Watch the Sweet Notes online guitar lesson by Robbie Calvo from Write Your First Song

"Sweet notes" are the notes found in your chords. This is an ideal place to find and create melodies. More often than not, the chords will even suggest melodies to you. Let's take one of our progressions and explore that a little bit with you.

Let's take a C major chord and play it. The notes that make up that chord are: C - E - G. You can use those 3 notes to start writing melodies over that chord. You can use any of the other notes from the C major scale too, but the 3 chord tones will sound the strongest and sound resolved when you land on them over that chord. I call chord tones "sweet notes" and use them all the time to write melodic hooks and motifs in my music.

Now let's take another chord and repeat the process. A minor 7 = A - C - E - G. Using those 4 notes over the A minor 7 chord is going to be a great place to start writing super strong melodic hooks.

Let's add in one more example so that you can really hear how powerful this approach is: F Major 7 = F - A - C - E. Let's sing those tones against the chord. Sounds great, doesn't it?

OK, now I'm going to play those 3 chords as a progression and sing chord tones over the chords. These are simple ideas that are great starting points for more complex melodies should you want to get deeper. Most songs however are super simple melodically...so don't feel pressured to write more detailed lines. Simple sweet notes are always good.

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