Lesson 35: Melody: Chord Tones
This lesson introduces the art of
creating melodies.
Before taking this lesson, you should know:
To learn about
creating your own melodies, we start by
studying
melodies in existing songs; this is called
melodic analysis.
Melodic analysis is a big subject, exploring the many different aspects of
melodies, for example:
Chord Tones
For this lesson, let's start analyzing how
individual notes in a melody
work with the song's
chords and with other notes in the melody. We can
divide a melody's notes into:
-
"Anchor notes" (chord tones): More about these below.
-
Embellishing notes: These are relatively "weak" notes which "fill
in" between the anchor notes. We'll explore these in
Lesson 48: Embellishing Tones.
Anchor notes. These are the "strong" notes in a melody which sound good
"on their own" with the chord that's playing at that moment, generally because
they are
chord tones. A
chord tone is just a tone which can be
found in the chord itself. For example:
-
Let's say the chord playing at a certain moment is C (a "C major
triad").
-
The notes in a C chord are (as I hope you know): C, E, and G.
-
Therefore, the notes C, E, and G are chord tones at that moment in
the song; and you can use any of those notes in your melody at that moment,
with confidence that the note will sound good with the chord.
Next:
