Learn how to Easily Add A Melody To A Chord Progression with Guitar Control instructor Darrin Goodman. Be sure to get the free tabs to go along with this lesson.
Introduction
Hey everybody how’s it going? This is Darrin with GuitarControl.com bringing you this video lesson. Today I want to show you how to Easily Add A Melody To A Chord Progression. So what this does is it kind of outlines the chords and it just sounds really nice as you make your way through. So be sure to click on the link in the description for the tabs and let’s get close up and take a look at how to Easily Add A Melody To A Chord Progression.
Chord Progression
All right so for as far as the chord progression goes, the chords that I’m using for this are E minor, D major, and C major and then back to E minor again. So it doesn’t really matter what voicing’s you use, I mean you could just use full-on bar chords, you could use open chords, you could use power chords, it doesn’t really matter for adding a melody over a chord progression.
Relative Keys
All right, so the first thing we’re going to do, we are in the key of E minor, so we are using the seventh position of G major. So let me back up just a little bit, so every minor key has what’s called a relative major key and every major key has what’s called a relative minor key. So if you know what your minor key is, all you do is go up a step and a half and you’ll know what your relative major is. So you know here if we’re in E minor and we move up a step and a half that puts us here, which is a G, it’s just easier to look at this if you think about it in the major keys. So for the key of G major, you have the seven positions of those and I’m not going to go into all of that right now. I actually did a lesson on the seven major modes that shows all these positions and stuff so I’ll just leave a link for that right here. You can check that out to get some further information, but I’m just going to go over the sequence and show you the notes and this is also movable so you could move this around and Easily Add A Melody To A Chord Progression in a different key.
Melody Note Sequence
All right, so the very first thing for Easily Add A Melody To A Chord Progression, we’re in the seventh position. So I’ve got my fourth finger all the way up here on the 19th fret of the high E string and we’re going to go from there to the 15th fret to the 17th fret and then from there to the 19th fret of the B string. So you can see it’s got this little repeating pattern, you could just keep going all the way through it but, we’re 19 on the high E, 19, 15, 17, to the 19 on the B string, back to the 15 on the high E to 17 on the B string to 19 on the B string to 15 on the B string. So that’s the whole sequence and I am just alternate picking this. I’m starting with the downstroke so; down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down… and I actually added in one extra note there when I said that, so the last note is an upstroke. So now what I’m going to do is I’m going to move down into the next position. So since I’m going backward this would actually be the sixth position. So now I’m on the 17th fret of the high E with my fourth finger and my first finger is here on the 14th fret, so we’re 17, 14, 15, and then go to the B, 17 back to the 14th fret of the high E to the 15th fret of the B string 17 and then13. So in this first shape, it was just two whole steps on both strings but now we’ve got two whole steps on the B string 13, 15, and 17 and then a half step and a whole step on the high E 14, 15, 17. And then the last one, this is the fifth position and the shape here is different again, so now we’re on the 15th fret of the high E with your fourth finger and the twelfth fret with your first finger, and then we’re going to go 14 on the high E to 15 on the B string and back to the 12th fret of the high E and now to the 13th fret of the B string to the 12 and then I just slide up to the 17th fret, back up to E to make it resolve. So the shape here on the B string, we’re 12, 13, 15, so a half and a whole and then we go to the high E; 12, 14, 15, whole and a half. So the whole sequence slowly and again the whole thing is alternate picked.
All right so like I said that sounds really good if you follow a chord progression with that, it just puts a nice little melody into it that is repetitive as far as the sequence you’re doing, you’re picking it the same and you know if you think about it, it’s three notes per string, so we’re going; three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, and it’s the same, it’s that same thing each time you move down the positions. Now you could continue to move all the way down or start in other places, I mean this is just one idea of many combinations that you could do just depending upon what chords you’re playing.
Check out that other video, it’ll make all this stuff kind of make more sense and help you Easily Add A Melody To A Chord Progression.
Conclusion
All right, so I hope you enjoyed Easily Add A Melody To A Chord Progression and got something out of it. If you liked the video be sure to give it a thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell so that way you don’t miss any of the content that we upload throughout the week. If there’s something that you would like to see covered in a future lesson. Leave a comment down below for me and I’ll see if I can maybe take care of that.
Anyway that is all I have for today. Thanks for watching Easily Add A Melody To A Chord Progression and have a great day.
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