Harmony — Post-Prog-Metal

Harmony (12)

Pedal tone (drone) One pitch held constant while harmony moves above it.

one bass note held constant for long stretches while the chords above it change, so the harmony moves but the floor does not

Pitch axis The root is fixed while the mode built on it changes from section to section.

the bass holding one root while the scale above it changes between sections, so the harmony travels without the root moving

Modal cycle A short harmonic cycle repeated indefinitely rather than a progression that resolves.

a short harmonic cycle repeating hypnotically without ever resolving or going anywhere

Quartal voicing Chords stacked in fourths rather than thirds, producing ambiguity of quality.

chords built from stacked fourths, open and ambiguous, neither clearly major nor minor

Drop voicing One chord tone dropped an octave to open the spacing.

widely spaced chords with a gap between the bass note and the rest of the voicing

Campanella (little bell) Consecutive scale notes fingered on different strings so they overlap and ring into each other rather than being damped.

scale lines where each successive note is on a different string and allowed to ring over the next, turning a run into overlapping bell tones

Baixaria An improvised third melodic voice in the bass, answering the tune and linking chord changes — not walking-bass filler.

an improvised bass counter-melody that answers the main tune as a third independent voice rather than supporting it

Qenet (Ethiopian modes) Five-note modal sets — tizita, bati, ambassel, anchihoye — selected as complete systems rather than positions in one scale.

a five-note modal set with a distinctive flattened second and wide leaps, plaintive and unresolved

Yaa Amponsah A specific highlife chord and riff pattern, recorded 1928, reused across countless later songs as a shared chassis.

a bright cyclical major-key progression repeating as a fixed chassis under changing melodies

Modal interchange (borrowed chords) Chords taken from the parallel mode, destabilising the key.

chords borrowed from the parallel minor or major so the key never quite settles

Open tuning The strings tuned to a chord, so a barre or slide across any fret produces harmony.

tuned so the open strings form a chord, with heavy use of ringing open strings against fretted notes

Wahine tuning Slack key major-seventh tunings that enable hammer-ons imitating vocal ornament.

an open tuning with a major seventh in it, giving a sweet unresolved ring under hammer-on ornaments