Pop Music Theory


Lessons in Order

1-7 (Intro & Pitch) +
8-18 (Major Scale) +
19-29 (Chord Progressions) +
30-34 (Hook Chords) +
35-41 (Written Notes) -
35: Melody: Chord Tones
42-50 (Song Chorus) +

Lessons by Topic

Strategy +
Pitches +
Scales +
Written Notes +
Chords +
Chord Progressions +
Melody +
35: Melody: Chord Tones
Songwriting Steps +
Science +
Games & Tools +
Song Examples: Crazy +
Song Examples: Rolling Stone +

Detailed Contents

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:
  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:


Lessons in Order

1-7 (Intro & Pitch) +
8-18 (Major Scale) +
19-29 (Chord Progressions) +
30-34 (Hook Chords) +
35-41 (Written Notes) -
35: Melody: Chord Tones
42-50 (Song Chorus) +

Lessons by Topic

Strategy +
Pitches +
Scales +
Written Notes +
Chords +
Chord Progressions +
Melody +
35: Melody: Chord Tones
Songwriting Steps +
Science +
Games & Tools +
Song Examples: Crazy +
Song Examples: Rolling Stone +

Detailed Contents

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