Collecting Harmony

Pulling chords from a palette is intuitive and easy. Having a library full of progressions ready when you need them is even more comfortable. Here are a few tips how to collect chord progressions.

Surfing Palettes

Open a Palette and explore chord changes that sound they way you like. This is a very convenient way of finding new progressions. Just drag a chord off the palette and drop it into the palette's notepad view. When a progression is complete, you can grab the Harmony outlet and drop it into a Library.

Transpose & Combine
Unlike audio or static MIDI clips, the Harmony parameter can be easily transposed in order to work in every key. Just transpose a progression (or a part of it) up or down until the global key setting matches the key you need. Once they are transposed into key, partial progressions can be combined freely.
Factories
There are Factories that generate random Harmony parameters. Sometimes they are great to be used as a whole. Often they contain a few chord changes that inspire you. You can copy these portions into a progression editor and build a more meaningful harmonic narrative that suits your taste.
Song Books
The ability to enter one or more chords by name into the Parameter Inspector's input field is often overlooked. Grab a song book or a visit a website with songs and write down the chord names right into Synfire. With the Pro edition, you can also write chords in Roman Numeral notation or as Harmonic Functions.