Harmony Gym

Modules

Harmony

Beginner

  1. What the Degrees Do: Tonic, Subdominant, Dominant

    Why I, IV and V keep turning up — the three jobs every chord in a key is doing, and the pull that makes music want to go somewhere.

  2. The Pull of the Dominant: The Leading Tone and the Tritone

    Why V wants to become I — the semitone under the tonic, and the unstable interval inside a dominant seventh that makes the pull stronger still.

  3. The Four Cadences: How a Phrase Ends

    Authentic, plagal, half and deceptive — the four ways a musical sentence can finish, and what each one tells the listener about whether to expect more.

  4. The Progressions Everyone Uses

    I–V–vi–IV, ii–V–I and the twelve-bar blues — three patterns that between them account for an enormous amount of the music you already know.

Intermediate

  1. Where ii, vi and iii Sit: The Chords That Stand In

    The three minor chords of a major key are not lesser versions of the major ones — they are substitutes, and knowing which one stands in for what is how a progression gets colour without losing its shape.

  2. The Minor Key, and Why Its Dominant Is Major

    A minor key has no leading tone of its own — so it borrows one, which is the whole reason the harmonic minor scale exists.

  3. Secondary Dominants: Borrowing a Pull

    Any chord in a key can be treated as a tonic for a moment and given its own dominant — which is how a progression gets a chromatic note without leaving the key.

  4. Modal Borrowing: Chords from the Parallel Minor

    A major key can take chords from the minor key on the same tonic — iv, ♭VI and ♭VII — and the effect is a change of colour without a change of home.

  5. Modulation: Changing Key Without the Listener Noticing

    How a piece moves from one key to another through a chord that belongs to both — and how that differs from the borrowing and tonicisation of the last two lessons.

  6. Reading a Progression: Everything at Once

    What to ask, and in what order, when you meet a progression you have never seen — the whole module used as a single procedure.

Can I count this visit? Google Analytics tells me which lessons actually help, and nothing loads until you choose. The site works exactly the same either way.

What this means