Chords and Scales

Here we are going to look at scales, and how they tie into chord progression and as usual, try to keep it as simple as possible.

In this example I am going to show how to create a melody to a specific scale and then how to apply chord progression to that melody.

So to start, we open up the piano roll by right clicking on the instrment in the pattern editor

Now click on the arrow in the top left corner of the piano roll, and open the Chords list.

In this example I am going to use the Phrygian scale, its actually used quite alot in pystrance.

Although as you can see from the list below, there are more than enough to choose from.

What this tool does is Assist you by showing you the complete scale of a specifc Chord.

By simply placing a note on the C, you will see the it lays down the pattern of the complete chord for you. The Phygian scale uses 1,2,4,6,9,11 and in this example we will be working in C

Now we are going to use that as a guide line to create a simple melody using the Phyrgian scale.

Move that chord all the way over to just before the 5th step, then using it as a guide, place random notes starting with the C in the first step on every 1st and 3rd step of each bar.

Also note the velocity window for the complete chord, i have turned the volume right down.

This will stop it from playing, because it always sounds horrible. Also the reason why i have placed it just before 5th step, is because this is a 4 bar melody, and this allows it to loops properly.

Now the next step is to place some half notes on the 2nd and 4th step of each bar.

Now I simply lowered the velocity on the half notes, just to give it a bit of variation in the notes.

And then I added a simple half note after every full note(would be nice with an arp)

And there you have it. A simple melody in C using the Phrygian scale.

Now the matter of chord progression comes up. To make it more interesting to the listener and also to create emotion, chord progressions do wonders.

Basically what this is is the exact same melody, but with a different root note.

In the example above, the root note is C, so now we are going to use a progression from C to C Sharp.

In the diagram below you will notice a few things.

Firstly, I have changed the display on the piano roll to show the actual notes instead of the keys, this is purely to show the notes better to make this example easier to understand.

Secondly, I have simply copied and pasted the melody into the next four bars.

Thirdly, I again use the chord helper to place the complete chord, however this time I have placed it on C#.

What you now have to do is move the melody up, so that its root note is the C#, then using the complete chord as a guideline, make sure that none of the notes fall out of the scale.

There are times when you will need to re-arrange notes though, for example if you swop from a major scale to a minor.

But for this example we simply shift everything up by one note.

You will notice that the 2nd half of the melody now uses notes that were not included in the scale for the first half. Thats because our melody has now shifted from a C to a C# root note.

This is actually still within the Phrygian scale, so if you wanted to you could use the chord progression of C-C#-D#-C# and you would then have a melody that spanned 32 bars.

And there you have it. Chords and Scales made easy(I hope)