THE TERRYTRILLA HARMONIZATION MODEL
Partimento — the TerryTrilla harmonization model
You bring a melody — it hears the music inside.
UNDER EVERY CHORD
Not just chord names
Next to every chord there are two labels.
The first says which chord of the key this is — the first, the second, the fifth. The second says what it does: holds you in place, moves you away, or pulls you back home.
If you studied theory, these are the degree and the function: tonic, subdominant, dominant. If you didn't — they tell you why the chords sound the way they do, and what changes if you swap one of them.
Degrees read as roman numerals — I, ii, V — or as numbers: 1, 2, 5. That is how they are written in session and worship practice, and that way they move to any key without rewriting.
Bar · chord · degree · role — read from a live analysis.
There is more than one right answer
The same melody can be heard in different ways: strict and transparent — or bold, with thicker colours. Partimento offers several versions rather than one: academic clarity, jazz freedom, cinematic depth. Take the one that sounds like you.
Inside each version chords can be changed one at a time: a richer one in place of a simple one, a passing chord added, a relative taken instead. In jazz this is called substitution and reharmonization — but you don't need the word to use it: you can hear the difference.
More than chords
Chords bar by bar are the beginning. Partimento will suggest a bass line, a solo part and guitar fingerings. All of it agrees with itself, like musicians who play together and listen to each other.
A bass line
Moving with the harmony, not under it.
A solo part
Written against the same chords you kept.
Guitar fingerings
For the voicing on the page, not a generic shape.
That is why the harmony holds together, instead of being a set of separate chords that each happen to fit on their own.
A co-writer, not a machine
Change a chord, and the model remembers — and rebuilds the rest around your decision. Your edits are never lost: the final word is always yours.
This is the difference that matters. We are not building a tool that writes the music for you and takes the authorship with it. We are building one that shows you the options — and the choice stays yours, in every bar.
Not scraped from the internet
NAPLES, 300 YEARS AGO
About the name
Three hundred years ago the conservatories of Naples taught an art called partimento: a student was given a single line of music and learned to hear everything else within it — the chords, the motion of the bass, the breathing of the phrase. The finest musicians of the era were raised on this practice.
We named our first public model after that art, because it does the same thing: it takes your melody and builds the harmony around it.
The version
The first two generations lived inside our studio, learning from real music and real corrections. Partimento v3.0 is the first generation we are ready to name and show. It will keep growing — hearing more music, taking new lessons — and the versions to come will bear names of their own.
You always decide.
The model that hears harmony inside a melody. Under every chord you see what it does; one melody gets more than one version.