Chords & Vocals

[Wakeon]

Hey!
I've a problem during the creation of my last track. Indeed, i've an acapella part and I wanted to know how to find a chord progression, a chord line which is good with my vocal part
So do you have some ideas to find chord lines with vocals ?
Thanks

[junqueira]

That's a great question...I think this is kinda tricky. I would see exactly what chords the original song used. Then experiment with different chords from there. Also, you could import other songs in the same key to get ideas of different chords that work

[inkjt510]

This is a pretty indirect solution, but you could try right clicking your acapella (assuming it's recorded already) then convert melody or harmony to MIDI. Clean up the midi notes and pop in whatever sound you want, then you should be left with a pretty solid foundation upon which you can build

[doghouse]

This is probably going to sound really stupid.

-- If you know the notes of the melody, finding a chord progression is trivial.

-- If you cannot figure out the notes of the melody or do not understand how chords relate to melodies, this will seem to be an impossible problem. If so, please do yourself a huge favor and get a beginner's book on music that explains how chords are built out of scales. This will save you a lot of time in the future.

-- If your version of Live has the pitch to MIDI feature, you can use that to figure out what the melody notes are if you cannot do it by ear.

If the OP is asking how to figure out chords if you do know what the notes of the melody are:

1. The last note of the melody almost always matches the key. If the last note is a G, the key is likely either G major or G minor.
2. The first note of the melody is almost always a chord tone. If the chord is C major, then the melody note is most likely a C, E or G. If the chord is G minor, the melody note is most likely a G, Bb or D.
3. Most other notes in the melody will be chord tones also, if not they most likely will be in the scale for the key.

There are always exceptions, but for most pop songs those three rules will cover 99% of situations coming up with chord progressions for a given melody.

[jibbs1234]

This is a pretty indirect solution, but you could try right clicking your acapella (assuming it's recorded already) then convert melody or harmony to MIDI. Clean up the midi notes and pop in whatever sound you want, then you should be left with a pretty solid foundation upon which you can build

Yep I second this method. First step: Google the key of the song. If that's not an option I used to determine the key by ear. But now I take full advantage of the "convert to melody/harmony" option to remove some of the guess work. If just working with an acapella, convert the acapella to melody, clean up the stray midi notes, and collapse the resulting notes to a single octave. The remaining notes help identify the possible musical key(s). Once I determine my desired key then I start working with the basic chords of that key. Sometimes I'll use the earlier midi vocal melody I created to determine chords which ride or complement the melody. But most of the time, by feel or ear works well. Then maybe work with inversions of the chords to make a smoother progression chord to chord.