The Strongest Melody/Chord Pairings

We all want our chords and melody to work together as one. 

If they don’t, our songs will feel off. They will sound amateurish. 

A great songwriter knows the art of utilizing different levels of consonance and dissonance in their melody/chord pairings. They understand how to pull the consonance and dissonance up and down to get the exact feeling they want to convey.

For this post, we’re talking about the strongest melody/chord pairings. In this case, we’re defining “strong” as consonant to the point of feeling like a perfect, pleasant, strong match. We don’t mean “strong” as in “good” as differing levels of weaker pairings and dissonance are important for emotion in music.

Strength Comes From Agreement

The first thing to think about is where strength comes from. Strength largely comes from tonal agreeance. What do I mean by that? Basically that the notes of your melody and chords are in agreement. The notes aren’t clashing.

Think of it like a team. If your star player is great, but doesn’t do his part to work well with his teammates, the team will likely fall apart. This is the same with your melody (star player) and chords. 

A great team is one that works together as one unit, not the star player doing his own thing while his teammates do their thing. 

So your melody needs to work and agree with the chords. 

In other words, the strength comes from the melody note being one of the notes contained in the chord.

So, if you have a G major chord (G, B, D), the strongest melodic pairings will be a G, B, or D. 

This is because your entire soundscape would then be built on the strength and consonance of a G major chord.

If you’re singing an A while the chord is G major, it’s not going to be a strong pairing. Now, it will become stronger if it’s sung over a Gsus2 (G, A, D) or Gadd2 (G, A, B, D) chord, because now the chord and melodic note agree again. 

Strength Comes From the Number 3

The strongest chords are triads- 3 note chords stacked in thirds.

If you reduce the number of notes to 2, the chords tend to become more vague and mysterious. If you increase the number of notes to 4, the chords tend to sound more colorful, but less resoundingly powerful and consonant.

So, if you wanted to pick a triad in the key of G that was very strong with your A note, you could use a D major chord (D, F#, A). This is the V chord in the key of G. And V chords are always very strong chords. 

You also could use the ii chord, Am (A, C, E). vii chords almost never sound good, so I’d avoid using the last triad that includes your A- the F#dim (F#, A, C).

It should be noted that I am not saying you can only sing notes contained directly in the current chord. So, you aren’t restricted to only have G, B, and D in your melody while you’re on a G chord. 

What I am saying is that if you want to have a strong and consonant note-chord pairing, the note to land on is within your chord. So if you’re holding a note at the end of the phrase you sing over a G chord, it should probably be a G, B, or D if you want it to be strong and consonant.