To eloborate on this (or complicate stuff): Melodic minor changes its scale when moving up or down. E.g. in A this is ABCDEF#G#A upwards and AGFEDCBA downwards. So in order to have “correct” chords/progressions in melodic minor, this means it follows the up/downward curve of the lead voice or melody.
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Good point, but that’s no hard and fast one either. It’s about the chords you make more than up/down literally, unless we mean the lift the G# makes on the way to A or the lift the dominant make on the way to tonic. Bach certainly did not follow any up/down plan for this kind of usage, but rather made the harmonies he wanted. The old joke is you get students to learn 2 scales for the price of one. But it does point out the complexity possible in minor.
And jazz has other uses for Mel minor entirely, totally other discussion.
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Agree and you are right ofcourse! Just to add to this: Almost all systems have been formed after the fact, so in the end you just follow what sounds right to your ears haha. This is the nice thing about theory and applying it: if you want to change it, just do it and hear what happens. Sometimes a “mistake” is like a happy accident: it is not following the rules, but it sounds great! I know a lot of composers/musicians who love their “mistakes”, even if they tried not to break any (selfimposed) rules.
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Well, sure, usage of “minor” in common practice harmony is quite complex. On the other hand, I played in “rock” bands for decades, and found that the natural minor is the only one used much in “pop” music.
To your earlier points, “pop” music does change keys a lot, and add altered notes, and yes, those kinds of things can make music sound much more “alive”. But melodic minor? Never run into that “in the real world”. I practice it on my piano. but that’s about it.
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Very true, but it offers a general starting point for someone not versed in theory.
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You just aren’t thinking about the scale when you hear these kinds of tunes, they are everywhere. Yesterday by the Beatles is a good choice for melodic minor. It borrows chords from the major and minor key and the melodies are brighter ascending with raised notes and often uses the lowered pitches on the descending lines. It is easy to pick out the harmonic minor things because they are naturally more jarring and you remember the effect of the aug second more easily, but a good melodic minor tune is just slippery about whether it is actually major or minor. Literally the only thing different between C major and C melodic minor is E or Eb. So a major tune that likes to resolve to a minor one chord is pretty much melodic minor. Remember these “scales” are abstractions, we don’t just play the right scale, we harmonize a melody or riff over a good chord porgression.
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It is my personal perspective after 36+ years of working on Meander that there is lots of remaining room and opportunity to develop generative systems.These could be monolithic modules such as my Meander that tries to do it all, but is made up of 13,000+ line of code to “simple” functional modules that can talk to each other and share some systems elements of music, such as scale.
Some approaches would require A.I. or at least trained neural networks. Meander has several harmonic progressions that have “Markov” in the name that are 1st order Markov chains for harmony progression transition probabilities, based on published academic papers and which serve as a trained neural network of a sort for a particular composer. I can imagine doing that same thing for melody generation based on the style of a music group or individual writer or performer.
Having a set of “rules” or guidelines is a good start for generative composition, but, having a system that knows when to break the rule and how is important for capturing the spirit of the music and performers.
The GPT, ChatGPT and other generative A.I.'s will probably beat us to this goal.
FL studio current beta is showing an algorithmic progression tool to analyze your melody and by style and character prompts will harmonize your melody in the correct style. It can also be a song starter with simple to adventurous slider for progression character and still has the style and other adjective type prompts.
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Test version of Harmony II is now posted, btw.
Harmonic minor is all over classical music. I never got far enough in theory to understand when it was invented or why.
But I also wonder how you’d do that in a module. A naive version would keep a one note memory to detect ascending & descending. Then you could change the 6th & 7th notes based on direction. But it might sound wrong in some cases. Maybe in an interesting way?
Also, how would affect harmony? Or what would it do with a polyphonic note cv, where different parts have contrary motion?
It should hang on chords. The harmonic minor really just makes a major V where natural minor has a minor V. The only other rule for older classical music is to avoid that leap between b6 and 7 in the and just find other routes. You could even have minor V too and make it fully complicated. Without the chordal framework it will just be aimless anti phrases.