JT,
You have brought up something I find very interesting. First, you have produced a script with the melody written as notes on a stave. There is no indication of any harmony. You have asked how to put chords (ie. harmony) to the melody.
Then Tony has given us an 'arrangement' with notes written on both staves. Playing the notes as they are written will give us a 'harmony' to the piece .. but no indication of what that harmony is as there are no chord structure names (as letters) written over the top. Harmony is expressed in chord structures, so if we can identify the harmony we are hearing and give it a 'chord structure name' we are on the way to identifying what that harmony is and remembering it.
I find it very difficult (in fact impossible) to 'identify' a harmony by seeing the written notes on the stave. For example, if I saw the notes written below, one above the other, on the stave ...
... then that does not conjure up a harmony in my head. And I'm not going to work out what the 'note letters' are because I'm not supposed to
do that when reading music, am I? I'm supposed to identify which notes to play directly from the positions of the notes on the stave with their corresponding positions on the keys.
But
play those notes so I can hear them and that is a different matter! I can hear the harmony!
It's a major chord! And if you had given the notes the 'chord structure name' of
D (or even given me the 'lettered notes' on the stave ie.
A,
D and
F#) then I would also have a harmony in my head.
The next thing that cropped up was what we mean by 'reading music'. I think that for most of us, 'reading music' means reading the
melody line from the dots on the stave. We then fill in the 'harmony' from the chord structures written as letters above the melody line. When the sheet music is in this form we call it 'Busker Music'. Anybody who reads every note on the full piano score (bass clef and treble clef) has my admiration as they must have spent many hours perfecting being able to do this. And
you had said that you still wanted the chord names, as presumably like the rest of us, although you can read a melody line of music you would have great difficulty managing to read
all the notes on a sheet of piano music.
You asked the question on how to get the chords from the music, and somebody from the PSR Tutorial Forum suggested
playing those notes in the bass clef and looking at your keyboard as that would tell you what the chords were.
That is brilliant! Wouldn't have thought of doing that! So if I had played those three notes on the stave above, the keyboard would have told me that it was the chord of
D. And it
has done.
And I would make a further suggestion. Why restrict your note playing to
just the bass clef? If you move your Split Point up an octave you can cover the notes on the treble clef as well.
But don't include any melody notes when you do this. This will then give you the harmony
under the melody line.
Changing the Split PointIn
MENU press the
FUNCTION button.
When the choices come up, choose
SPLIT POINT.
The SPLIT POINT is probably set to
F#2 (or G2) by default.
Set
F#3 as the split point.
You do this by
holding down the
S+L tab on the right and turning the
DATA WHEEL clockwise until you reach
F#3.
Now you can play some of those notes from the written music on both bass and treble clefs and see what the keyboard tells you the chord is. You do not have to have a STYLE 'activated' or 'playing', but must have the
ACMP button ON.
When you have finished, don't forget to set the SPLIT POINT back to where you had it before!