could you please judge my chords?

Hi guys, I composed a short melody and chorded it. I feel the chord is not suitable but I don't know how to improve it. Could you help me?

Well there are two main problems

In terms of melody, it's kind of erratic and all over the place, with a very odd rhythm — so it's going to sound kind of weird regardless.

In terms of harmony, the main problem here is that your chord choices don't reflect implied harmonies in the melody itself.

Although you are using C, F and G chords from C major, much of the melody would more strongly imply A minor. You want to primarily use "chord tones" in the melody to choose chords. For example, in your first bar, you have the notes A, G, and E with the A note being sustained. This would make Am or Am7 a good choice.

The first beat of bar 4 goes "A, C, A" in terms of notes, followed by two consecutive D notes on the second beat. For the first beat, you could stick with F, but you could also use Am. The Dm chord is an obvious choice for beat two, but G would also be a good choice especially if you used F for beat one.

However, we then run into the problem that in bar 5, the D note is sustained with a resolution back up to E. In this bar, one would typically expect a resolution back to the tonic. You could still use Am in bar 5 — it's definitely a better choice than G — but it will still not sound as complete.

The short answer: Try harmonizing this with chords from A minor and matching chords to shared notes from the melody. If a bar has mostly A,C and E in it, than Am is probably the best choice.

Also, never forget that for this reason, every melody implies a chord progression itself. Therefore, strong harmonic flow and voice leading is pretty much inseparable from strong melodic movement 

On 3/4/2021 at 8:33 AM, zzzyou said:

 

Hi guys, I composed a short melody and chorded it. I feel the chord is not suitable but I don't know how to improve it. Could you help me?

 

On 3/4/2021 at 8:33 AM, zzzyou said:

 

Hi guys, I composed a short melody and chorded it. I feel the chord is not suitable but I don't know how to improve it. Could you help me?

 

I judge them to be excellatorius, no, you dont know what that means nor do i, so i suppose i am not all that qualified to comment here as intelligentatoriously as others but in addition to their good advice you could study textbooks of "music theorists" and get their good opinions on melodic/harmonic constructions. You could start with SCHOENBERG'S Theory of Harmony although that might be something of start for someone just starting out and it is loooong and deeeetailed to boot, good things to be, but damned if it didnt take me 16 (I un-exaggerate) years to wade through its wonderfully constructed ideas. Then, however much you have studied, try to forget or rather, try not to worry about most of it when you next approach the keyboard and instead, improvise chord changes under your melodies and see how you like the results.  If you can { record the exact chords that you play and save them out to MIDI file which can then be brought into your favorite playback system } then you can do further analysis on what you have done and perhaps (very most likely) learn from all that.

{ regarding bracketed text, i am sure you know all about that, just being sure, if not, HMEUBPM (hit me up by private message).  }

Next, remember, rather stop worrying about not worrying about the "theory" (ugh) you have studied, study it anew, lather, rinse, jeez take a break, you still need to sleep at least three hours per week, you know.

See you in the stacks!!!

Looks good, however like another member suggested, the melody implies that the piece is in the key of A minor rather than C. I am having huge trouble chording a song I wrote, I sent you a PM,.