I quite often take a structure-first approach rather than a harmony-first or melody-first. With a little bit of planning your structure and understanding your goal, your harmonic choices start to fall into place. This method work well when working to a brief rather than just jamming. For example, I want an eight bar section in the sentence form (a classical form based around developing a basic idea through a presentation and a continuation phrase). The initial idea covers the first two bars and, for example, this is the first A section and I want to establish the key centre, so I'll rely heavily on tonics, with tonic inversions and maybe a dominant. The repetition/variation idea is the second two bars and they are going to either be the same or similar harmonically, say swapping out some tonics for submediants for that minor hit. I decide I want my continuation phrase to harmonically accelerate towards the cadence, so the next two bars could be the previous four bars but harmonically accelerated. I know I want some sort of cadence depending on where in the larger piece this section falls, which defines the last two bars (or most of it, we might want some smoothed leading from the acceleration to the cadence). The basic progression kinda writes itself within a framework, making choices based on the function of the current bar(s) and the theme of the piece. You can jazz it up a bit on a second pass to break away from the mechanical nature of it's creation. This should also work for more modern styles with an understanding of the form and structure of your chosen genre.

Hey all :) Great to see Dave putting together his own community and good to see so many familiar faces. I'm Tom from Southern England and currently in Guildford, dabbled with bad electronic music most of my life but started to take things (a bit) more seriously around 18 months ago and branched out towards Hybrid Cinematic. Pretty confident with my harmony but appalling at melody writing.