The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

Definition
Embellishing the melody with a neighboring tone.
This is a nice little melody—but it’s really only half of a melody. Ending on the
fifth note of the scale, as it does, actually sets up some melodic tension. When
you hear this melody, you want to resolve the tension, and somehow get things
back to where they started—on C.
There’s an easy way to do this, of course. All you have to do is create a sort of mir-
ror image of the first two measures, but with a downward motion from G to C.
The first thing we’ll do is copy the first measure into a new third measure—
except we’ll copy it with the first note starting on G, and with the quarter notes
moving down in a G F E D progression. (Note that this progression puts two of

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Chapter 8:
Melodies
97
the C Major triad notes—G and E—on the primary beats of the measure: one and
three.) Then we’ll end the run with a whole note in the fourth measure, posi-
tioned on the tonic note: C.
Your completed melody looks like this:
Your completed melody—play it loud and proud!
That wasn’t so difficult, was it? Granted, this melody won’t win any Grammy
awards, but it is a legitimate melody, and it’s quite singable. (Trust me, I’ve heard
worse.) The key thing is that you’ve seen that creating a melody isn’t hard, as long
as you know the basic theory involved.
What Makes a Melody Memorable?
All of this brings us to the key question: How exactly can you create a memorable
melody?
It certainly helps to have a little soul and inspiration, of course, but you also can
employ some very reliable techniques to ensure that you create a melody that works,
and will stick in the listener’s memory after he or she hears it. We’ll go through a
number of these techniques next, with the caveat that these aren’t necessarily “rules”—
it’s possible to do just the opposite of what I recommend and still create a great-
sounding melody. (Which means there must be 
some 
art involved, doesn’t it?)
Center on a Pitch
You don’t want your melodies wandering around all over the place, like a dog looking
for a place to do his business. What you want is more of a hunting dog of a melody,
one that knows where home is and, at the end of the day, finds its way back there.
The “home” of your melody needs to be a specific pitch. When you pick a home
pitch, your melody can then revolve around the pitch. You can start on that pitch
(although you don’t have to), and you should end on that pitch. Equally important,
the other notes in the melody can play around that pitch—and even land on it,
occasionally.
Note that your home pitch doesn’t have to be the tonic of the scale. You can make
the third your home, or the fifth—but probably not the second or sixth or seventh,
because they’re less related to the tonic triad of 1-3-5.
For example, listen to the following melody. It’s in the key of G, but revolves
around the home pitch of B—the third of the scale.

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