How to write a rock guitar melody using musical notation

One of the reasons why it’s fantastic to learn music theory, is that it lets you be “creative” without needing inspiration.

Today we are going to look at how we can write a cool melody using three simple music theory concepts:

• Chord tones
• Neighbour tones
• Passing tones

Step 1

First we write a simple chord tone melody. We are going to write over an E minor harmony, so we can use E, G or B for our chord tones. Use half notes and whole notes:

Step 2

Take some of the chord tones and split them in two:

Step 3

Add neighbour tones to the chord tones that were doubled in Step 2:

Step 4

Let’s add a passing tone:

Step 5

Let’s play these notes using slides and bends:

Step 6 - shred it!

We can take this one step further and connect up the big jumps between chord tones with a “connection by step”, which is a fancy way to say “play all the notes in-between them”. We’ll use legato and bends to play these extra notes and change the rhythm slightly:

Conclusion

And that’s how you can write a cool rock guitar melody with some very basic music theory. There are lots of other melodic devices we can use which we’ve not explored here. If you want a more comprehensive guide to instrumental composition for rock guitar, then checkout the Instrumental Rock Guitar Composition program.

Download

Enter your details below to download a PDF of the above tabs and also the E minor backing track: