Sometimes I have melody before I have any harmony, but with the process I have been describing, creating harmony often comes first. (After creating a progression, that is.) Anyway, with a diagram it is easy to create harmony and bass parts. Let's start with the bass.
Here's the diagram again:
The Bass Part
By far the easiest bass part is this: the bass plays the note the chord is named after. The bass stays with the chord changes. So, with the above chord progression, the bass would play C G D A E G C (all half notes).
Having the bass play any note other than the one the chord is named after is a little more advanced. There are certain guidelines for those situations. I'm not aware of all the guidelines, but I have figured out some rules of my own. These very well might correspond with the official guidelines.
1. The bass should play the note the chord is named after on the beat that the chord changes.
2. The bass may play other notes of the chord (or repeat the main note) at any other time. IOW, in between chord changes.
3. The bass may play notes that aren't from the chord as long as the note doesn't cause unwanted dissonance. (More on this one later.)
You can break any of these at any time. But, if the song doesn't sound right after you experiment, go back to these rules and start again. (This is true of a lot of this process. A lot of the rules are very confining. I break these rules often myself. The point is these rules or guidelines provide a starting point. After that, you can do whatever you want.)
Whole Note Harmony
In a previous post, I referred to a whole-note harmony. It's really easy to do with this progression ... especially since this progression was designed to create dissonant free parts. Here's how you do it: just choose the note that both chords in a measure have in common. In the case of our progression: G A B C.
Arpeggio Harmony
Here's a wiki article on arpeggios.
There are many ways to compose arpeggios. As long as you stick to notes of the chords, you can put down whatever you want. Usually there is a pattern, though. You can have arpeggios going up, going down, or going up and down. All of this is really easy with a diagram. You just choose the next note. And, with the piano roll view of many software titles, its easy to see the pattern you are creating. The main goal most of the time with arpeggios is to keep a consistent rhythm.
You don't have to keep the same pattern for measure after measure. In fact, that can get kind of monotonous if over done. In Lurking Exhaust, I changed the pattern every measure. Sometimes you want the next note to be as close to the previous note as possible. Other times great jumps sound pretty good, too. Experiment and see what you come up with.
Filler Harmony
You've worked on bass parts, arpeggio parts, and you have one filler harmony already: the whole-note harmony. Filler Harmony is a term I made up. It means creating parts that aren't concerned with rhythm. You just need some empty space in your sound scheme filled. The whole note harmony does this pretty well. But, you can also create filler harmony from any progression. Just choose notes from the diagram. To truly be filler harmony and not some funky harmony part, the notes would need to be long boring notes. I use half notes a lot. I just change notes every time the chord changes.
Well, that's all for now. These general descriptions should give you an idea of how easy it can be to create harmony parts. There are more specific things I do within each harmony type. Maybe I'll discuss them later. But, for now, what do we do about melody? I'll tackle that one next.
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