Once you see the process to doing this, you aren’t going to forget it.
Now, say that you have a diatonic melodic line like the one below with the notes appearing in sequential order:
Between each of the diatonic notes, we are going to approach each with a chromatic note. It should look like this now:
Okay, from here we are going to harmonize the diatonic notes with triads within the key. For the simplicity of this tip, the notes will act as the root of the chords:
Finally, it is time to add the secondary dominants. A secondary dominant is the “V7” chord proceeding before a chord it wants to temporarily tonicize. It just so happens that those chromatic tones are part of the secondary dominants we are going to build:
Our progression is now I – V7/ii – ii – V7/iii – iii , all built on a chromatic line!
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