Homophonic texture in music
What is homophonic texture?
In the most basic terms, homophonic texture is a melody played with chords.
Homophonic texture is the next step in complexity in writing your songs. It is here that we add another voice beyond a simple one note drone we saw in monophonic texture.
Examples of homophonic texture
Here we add chords behind the melody. The chords are not very active in creating their own interest. They support the melody in full and are of otherwise not much interest.
Another possibility is to write something that is called an "ostinato."; This is basically a piece that is repetitive. What I mean is a chord progression, usually 2 or 3 are repeated over and over and the melody is played over it drawing from it. This would be difficult to do on one guitar. But by no means think that you shouldn't try to accomplish its effect. I'll show you an example for 2 guitars.
Notice something here. I had to change the melody a bit. I didn't change the notes. I just changed them from quarter notes to make them more interesting. The point is don't get too tied to a melody. Sometimes you have to change it for it to sound better.
A common type of homophonic texture is used by just about all of us guitarists. We sing (one voice) and we accompany ourselves with our guitar ( the other voice). This is melody with accompaniment.
But we can also use arpeggios to accompany a melody. It still wouldn't be polyphonic because the arpeggio simply accompanies instead of creating it's own movement.
So we can still have homophonic texture and have pretty intricate sounding music. And still relatively easy to play. You can see that in homophonic music the rhythm, melody and harmony of the 2 parts can be very similar and they move generally in the same direction.
The next thing we'll look at is polyphonic music.
In the mean time use the blank tab sheet you can find on the website to write out some homophonic textures with arpeggios.