J. Anthony Allen takes "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and re-harmonizes it to sound like it modulates to a new key without changing a single melody note. The trick is making the same tune feel like it shifted keys just through harmony choices.
Okay, so what I thought we'd do next is this modulation challenge. This can be really tricky. It can be really fun. It can also be a super disaster. So we'll see how it goes. We might be deleting these videos after we make them, and you might never see them, but maybe. Maybe it'll work. So what we're going to do here is we're going to take a popular melody and we're going to try to modulation it. We're going to try to harmonize it with a modulation in it where there wasn't one. So we're going to try to make it shift to a new key. So we need to decide on a melody to use. We could use, like, a popular song like Mary Had a Little Lamb. We could use. The Star Spangled Banner is one that we often use for this kind of a challenge because it does have some odd numbers, odd notes in it that lend to a modulation pretty well. We could use Christmas songs, but, you know, I don't think I want to use this Star Spangled Banner because I have such an international audience here. Maybe we'll try Mary Had a Little Lamb. Let's try Mary Had a Little Lamb. So the idea here is not to change any notes in the melody, but just make it feel like it's moved to a new key. Okay. So you can do this with any song you can imagine. You can harmonize something to have a modulation in it. Whether or not it sounds good is a whole other can of worms. But let's modulate Mary Had a Little Lamb and see what happens.
