Learning from pieces you like

One good way to learn about harmony is to learn to play, and to modify, pieces that you like. Very simply, this involves taking songs that you like, or parts of them, then modifying them. At a certain point, the result becomes something new, and becomes the basis for a new piece. However, this is not as easy as it may sound - making random changes nearly always makes a song worse. Musical knowledge and experience is needed to know what kind of changes are likely to work. And of course, once you have this kind of background knowledge and experience, it also becomes easier to make up new material from scratch.

This process is not a matter of learning or applying any prescriptive rules. Rather it is a matter of looking at lots of examples of music that you like, and trying to understand how they work.

Harmony Space can help in doing this.

“John and I ... were quite happy to nick things off people, because ... you start off with the nicked piece and it gets into the song ... and when you’ve put it all together ... of course it does make something original” Paul McCartney quoted in (Moore, 1992)