The best way to illustrate this is, let's write a melody using these very basic melodic words and see how they are joined together.

Example 1

Now for the above example, I used 4 melodic words C chord -Variation 2, F chord - Variation 1, G chord - Variation 6, C chord - Variation 6.

The rule of thumb for this is, when moving from one melodic word to another, go to the nearest note or to a common note.

What does that mean? It means, that you look at the last note of your melodic word and look for another melodic word that begins on the same note, or the closest different note. In our example above, in the first melodic word in the C chord, the last note was E and the first note of the next melodic word was F. So the progression of notes was C-G-E, F-A-C. Click here to see all the possible nearest notes and common tones for a C chord going to an F chord or vice versa.

I marked with a blue X the place where I duplicated a note in an inversion form. As you will learn in the next lesson, all our chords can be inverted twice, yielding another 6 words per inversion. Don't worry if inversions doesn't make sense now, the important thing to see is the nearest notes, since this is how you put together your melodic Legos, so to speak.

Click here to see the nearest notes between the F chord and the C chord.

Going back to our melody, click here to hear it again and see it, we went from an F chord to a G chord, the last note of our melodic word in F was the note C and that moved to the first note of the melodic word in G, the note being D. Click here to see a chart representing nearest notes between F and G and vice versa.

And lastly, we moved from the G chord to the C chord, using Variation 6 of each chord. The last note of the G chord was the note G and the first note of the C chord was the note G, so we used the note that is common to both of them. Click here to see the chart of nearest notes and common notes between C and G and vice versa.

At the end of every new material, I'll put up a couple of examples illustrating the use of our new melodic word. This is the logic that we use to put them together.