Harmony
At any moment your project is on a chord. This course is about that chord and everything downstream of it.
Most applications leave harmony to you and to whatever you happen to play. Phonon keeps one harmonic context that anything is allowed to read, which is why there is a lattice down the right of the window and why a generator dropped on an empty track already knows what to play. The course covers where the chords come from, how to write your own, and what changes its behaviour when it hears one.
The lessons
These are in order, and it is a real order: each lesson is about something the one before it produced. Lesson 4 is the reason for the other three, so if you want to know what any of this buys you before spending time on it, read that one first and come back.
- 01The harmonic engineThe chord the whole project is currently on, where it lives, and the three things a progression is made of.Unlocks: You can put a progression under everything else you make.
- 02Writing a progressionThe wheel, the sections and the form strip: choosing chords, arranging them, and starting from one of the twenty-two presets.Unlocks: You can write a progression of your own rather than keeping the one you were given.
- 03The latticeThe Tonnetz sidebar: what the shapes mean, why chords that share notes touch, and how to read the trail.Unlocks: You can see what your progression is doing while it plays.
- 04What follows the chordHow the chord reaches the sound: generators that write from it, regions that follow it, and effects that retune to it.Unlocks: You can change one chord and hear the whole project move with it.
What this course will not do
It will not teach you harmony. It does not explain what a dominant seventh wants to do next or why a progression resolves, and it assumes nothing about whether you know. Those are worth learning and this is not where.
What it teaches is where harmony lives in this application and what reads it, which is a question about Phonon rather than about music. You can follow all four lessons and choose every chord by ear.