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dlwalke
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Joined: 02/02/19
Posts: 240
dlwalke
Full Access
Joined: 02/02/19
Posts: 240
06/24/2019 3:49 am

Sure. You can play the melody line (what you sing or whistle or hear in your head when you sing or whistle or imagine the song) with single notes. I think you would have to figure that out by ear unless you have some guitar tab that shows you the melody line. The melody notes relate to the chords but it's not as simple as saying that a particular note corresponds to a particular chord. This is a really imperfect analogy but I think of the relation of the notes to the chords (the melody to the harmonic progression) as being similar to the relation between the path a white water kayaker chooses as he or she navigates the flow and dynamics of a river. The progressions of chords limits the options of what notes would sound good but there is still a great deal of freedom in selecting the particular notes to play over those chords. The interaction between (a) the movement of notes and (b) the flow of the chords is, in part, what gives any particular song on rendition of a song is unique character. The main point I'm trying to make is that their is not a 1-to-1 deterministic relation between a note and a chord.

Having said that, trying the note that the chord is named for would be a reasonable place to start but the melody note could be any note in the chord (which is typically built from at least 3 notes) or even a note that is not in the chord, so you just have to figure it out. To make it a little more interesting, you could see how it sounds to play the first chord of each line, and then play some melody notes after that. Like play a chord for "Ben", melody notes for each word "the two of us need look no more", then the same chord for "We" followed by individual notes for each word of the next line ("both found what we were looking for", etc.