Hey Friend,
At the very basest of levels, melody starts out as a single pitch (note). But one note a melody does not make!
As the definition goes, melody is...
...a collection of pitches that all together form a pleasing or satisfying piece.
The important idea here is the “pleasing or satisfying” part!
Just snapping a series of notes together doesn’t give you a melody. They have to be notes from a specific set of pitches, and we call these sets of notes “keys."
When we string notes together sequentially, moving up or down in pitch, we end up with a scale.
Lucky for us, a lunatic by the name of Pythagoras (yeah, the same guy that created the theorem that gave you nightmares in high school geometry class) came up with just the right formula to space pitches so they work together seamlessly.
His tuning wasn’t the end-all, be-all, but it was a great start that other people refined over the years.
For our purposes, we only have to be concerned with twelve notes. Think about that for a second…
Have you ever paid attention to the sound of your guitar strings as you tune them?
We tune to specific pitches, but there is an entire range of sound between each pitch. What if we had to remember each tiny little pitch?
These tiny pitches are known as micro-tones, and there are musicians out there that work primarily with these tones. But fortunately, we ain’t those musicians!
I’ll stick with having to only deal with twelve notes.
Twelve notes…
Hmm, twelve frets…
Can you see where I’m going with this?
On most guitars, there are markers on the fingerboard, and at the twelfth fret, there are usually double markers. That’s telling you something.
Those double markers visually tell you it’s time to start the scale notes over - you’ve reached the twelfth note.
These twelve pitches are the only ones we need to remember. And I’ll go one better…
As we get rolling, you don’t even need to know all twelve. We’re going to get started with only seven.
More on this tomorrow…
Peace~
Dave
P.S. - If you dig The Who (or The Beatles, NightRanger, Steely Dan, the Eagles, or hundreds of other artists) and want to learn their best-loved songs…
At the top is a button for GET FULL ACCESS. Click that button.
You’ll need to sign up for a free account if you aren’t already getting their emails. Sign in if you’re already subscribed for the free lesson emails.
Once you log on, click any of the GET FULL ACCESS buttons to take you to the full access sign-up page.
Once you’re set up, go to the Songs section and check out all the brand new Who songs, as well as the 900 other song videos at your fingertips.
And don’t worry - if you’re not happy or have second thoughts, just email customer support and cancel. Easy as that.
| 
