You Are Reading the First 6 FREE Chapters (470 pages)
To Modulate in Music: The Chromatic
To modulate in music means having a heightened awareness of the chromatic. Chromatic notes with chromatic chords might be signalling a modulation in your music, whether you mean to modulate or not. If you move the melody at random to some chromatic note or other, or throw in an out-of-context chord, thinking you’re introducing musical variety, chances are, you’ll screw things up. You will muddy the waters. Mere anarchy will be loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide will be loosed. And, yes, everywhere the ceremony of innocence will be done drowned. And maybe your horse, too.
So, when you’re experimenting with new tunes and chord changes, you need to have an awareness in the back of your mind of the musical implications of introducing chromatic notes into a tune. Particularly when you also accompany chromatic notes with chromatic chords (chords comprised of notes that are outside the key you’re playing in). You might actually be signalling a modulation. Whether you know it or not.
When you do this, the brains of your listeners will be searching for a new tonal centre—even though they aren’t conscious of it. So if you don’t understand how to handle switching tonal centres, you’re likely to confuse (and alienate) your audience.
As you’ll see in Chapter 6, it’s a lot easier and faster to switch tonal centres—to modulate—when you use chord changes to accompany melodic moves, because chords wield multi-tonal power.