In a previous article, I’ve shown you a quick tip using Logic Pro X Transposer MIDI FX to make sure that your melody stays in key. In this article, I will show you my process to add chords to a theme. Whether you produce EDM, pop music or orchestral music, you will have to deal with harmony at some point. Be advised that this is aimed at beginners and that you don’t need a background in music theory to follow along.

Here is the quick piece I will use to demonstrate the technique explained in this article:

The main melody

I quickly wrote a melody to serve as an example for this article. 8 bars of a simple piano tune:

The melody I’ll use in this article

Nothing groundbreaking. Just a few piano notes. Here is what the same melody looks like in my DAW (Logic Pro X):

Just a simple melody

Notice that I added two tracks below the melody. One that I named Harmony and one that I named Chords. The chord progression will go on the first track. But what about the second one? That’s the one I use as a draft to store all the chords that would fit the melody.

Finding the scale first

To add a chord progression to this melody, we first need to figure out what is the scale of the melody. I use a tool for that because I can’t tell what scale it is by just looking at the MIDI piano roll.

Go to https://www.scales-chords.com/scalefinder.php. It’s a free online tool used to find all the possible scales a melody would fit in by inputting the notes. First, write down all the notes in your melody. To know which one they are, in Logic Pro X, you can simply hover on the notes in the piano roll. A pop-up will indicate which note it is. Other DAWs have a similar feature.

This note is an F

Then, on the ScalesChords website, enter each note in the top box (1) and then click on “Find me a scale!” (2):

The result will look like this:

As you can see, our melody could fit several scales. As a beginner, we’ll stick to the major and minor scales but do experiment with others as well. Let’s click on C major, and this is what we get:

The chords in Normal Triads is what we want, but we could also use chords from Other Triads or 4 Notes Chords. I will click on each chord from the Normal Triads result to see what they look like. Here is what clicking on C shows us:

The C chord

Getting each chord in the DAW

With each chord opened in a browser, I then copy them within the Chords track in my DAW to be able to copy-paste them later easily:

All the chords from the C major scale

Placing the chords

Let’s find the first note of the first bar in the melody:

It’s a C!

In this case, it is a C. That means that each chord we copied and that contains a C could work on the first bar. There are three different ones.

A C note doesn’t have to be supported by a C chord. It can be any of them with a C in it. Experiment to find the one you prefer. In my example, I settled on the F chord:

I copy-pasted it from my list of chords and extended it to fill the whole bar. Now, do the same with each first note of each bar. After placing all the chords, this is what it looks like:

All chords are now in place

And most importantly, this is what is sounds like:

But that’s not the end of it. Read on.

Spicing up your chords a little bit

Although the result sounds correct, it doesn’t sound interesting. One of the tricks I use is to “cut” the notes in each chord except the root note of the chord. Visually, it looks like this:

And this is what it sounds like:

It makes the piece a little bit more interesting, don’t you find?

Continue experimenting

For the second part of the melody, I continued to resize and split each note within each chord:

Adding even more interest

Compare the first 4 bars of the tune with the next four ones:

Last trick before wrapping up: adding bass

Here is another method I use to quickly add a bass line to a melody with a chord progression. In another track, I copy the chords MIDI notes and remove all of them except the root note of the chord:

You can experiment with that and even add a synth pad that follows the bass line. That’s the version at the top of this article.

I rendered another one using strings:

Happy composing!

Bonus

As a bonus to this article, here is a track I’m working on that uses the technique explained in this article: