Harmony for Computer Musicians: Second Edition is the definitive deep dive for the computer musician who is ready to get serious. Building on the foundations of theory and composition, this book focuses on the single most important element for adding depth, colour, and emotional power to your music: harmony.

This is your masterclass in the why and how of harmonic movement:

• Perfect the foundations of functional harmony: Instead of working by trial and error, establish a thorough understanding of the traditional tonal system -building logical chord progressions that give your tracks a clear sense of direction.
• Master voice leading and chord writing: Learn the principles of connecting one chord to another smoothly, discovering how to properly voice chords using inversions, spacing, and doubling - making your arrangements sound clean, intentional, and massive.
• Bring progressions to life with melodic decoration: Move beyond plain chords by introducing mobility and tension to your harmonic textures. Master the use of passing notes, suspensions, auxiliaries, anticipations, and arpeggiations to breathe life into your arrangements and move beyond gridlocked MIDI chords.
• Expand your vocabulary with extended chords: Go beyond basic triads to construct, voice, and resolve seventh, ninth, eleventh, and complex thirteenth chords. Unlock both the traditional resolutions and modern jazz approaches used by top-tier producers.
• Create journeys through modulation: Break out of four-bar loops by mastering the art of travelling between keys. Learn to navigate key changes confidently using diatonic pivot chords, chromatic alterations, and more - creating song sections that develop and evolve.
• Discover advanced chromatic and modal textures: Stand out from producers using the same old harmonic textures by introducing new colours to your tracks using secondary dominants, tritone substitutions, and augmented sixth chords.

For the computer musician who is ready to write with clarity, purpose, and originality, the Second Edition of Harmony for Computer Musicians is your blueprint for better tracks.

INTRODUCTION

The rapid development of musical technology over the latter part of the last century led to significant changes in the musical production environment.

Some of the main changes were largely because of the increased accessibility of the means of musical production. The development of affordable hardware synthesizers and samplers gave many aspiring music producers and composers immediate access to an infinite variety of both realistic and highly imaginative electronic sounds. The spectrum of sounds included types of drum kit and percussion sounds and orchestral sounds such as string, brass and woodwind instruments, added to which were many original and often very colourful electronic timbres. And this comparatively new resource has proved itself over the years to be an invaluable and exciting facility for those engaged in the occupation of composing and producing their own music.

Yet this is not all. Software emulations became favoured post-millennium, providing new options for music producers. Taking advantage of Steinberg’s Virtual Studio Technology (VST) interface, a good example is the Korg Legacy collection, which features software versions of Korg’s classic Wavestation and M1 Synthesizers. Other notable examples are the availability of software emulations of Roland’s TB-303, TR-808 and Sequential Circuits’ Prophet-5. Adding to this the advancing development of VST effects plug-ins such as compressors, reverb, delay, etc. means that a home music producer can now gain access to a large rack of synthesizers, samplers and FX devices on their computer which had previously only been available in expensive hardware forms.

One of the remarkable features of all this is the relative affordability of the setup. Because of this affordability, the means of production of high-quality and professional-sounding music tracks has now been placed into the price range of the ordinary person. As a result, the number of people involved in
the music production community has surged considerably. Indeed, there are now millions of people worldwide who are producing their own music on their computers. There is a new type of musician in the world. A type of musician that may even outnumber all other types of musician. This is the computer musician – a person who uses their own computer as a musical instrument and production device.

The computer musician is a rather unique animal. And in my experience, although computer musicians often show high skill and expertise in terms of the technology they use to produce their music, many mistakenly assume that this is all they need to produce the tracks that they hear on the radio or dubbed on films or television programmes. And in some ways this assumption may bear out. The computer musician does indeed have all the tools necessary to create beautiful and professional-sounding tracks.

Yet there is often a vital ingredient missing. This vital ingredient is a working knowledge of how music as a language works – what its ingredients are, how it is put together, what scales are, chords, modes, keys, the principles of arrangement, melody, harmony and so on. The computer musician may have learned how to use their instrument, but this does not necessarily mean that they know how to create professional sounding music properly using that instrument. To create effectively using that instrument, an in-depth knowledge of the musical language is also essential.

However, there is a basic problem here. As the computer musician is relatively new on the music scene, there is a distinct lack of materials that provide the vital musical learning that computer musicians so desperately need. Instead, it is generally assumed that the computer musician should adapt themselves to the classical methods of musical training ordinarily used in our schools and universities. And as such courses of study often take many years to accomplish, and are often preceded by a good few years of specialised musical training in childhood, the computer musician is thus faced with a huge hurdle to overcome in order to gain the essential musical learning and training that they need.