The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

Part 3:
Tunes
96
This gives us the first two measures of the melody:
The first two measures of our first melody.
Let’s elaborate on these notes a bit. If you want to give the melody a little more
of a flow, you can fill in the blanks between these three notes by adding notes in
the step between each pitch. We’ll do this by turning the half notes into quarter
notes, and adding 
passing tones
between the C and the E, and the E and G.
(That means we’ll go from C to D to E, and from E to F to G.)
The result looks like this:
A
passing tone 
is
a subsidiary tone you have
to pass through to move
from one important note to
another. The passing tone
is not part of the underly-
ing chord structure, but is
often situated between two
of the notes in a triad.
Definition
The first two measures, with passing tones added.
We’re still left with that single whole note sitting there. It’s okay to leave it like
that, but doing so makes this part of our melody sound like nothing more than a
simple major scale—which it actually is! Fortunately, we can choose to add a lit-
tle more interest by using another technique called a 
neighboring tone, 
in which
you land on the main note (in this case, the G), slide briefly to an adjacent note,
and then return to rest on the main note (G, again). The result sounds a little
like “doo-de-doo,” which is slightly more interesting than a plain “doo.”
You can place neighboring tones above or below the main tone; for our little
melody, we’ll use the neighboring tone above the G—which happens to be an A.
Keeping the rhythm simple, we’ll now start the second measure with a quarter
note on G; then follow it by a quarter note on A and a half note on G.
The result looks like this:
You create a
neighboring tone 
by start-
ing on a pitch, moving up
or down by a step (either
half or whole) and then
returning to the original
pitch; the neighboring tone
is the one that “neighbors”
the original note. Like a
passing tone, a neighbor-
ing tone typically is not
one of the three notes in
the underlying chord triad.