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Chord MemoryĪ number of classic polyphonic synths from the 80s had a feature called “chord memory,” which was essentially an automatic parallel harmony generator. By then playing the sampled chord at different pitches, the resulting harmony moves in parallel. As with sampled breakbeats, the source for these single chords is often classic soul or jazz tracks.
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In house music, a common technique for creating harmony is to sample a single interesting chord from another song. There are a number of technical and historical reasons for this, and you can use these techniques in your own music as well: Sampled Chords Starting with the same voicing for the first chord, a more typical voicing of this progression might be something like:īut while traditional music theory would probably call the second version “better” than the first, the parallel version has a distinct sound which has found a place in a lot of electronic music. A trained keyboard player might instead re-voice these chords to minimize hand movement, preserve notes that are shared between adjacent chords, and improve the voice leading. If you try to play this on a keyboard, you’ll notice that you need to move your hand somewhat far to get from one chord to the next. For example, here’s a chord progression (Cm7- Fm7-Gm7-B ♭m7) constructed using parallel harmony: Parallel harmony is essentially what you would get if you copied a chord, pasted it somewhere else, and then transposed the copy. A lot of house music chord progressions use a technique called parallel harmony, which refers to a method of moving from one chord to another in which each note moves by the same number of semitones and in the same direction.