Seven Harmonies Tutorial
This is a brief and greatly condensed tutorial which will give you the flavor of the Seven Harmonies learning system. The
book itself contains a more complete presentation and explanation of terms. The book and this tutorial train you in
recognizing and appreciating harmonies, and understanding chord sequences.
If you are like most people you wonder about how music works, but you feel that the theory is complicated and probably
over your head. You know harmony involves chords but that may be where your knowledge stops. You think you would need to
study first inversion minor seventh chords, and things like that.
But the way ordinary music works is really quite simple, and you can learn the essence of it by listening to guided
examples. There is no need for obscure terms and symbols.
Most music uses the seven-note major scale (the notes repeat in each higher octave). The seven notes may be numbered 1
through 7, 1 being the first note of the scale, the note that defines its key. If you build a three-note chord on each
of the notes, you will have the seven harmonies. The picture below is what they look like in the key of C. But you can
do the same thing in any key.
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In the context of the key, each of these harmonies performs a different function and has its own individual personality.
This variety is what makes music interesting and pleasing. The more you listen to these harmonies, the better
acquainted you will become with the particular qualities and "feel" of each one.
The seven basic harmonies are all simple three-note chords. The relationship among them is what's important,
not details of the chords themselves.
Chord modes
These short soundtracks demonstrate what the three most common chord modes sound like.
For the examples, you should have a pair of good quality speakers.
Sound tracks have been compressed for better download times, so audio quality may not be as high as on the CD.
Each clip is a short excerpt from the title shown.
The harmonies are arranged here in order of most common to least common.
For each, I have listed its mode and the qualities I hear in it.
After the basic seven there is a section relating to the secondary harmonies,
which are less common but still very important.
The CD has many more examples of each harmony.
Go now to the 7 harmonies examples.
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