How to Play a Melody on Guitar

by Julie Francis

There are many articles on how to form the chords on a guitar and very few on how to play a melody on guitar. That's because it takes a lot of words to explain how to play the melody of Three Blind Mice while a video could show you in a few minutes very easily.

The truth is that most people learn how to play a melody on guitar by humming the tune in their head and then finding the coresponding note on their guitar. Then they remember where the notes were and gradually put it all together, perhaps a little slowly at first, but practice will burn the memory to your fingers and if you play it often enough, you'll still be able to play that melody in 20 years even if you havn't picked up a guitar in all that time.

If you have learned to read music and also learned the names of each note and where it lies along the string against each fret, you can work out how to play a melody and memorize it from sheet music. Many people never learn more than some basic chords and their names, yet they are perfectly capable of picking out a melody "by ear."

I have listened to several guitarists in pubs recently play the "Chasing Cars" song by Snow Patrol and they strum it. This beautiful song is too heavy when strummed, it just floats with the original guitar in the background. I can only assume they don't realise how easy it is to play it , as Snow Patrol do, with that hypnotic repeated melody.

Chasing Cars has three chords. A guitar has six strings. You frame the chord, you play and listen to each of six notes. You find the ones you need and then you play them one after another, just as you remember hearing them.

You can work out almost every melody from it's chords, the only difficult part is sometimes swapping out the chord fingering on one fret for the same chord on a higher or lower fret so your fingers don't have to travel so far up and down the fret board for the melody. It's just practice. It's a great way to spend a quiet evening, working out a melody for something you have always wanted to play. You can also cheat a little later when you perform it and fill a part of the meolody you can't work out with voice, until the music comes back to a chord you know!

Strumming is a first step when you learn to how to play the guitar, but playing a melody is not far behind. Practice with some nursury rhymes, most of which have only 3 major chords and you'll soon see that the melody is already there, on one of those six strings as shaped by the chord. It's far easier than you may think.

Learning how to play a melody on a guitar is something you can pick up watching another guitarist do, if you have learned sheet music you can work it out from that, or you do it by ear. The hardest thing you will first have to overcome is the belief that it is hard. Get past that and simple melodies will come easily to you. Then you'll start to pick out a melody over several of the strings. As you practice this will get easier. You cannot run before you walk, so make sure you learn the major and minor chords so your fingers will simply go to the chord via muscle memory. Once one hand works automatically, the brain is free to concentrate on the other hand which is picking out the melody