had a little lamb is an easy melody and that's why we're using it for today you know how it goes the next step is to make sure you're familiar with the original harmony mary had a little lamb is some very has some very simple harmony just really makes use of the one chord in the five chord something like that just making use of C&G the next step to be harmonizing really comes down to a lot of harmonic exploration so what I do is I take a look at each individual melody note so for instance starting with this e and then trying out some different chords that work with this e so obviously C major works because E is the third but what if we made a the major seventh in that case it would be F major seven where he is the major seven what if we made easy the nine on like a minor nine chord that would be D minor nine it would sound like this alrighty let's do one more what if he was the sharp nine that would be on it like a D flat seven sharp nine something like this alright so you have all of these different options and it really depends on what kind of sound you're looking for the best advice I can give you is just to try a bunch of different ideas different options here using different chords and then seeing or hearing what you like best one other important side note is to remember that it's not all about each individual chord a big part has to do with how one chord leads to the next so careful not to get lost in the trees and lose sight of the forest every once in a while kind of step back and play one chord going to the next so one approach to reharmonization is using a single chord for each individual melody note now that's what I actually did at the beginning of the rearm I played at the the top of the video and this is what it sounded like now that can be very complex and at times a bit chaotic if you're not careful so what I'm referring to here is using a cord for each individual melody note another approach is to use one cord for a few melody notes something like this maybe so in that situation we have or in that example we have fewer cords but the same amount of melody notes both approaches work work well it's just a matter of what sound you're looking for and the other field so let's go back to what I was doing before and let's break that down a little bit so we started in c-major which is the original first court of the original harmony so that works well and what I'm doing here is a descending baseline so if I just played the bass line it sounds like this all right so that's a bit of of diatonic and then it goes chromatic and that structure of the descending base line really works nicely it gives the it gives all these kind of crazy jazz chords some some structure and it makes it easier to digest for the listener so I'll play it one more time and those chords specifically our C major that's a G over a B that's an a minor 7 this is like a you could call us an F minor 6 over a flat there's a few other names you could call it a D diminished over a flat I'll think of it as an F minor 6 over a flat anyway this is AC major over G that's a G flat 7 and then resolves down to the 4 chord which is F major 7 and I'm adding in the 9 there as well for some color alright so after that this is where things get a little bit more out there I go into this so I go from E flat major 7 to 8 flat 7 sharp 11 now on the E flat major 7 that melody note the D is the major 7 and on the 8th flat 7 sharp 11 the D is now the sharp 11 and the reason I think it works is because that E flat going to that a flat is the interval of a fourth and if you look at if you look closely at a two five one progression something like D minor g7 C major 7 those intervals are all fourths d going to G and then you can think of it think of the G going up to C so you have 2 5 1 and those are all moving in fourths or fifths depending on the direction you're going so let's back it up a bit so the e flat major 7 going to the a flat 7 sharp 11 works nicely because of that interval of a fourth in the bass the next chord progression I used was this so e 5 major 7 a flat 7 d minor 7 and then Jesus resolving to a g7 that's the C resolving to the B now again we have this D minor 7 to the g7 that's 1/4 that's that 2/5 I just referred to and again we have some crazy chords but we're using the bass line we're using the intervallic relationship of the bass notes to provide some structure so if I just play the bass notes it sounds like this and that's not so crazy that doesn't sound so crazy anymore let's add in those chords again all right let's move on the next chord progression is one that I've been using a long time it's it's something I just stole off of it I think I stole it off of a like a demo on some pn time some electric piano i came across and essentially what's happening here so let's pause there for a second so we're jumping right into this progression with so I'm going to think of this as like a an f-sharp said f-sharp minor 7 flat 5 can also call that an F sharp half-diminished chord and it's resolving to an F minor you could also go to just a regular F minor or use that F minor 7 difference between that is the F here and the E flat you see that on the keyboard there now a minor a sus resolving to a seven flat nine these two notes in here that's the for resolving to the 3 and the 9 resolving to the flat 9 so again all right now last but not least - that's a to chord D minor I D flat seven sharp nine resolving to the C ok so what's happening here is you have a two chord now the D flat is what we call a tritone substitution that's a fancy word for a pretty simple concept you may have heard about this before all its really doing all it's happening here is that we're going from the two chord which is D to a D flat in the bass and that D flat is a tritone away from G what's a tritone well tritone is three whole steps so D flat to E flat is one whole step B flat to F is two whole steps and F to G is your third whole step so that's the tritone away from from one another and if we were to just play that chord progression as D minor g7 C major that's just your regular 251 right but no we are doing a tritone substitution for that five chord so instead instead of the G we're using D flat D flat seven sharp nine alright now there's one other little bonus thing here I did at the beginning of the video just sort of a little gospel way of ending the ending the reharmonization here i think it was that's a nice little cadence to tie a tight little bow at the end of this thing so that's and the riff I did was so there's that whole little section slow down for you and I'll and I'll end with this there's a lot of possibilities there's you might haven't said infinite possibilities for reharmonization and knowing which chords to choose and exploring different options you're going to find that you gravitate towards certain chord progressions that there are certain chord progressions that just you love and you want to know what they are and those are the chord progressions you need to learn first figure out why they work figure out how to play them in different keys and then see if you can apply them and repurpose them to simple songs like mary had a little lamb and the more you do that the more you build that repertoire of harmony the faster you're going you're going to be a tree harming your own songs re harming other people's songs and creating really exciting harmonic textures so I'll leave you with that a lot of information here again as I always say if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them down below I also offer Skype lessons which is another great way to improve your skills and get you to the next level very very quickly it's a much more personalized approach we can connect directly and that's an option that's always on the table again you can email me at Jeff's mentor music at gmail.com to set those up and I'd be happy to give you more information but until then I hope you enjoyed the video and stay tuned for the next one thanks for watching