Alphonse Nguyen

We tackled melody last time, so so today we’ll go over accompaniment. The accompaniment plays an important role in establishing the harmony as well as driving the melody forward, while also setting the tone/mood.

Let’s take a chord progression and make up a simple melody to go along with it (most of these cases are adapted from my former professor):

In Example A, the accompaniment is nicely flowing and steady, but each chord is in root position, except for the second bar. This can make the music sound weak and uninspiring. Whereas in Example B, the chord progression now alternates from root position to first inversion, which sounds much better. Also, the first note of each bar in the accompaniment forms its own melody (C – C# – D – B), which happens to go along nicely with the first note of each bar in the melody (C with G, C# with A, D with F, B with D). However, Example B has a different kind of flow from Example A, because 1) the repetition of notes in the middle of each bar makes the accompaniment sound a bit interrupted, and 2) in Example A the accompaniment gently flows up and down in each bar while in Example B the second half of each bar alternates from flowing up to flowing down. In the end, it’s up to you to decide which one you like better, depending on which tone/mood you want and on the two reasons I’ve just demonstrated.

In any case, note that Example B has some flaws as the harmony isn’t always strong (see all the doubled thirds in bar 3).

Here are more examples of playing around with the accompaniment in order to give the music a different tone/mood:

Practice around with different accompaniments. Then you can soon move on to write your own Theme and Variations.