CHORD MELODIES

The Basics

Chord melodies are arrangements of a tune where you play both the melodic line and the chords. In other words, you harmonize the melody.  Chord melodies are frequently played solo but may be played with accompaniment.

 In most cases, the melody is in the top notes of the chords.  The notes below the melody are the notes of the chords of the tune.  In solo arrangements, the bottom notes will be heard as a bass line, so you need to pay some attention to that.  (We'll cover bass lines in depth at a later date.) You'll want to have it sound good and make some kind of musical sense, but it will be somewhat limited - unless you're Joe Pass! 

You need to know your chords fairly well to be able to do much with this technique. If you don't have a good understanding of harmony and a reasonably sizeable chord vocabulary (know a pretty good number of chord shapes), you'll want to refer to my Blues You Can Use Book of Guitar Chords, or some other thorough chord book.  The better you know fingerboard harmony, the easier it is to arrange chord melodies, and the better they will sound.

Here's how it works:

First, you have a melody with a chord progression.  The example below is a simple blues riff melody.  Play it to see where it lies on the fingerboard.

Once you have the melody worked out, you find chord voicings that fit underneath the melody notes.  First, we'll create a simple arrangement, where we harmonize only a couple of melody notes per bar.  In this spare style, most of the melody is played without a chord sounding underneath it.

You may have to play some melody notes on a different string in order to fit it on top of a chord shape.  In this example, we move the first note - an A - from the 2nd string, 10th fret to the 1st string, 5th fret.

After you have created the simple chord melody, you may want to add some more chords to harmonize more of the melody notes.  In the example below, only two more chords were added, but they give harmonic fullness to the tune (in a full 12-bar form or some other bigger tune, that would add up to a lot of additional chords).  They also make it a bit more difficult to play - something to consider if you are working up a tune for performance. 

Notice that the chords we used are mostly smaller fragments of larger forms.  You don't have to always use every note of a chord.  See the Chordin' the Blues page on this site, or better yet, Blues You Can Use Book of Guitar Chords.

Once you have the chords in place, you can then jazz it up a bit.  Instead of playing "block chords" where you play the whole chord in one strum, you can pick parts of the chord, adding the rest in another strum, and maybe a more active bass line.  Look at the final version of the example tune to see how that works.

In the above version, the tune is much more active with the bass moving more and the addition of the little lick at the very end. You can try this with any tune but it's best to start with short, simple melodies.

Now look at the chord melodies currently up to see some examples of this in some more sophisticated and complex tunes.