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Harmony for songwriters, exploring diatonic chords, modes, functional harmony, secondary dominants, tritone substitutions, modal interchange
Learn harmony in a hands‑on way and give your songs a wider range of colors. In this online course, Adrian Suchowolski walks you through functional and modal harmony on piano and guitar, showing how these ideas actually feel when you're writing music.
You start with the basics songwriters really use: the major scale, diatonic chords, triads, sevenths, inversions, voicings, and the usual extensions and suspensions. From there, you get a clear sense of how tension and release work through tonic, subdominant, and dominant roles, and how those shifts give a song its emotional pull.
Then you jump into modes, minor keys, and the practical differences between modal writing and functional harmony. It becomes easier to decide when you want a firm tonal center and when it's better to hover on a pedal note or a simple vamp. Later, you try out tools like secondary dominants, tritone swaps, modal mixture, and diminished chords—useful tricks for smooth key changes or little harmonic surprises that still make musical sense.
Everything is shown on real instruments, always with songwriting in mind, whether you're working in pop, rock, folk, jazz, film music, or anything else. A downloadable PDF gathers all the theory and charts so you can keep experimenting with your own songs.
Learn harmony in a hands‑on way and give your songs a wider range of colors. In this online course, Adrian Suchowolski walks you through functional and modal harmony on piano and guitar, showing how these ideas actually feel when you're writing music.
You start with the basics songwriters really use: the major scale, diatonic chords, triads, sevenths, inversions, voicings, and the usual extensions and suspensions. From there, you get a clear sense of how tension and release work through tonic, subdominant, and dominant roles, and how those shifts give a song its emotional pull.
Then you jump into modes, minor keys, and the practical differences between modal writing and functional harmony. It becomes easier to decide when you want a firm tonal center and when it's better to hover on a pedal note or a simple vamp. Later, you try out tools like secondary dominants, tritone swaps, modal mixture, and diminished chords—useful tricks for smooth key changes or little harmonic surprises that still make musical sense.
Everything is shown on real instruments, always with songwriting in mind, whether you're working in pop, rock, folk, jazz, film music, or anything else. A downloadable PDF gathers all the theory and charts so you can keep experimenting with your own songs.
