The Craft of Contemporary Commercial Music

Chapter 10

Expanding Your Harmonic Vocabulary

In the previous chapter, you began to explore harmony from a traditional, functional perspective and learned some ways that modern music incorporates (or abandons) common-practice schemes. However, Chapter 9 focused entirely on diatonic harmonies—those that are more or less generated from major and minor scales and can be created using key signatures without additional accidentals. Though melodies and chord progressions in a variety of genres both old and new tend to use diatonic pitches the majority of the time, most music additionally incorporates chromatic sounds that involve notes from outside the key signature. This chapter focuses on chromatic harmonies, beginning with sonorities that tend to ...