Music & Melody (Guitar Lesson)

This lesson introduces some big musical concepts with a simple melody you can play with one finger. Using just six notes, we'll explore what it means to be in a “key”, how music is organized into phrases, and more about rhythm. The lesson also wraps up with an in-depth explanation of tablature, and walks you through the exercise note by note.

Our melody “Twang Primero” is in the key of A minor, and uses notes from the A minor scale. This means that we hear the note A as our musical “home”. This idea is illustrated at 0:40 by a short sequence of chords. Notice how the four-chord sequence sounds complete when it begins and ends with the A minor chord, but sounds unfinished when it ends after just three chords, on the E. You might notice something similar when listening to the exercise.

The melody for “Twang Primero” is organized into short musical statements or “phrases”. Most of these phrases end with the note A, which is the “tonic” of our key. Pay close attention to each phrase and you'll hear how this return to the tonic note creates a sense of completion, especially at the very end of the song.

At 4:48, you'll hear the melody played slowly against a repeated count of four. This count is our “meter”: a repeated cycle of beats that organizes the music into recognizable rhythmic patterns. Note the use of different notes values: quarter notes lasting a single count, half notes lasting two counts, and whole notes lasting four counts. If you like, follow along on the accompanying PDF and watch the notes. Even if you've never read a note of music in your life, you'll probably find that it's easy to see how the notes line up with the steady beat. We're not going to go very deeply into reading traditional music notation in this course, but understanding how to read rhythms will be very helpful to everything you do going forward in your guitar studies.

The last section of this lesson focuses on tablature, another form of music notation and by far the most popular and familiar. You've already been reading “tab” in previous lessons, and it's easy to see why so many guitarists prefer it to standard notation: you don't need to know what note you're playing, only where to put your finger. Tablature does have its shortcomings; you'll need to look at the notes to find an indication of how to play the rhythms. But you'll most likely pick up the rhythm by listening, and that's an important skill as well.

The tab “staff” consists of six horizontal lines. Each line represents one of the six strings, with the bottom line representing the sixth string or low E. Remember that “low” has to do with pitch, not proximity to the floor! Most beginners would be likely to call the low E the top string because it's closer to the ceiling, but it makes the lowest sound. On our tab staff, it's the lowest line. Numbers on the lines tell us where to put the fingers: a number 2 means to hold down the string at the second fret, while a zero means to play an “open” string. Follow along as we walk through the tab for “Twang Primero” and it won't take long for you to see how easy it is to read.

As you play along with the backing track, be sure to keep time! Since there's no drums to follow, listen closely to the rhythm guitar. Even when the strumming pattern changes, you should notice that the steady beat or “pulse” is always clear. For extra “twang”, try striking the string close to the bridge of your guitar. Twang on!

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