Write a few notes of a tune, with the rhythm they have. This puts a chord under each bar — not under each note — dressed the way the style dresses it, picks a grip that keeps your line on top, finds the finger to move while it rings, and plays it against the groove so you can hear what each of those is worth.
G a note · . a rest · - hold the last note · G*3 hold it three · | a barline, for your eyes only · G4 a particular octave. Where the notes fall matters more than which they are, which is what the grid is for.Play them back to back. The chords are the same degrees in both; almost everything you hear change is rhythm and touch.
The top row is not a rival harmonisation — it is these same degrees, voiced the way a style that prefers triads would voice them. Holding the roman numerals still is what makes the rest of the difference visible.
The same degrees of the same key. 2 of the 2 bars change quality: the style reaches for a ninth or an eleventh where pop and rock reach for a triad.
Unchanged, and worth saying: harmony is chosen for the bar, not for each note. There are 2.0 melody notes per bar here, and they move over the chord rather than each getting one — which is the difference between this and a harmony exercise.
The single biggest difference, and the one no chord chart shows. The same chords played square on the beat are not this style.
The hammer-on or pull-off under a chord that is already ringing is what a diagram cannot photograph, and a good half of what the style sounds like.
Every bar is the pattern below: 86bpm, sixteenths swung about 56%, the full grip on the downbeat and the rest of it landing where the bar does not. Damped chops rather than rung strums, so the chord stops before the next one arrives and the space between them is part of the pattern. The melody is played a few milliseconds behind all of it, because nobody plays a line exactly on the grid.
The bar is the unit, not the note. All the notes in a bar are weighed together — by how long each is and where it falls — and one chord is chosen to carry them. A short note off the beat that fits nothing is a passing note, so the harmony does not have to flinch at it. Putting a chord under every melody note is what makes a harmonisation sound like an exercise.
The degree comes first. Every chord in and around C major is tested against those notes and rated by what they do in it: strongest on the 3rd or 7th, available as a tension a whole step above a chord tone, unusable a semitone above one.
Then the style says how to play it. Neo-soul reaches for maj9, m9, m11, 69, maj7 before a plain triad, so the degree is written as the first of those the chord can be — checked against the melody again, since a quality that puts the tune a semitone above a chord tone is not an upgrade.
Then the bars are chosen together. Best chord per bar gives a bad progression, so these are picked over the whole phrase at once, scoring root motion as well as fit — and holding a root while only the colour changes is worth something here that it would not be worth in another style, which is why a vamp is allowed to be a vamp.
Then the hand. The shape is picked to put the bar’s own note on the top string, in the octave it is actually in, then for staying near the last shape. The embellishment is whichever hammer-on or pull-off this grip has a finger free for, preferring one that leaves the melody string alone.
The harmonic classifications are the Berklee ones and are cited on each bar; which notes of a bar the harmony has to agree with is the ordinary account of structural against ornamental tones. The style profile is a different kind of claim and a weaker one: No corpus study of neo-soul harmony exists, for either strain, so these levels are read off the teaching literature and the recordings rather than counted. The reading is weighted to the modern guitar players, which raises maj7, add9 and 6/9 above where a profile of the 1990s keyboard records would put them; it does not lower the altered dominants, which both strains treat as core vocabulary.
Shows each chord the way this style would voice it, and marks which of its alternatives belong to the idiom.