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What is harmony?

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Harmony is the sound created when two or more sounds of different are played at the same time.

The sounds you choose to play or sing together, create different harmonies and help the listener feel different emotions.

Harmonies can turn a good song into a great song!

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Watch: How about a little harmony?

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How to create a harmony

A cartoon of Ruby playing her base guitar

Harmonies are made up of . When notes are played together it makes a chord.

Chords can be created by combining voices or musical instruments. Some instruments like the guitar, harp and piano play multiple pitches at once. They can play chords on their own.

A voice can only create chords when you have two or more people singing different pitches at the same time.

A cartoon of Ben playing his guitar

There are lots of different chords and each can be made up of two or more notes. The most common chords are major chords, which tend to sound happy and minor chords, which tend to sound sad.

Harmony isn't just about the sounds made by playing one chord at a time. It's also about how the music sounds when you move from one chord to another.

A cartoon of Ben playing his guitar
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Watch: Creating chords on a keyboard

Discover how to create major and minor chords using a keyboard with this video.

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How are chords written down?

In traditional music , we write chords by stacking the different notes on top of each other like this:

You can also write chords using symbols which is often used by pop and jazz musicians.

Watch this video to see and hear different chords played on piano.

Guitarists will often read chords using tablature or tabs for short.

Tabs are diagrams with chord symbols that show exactly where to place your fingers on the guitar.

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Activities

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Play fun and educational primary games in science, maths, English, history, geography, art, computing and modern languages.

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