Custom Harmony Tutorial

Setting Up

We are just going to compose a single phrase in this tutorial so we'll use a custom song structure by setting "Overwrite Song Structure" to true. Also, make sure that there is only one "Verse 1" in the song structure.

Then, add a "song part type override info" for "Verse 1" and set "Override phrase group type" to true. Set the "Phrase group type" to "Single custom harmony".

Scroll down and set the "Custom harmony indices" to 1. If you set it to 0, the default harmonic rythm is used instead.

We are also going to force our custom harmony to use the main time signature. Select the "Parameters" tab and set "Set custom harmony numerator" to true.

Harmonic Rythm

In the "Details" tab, at the bottom, there is a list called "Harmony Elements" where you can add custom harmonic rythms.

Click on the "+ Simple Harmony Sequence" button and then click on the item that appears in the list.

Set "Length Mode" to "Count and Length Pattern", "Count" to 5 and "Chord Roots" to "0 1 3 4 0". This will give a common progression I, II, IV, V, I. Then set the "Length pattern" to "1 0.5 0.5 1 1" to determine the lengths (in measures) of the harmonic rythm.

We will now spice up the harmony with some seventh chords. Add a chord type to the "Chord Types" list and set it to "Seventh". Then set the "Chord Type Indices" to "0 1 1 1 0" which will set the middle chords to seventh.

We will now invert some of the chords by setting "Chord inversions" to "0 1 0 1 0", which will now give the progression I, II65, IV7, V65, I.

There! Now we have a nice little harmonic rythm that we have complete control over. We will now move on to constrain how the voice lines can move within this harmonic rythm.

Voice Line Constraints

Sometimes it is very useful to partly control the voice lines when you create your own harmonic rythm. Sometimes you want to steer the melody to the tonic in the final measure or prevent it from doing so etc. It is also possible to add constraints to avoid bad voice leading in those cases the default/classical voice leading planner fails to detect that something sounds like crap.

Abundant Music has a lot of different voice leading constraints built in but so far it currently only exposes the "Voice Chord Note Constraint". With this constraint, you can penalize that certain voice lines move to certain notes in the chord.

We are going to penalize the melody if it moves to the tonic and create an imperfect cadence, which also suits the progression well.

More Options

As you can see, there are many more options for harmonic rythms. You can define your own scale types by setting the "Custom Scales" property. The input is the absolute semi-tone offsets of the chromatic scale (12-TET). The default value "0 2 4 5 7 9 11" gives the major scale. Use comma "," to enter more custom scales.

You can then use "Custom Scale Indices" to index the scales you have entered.

Every scale has a number of "modes". For example, major and minor scale has 7 different modes which you can access by changing "Scale Modes". These can also be negative.

Chords can also be customized. Just change the chord type to "Custom" and use the "Custom Chords" property to select what scale notes to use in the chord.

It is possible to use the "original" rythm for the harmony by setting "Length Mode" to "Rythm Only". Then the total length will determine how long the harmonic rythm becomes. The total length can be overwritten by the "original" total length, which is probably a good idea since the rythm and total length are coupled.

Multiple Harmonic Rythms

You can create several custom harmonic rythms. To use them, just index them from the custom song structure parts (the index starts at 1 for the custom harmonies).

If you have a phrase group that has two or more phrases, you can just list the harmony indices that you want to use in order.