Music Lesson: Exploring "Private Dick"

This is a tune of mine called Private Dick, and it explores the upper reaches of the kind of harmonizations that you can do with the melodic minor.

Understanding Melodic Minor

If you recall when we talked about melodic minor, the fact is that you can have both the major and minor 6 and major and minor 7 in the scale. In E minor, this means that as you go up the scale, you can have:

• C natural
• C sharp
• D natural
• D sharp

This allows us to do all kinds of cool and interesting things.

Characteristic Chord Progressions

One of the more characteristic things in this piece is when you have an E minor 9th chord, which consists of:

• An E minor triad: E, G, B
• The 9th: F sharp
• The major 7th: D sharp

This creates what I call a double 0 7th chord, resulting in this kind of harmony.

Chord Melody

Now, this is also kind of in the nature of chord melody. It's not strict chord melody because I'm arpeggiating some of it, but here's an example. I'll bring this down an octave.

This is where you can get the B7 sharp nine chord, because you have a B chord (B seventh chord) structured as we would normally do it in our Cal position. However, due to the melodic minor, you can incorporate:

• A D, which is the 9th relative to the B

Instead of being a regular B ninth chord, which looks like this, it has the D natural as a sharp ninth. In the key, you can utilize both D sharp and D natural.

Moreover, the C can be natural or sharp; however, the sharp doesn't sound right, it's too major sounding. If you move the ninth down to the flat side, similar to descending melodic minor, you can have that C natural.

Playing "Private Dick"

Let me play through Private Dick, and we'll talk a little bit more about it afterward.

Chord Progressions

In terms of that kind of chord progression, I've got:

• Minor ninths with major sevenths
• Augmented sevenths with sharp and flat nines

For example:

• Here's a B7
• Here's a B7 augmented where I'm making the 5th technically an F double sharp (actually a G)
• Adding on top of that the 9th: sharp nine and flat nine

Additional Chords

• Here's an E minor sixth chord

You'll notice on this C minor six, I have a C sharp in there. When I was prior to playing the piece, I mentioned that going to the B chord with that C sharp doesn't sound so great. It sounds great with the C natural, but doesn't sound right when you put that C natural on the E chord.

You can get a feeling for how these notes correspond with the different tonalities of each chord.

• On the A minor, I've got an A minor 9 with a major 7, transitioning to an A minor 7 sus 4, where the 7 is a natural 7, as opposed to the A major seven.

Even here, I have a G13. It's not quite a 13, but it gives you the dominant of that C, which then leads to the B, ultimately going to E minor.

Bridge Section

On the bridge section, I'm basically just doing a thick line. This is another way to harmonize, sliding up a C9 chord chromatically all the way up.

I'm really not paying any attention at all to what's in the key signature there, as it's more of a musical gesture. Sometimes, music plays things that are more of a gesture than something that subscribes to a particular set of rules.

Because I'm using a fair amount of chromaticism, with many sharps and flats, I can get away with that in Private Dick. In a more folky context, it might not resonate as well, but in this case, it does.

Advanced Harmonizations

This piece features pretty advanced harmonization.

I don't want to go too deeply into how all these interactions happen, but if you analyze it, you can see that there's a lot to chew on:

• Cycle of fifths
• Melodic minor techniques
• Chord melody concepts

So, have fun with that one!