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
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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.