Harmony browser

Figure 2.22: Harmony browser toolbar

The harmony browser shows the 4-tuned JAZZ harmonies of the four scales types major, harmonic minor, melodic minor and harmonic major.

The first thing you can do is to click on chords and listen how they sound (eg examples from a song book or a book about harmony theory). The selected chord is placed into the pianowin copy buffer and can be pasted into your song (see mouse actions.

The harmony browser is also able to analyze a section of your song and to transpose parts of your song into new scales and chords. Also you may generate chords thru the random rhythm generator into your song.

What you can do with the mouse:

• left click on a chord selects the chord and marks related chords (see below).
• shift + left click selects the chord and appends it to the chord sequence you need to transpose parts of your song
• right click just listen to the chord, don't select it
• right click on the last chord of the chord sequence removes this chord from the sequence.

There is a toolbar with the following icons (from left to right):

• The left four buttons switch the scale type for which the standard chords are displayed: major, harmonic minor, melodic minor and harmonic major which is also known as ionic b13.

The following five Icons (with the cyan right arrow and the piano) specify what related chords are marked when you select a chord:

• 4,3,2,1,0 marks all chords that have 4,3,2,1,0 common notes with the actual chord

• 1/2 marks all chords, that differ from the selected chord by exactly one half note

• 251 marks all chords, that would come next in the 2-5-1 move

• =B marks all chords, that share the same bass note with the selected chord

• Tri marks all chords, that could be tritone substitutes (their bass note is at a tritone interval from the selected chord).

• (piano) mark all chords, that contain all of the keys in the pianowin copy buffer. So you could select a few notes (max 4) in the pianowin and select copy from the edit menu. Now the harmony browser will mark all chords that contain those notes.

  If the piano button is not selected, the harmony browser works the other way round. Whenever you select a chord, the chord is placed into the pianowin buffer so you can paste it into your song. The parameters (midi channel, length etc) can be set in the midi-entry of the harmony browser menu.

The last four buttons do different things:

Haunschild layout shows harmonies and scales in an order proposed in a book about harmony theory by the German author Haunschild. If selected, chords are shown in a way that 'valid moves' are

• from left to right, e.g the 2-5-1 move is displayed as three neighbored chords. In general, all horizontal moves are allowed.
• vertical moves are allowed, they change one semitone of a chord (at most).
• diagonal from top-left to bottom right. I don't know why, but it sounds nice.

Transpose lets you change parts of your song to the harmonies and chords of the chord sequence. When you select some bars in the trackwin and click on transpose, then the selection is mapped to the chord sequence. The default is, that on chord lasts one bar, but you may change this in the settings menu in the harmony browser. If the results are not satisfying, you should try to transpose track by track, this often works better. All in all, transposing works better, when the selected material is not too complicated.

I had nice results with the following procedure: I recorded (very slow, as I am not a good piano player) cj7 chords on one track, some monphone bass line on the second track and a solo on the third track. Everything was in c major (white keys only). Then I selected some chords and transposed each track on its own.

Analyze Tries to find the chords and scales from the selection in the trackwin. Again, the default is one harmony per bar which can be changed in the settings menu. The algorithm looks at the length of the notes and chooses the longest notes to be the notes of the chord.

Clear chord sequence removes all chords from the chord sequence.

Menu entries

• edit chord - often you may want to have chords/scales that are not displayed in the harmony browser. You can select a chord from the chord sequence and change it in this dialog.

• settings - adjust parameters for transpose and analyze as explained above. A value of 0 quarters per chord when transposing will map the chords to the length of the selection, e.g if you have selected 16 Bars and your sequence has 4 chords, every chord will last 4 bars. If you had chosen 4 quarters instead, the chord sequence would have been repeated 4 times to fill the 16 bars of the trackwin selection.

• midi - these settings affect what you hear, when clicking on a chord and what is put into the pianowin buffer.

Generating chords with the random rhythm generator

After defining a chord sequence, you may open the random rhythm generator. When adding an instrument, it will show (beside drums) the instrument 'chords from harmony browser'. You select it and define a more or less randomized rhythm and proceed as described here.

Transpose Algorithm