Harmony Tip 3

Harmony is so amazing. This word means a lot of things, as Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s Grammy winning song ‘Ebony and Ivory’ sings about.

When I went to study with the great Luizinho Eça, I was already playing classical piano for about 10 years and was attending the Brazilian Federal University of Music, and The Brazilian Music Conservatory for music theory. On my first lesson I brought one of my compositions to play for him – at the time I hadn’t start singing yet, so it was an instrumental – and one of the chords in particular caught his attention. I think it was a 6 chord in one of its inversions. He asked me ‘ Why did you choose this chord here?’ To which I answered ‘I searched for the sound I heard in my head.’ Now, that caught his attention!

Eça’s method of teaching harmony was very unique, and at the core it was about finding the sounds we hear in our heads and/or trying different options until we find the particular chord with the particular bass that sounds like the emotion we are looking for for that particular melody.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t learn which chords belong to a particular key, and the relationship between them. That is a must. In fact, to use Eça’s method it helps to know by heart the most used types of chords in all keys. 

For example: I have a ‘G’ on the melody. That G belongs to many different chords. In the example below I identified 39 different basic chords that include ‘G’. I used the basic major and minor chords with 7th and 6th that ‘G’ appears. First as the Tonic, then the minor 3rd, then the major 3rd, the b5, the perfect 5th, the 6th, the 7th, the Maj7th.