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Lesson 35: Melody: Chord Tones

This lesson introduces the art of creating melodies.

Before taking this lesson, you should know:

• Major triads (Lesson 14: Major Triad Games)

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 (these are covered in separate lessons):

• How the pitches fit the chord progression (this lesson)
• Rhythm (Lesson 46: Melody Rhythm: Rolling Stone)
• The pitches' scale degrees (Melody: Degrees of the Key)
• Pitch motion, up/down (Melody: Contour)
• Simultaneous melodic lines (Contrapuntal Motion)

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:

1. Let's say the chord playing at a certain moment is C (a "C major triad").
2. The notes in a C chord are (as I hope you know): C, E, and G.
3. 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:

• Start learning how to read music, which you'll need for other melody lessons, in Lesson 36: Treble Staff; or
• If you can read music, go on to Lesson 48: Embellishing Tones; or
• Explore another aspect of melodies, in Lesson 46: Melody Rhythm: Rolling Stone.