The Second Challenge

soundfly.com/courses/kiefer-keys-chords-beats/lessons/the-second-challenge

The second challenge we gave Kiefer was all about the relationship between melody and
chords. What tricks and techniques do you employ to come up with a great melody, and then
how do you match chords to it (or vice versa)? To help get at his approach to chords and
melody, we challenged him to:

Come up with an original melody and then add a harmony to it.

Many of Kiefer's songs have truly captivating melodies, which are often accompanied by lush
harmonies. There are so many things in his music that are worthy of note, like the bouncy
leaps of "Socially Awkward," the spaciousness of "i remember this picture," the
lyricism of the piano part in "Memories of U," etc.

In this section we'll see how Kiefer comes up with melodies and how he harmonizes them in
multiple ways, building on some of the stuff we learned in the previous section.

What You'll Learn

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Since this section is all about creating and harmonizing melodies, here are some of the
specific things we'll touch on:

Melodic contour,
Rhythmic phrasing,
How to draw lessons from other melodies,
Techniques for creating melodies, like speaking them or using constraints,
How to come up with chords for your melodies,
The specific relationships between melodic notes and various chords,
A few different practice activities for writing melodies and harmonizing them.

Additional Resources
We have a number of other resources on writing melodies at Soundfly that could be useful if
you want to build on what you're learning here.

Our course with the pop artist Kimbra has a whole section on her approach to
melody writing.
If you want to dig more deeply into chord tensions, which we look at in this section as
well, feel free to check out the sections on ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths in The
Creative Power of Advanced Harmony.

How Long It'll Take

Though this section has nine lessons, it only includes about 25 minutes of video runtime, so
the content can be completed in an hour.

That said, this section has more activities in it than the last one, so we definitely encourage
you to incorporate the ones that resonate with you into your practice program in the coming
weeks and months.

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