One of the burning questions I get asked is how to get from the melody to chord melody. In other words, how do you create a solo instrumental version from a lead sheet that provides only the melody notes, lyrics, and chord names. With practice, you will be able to play the melody and the harmony together by fingerpicking and strumming with only the bare skeleton of melodic notes and chords. Let’s take the well-known two-chord nursery rhyme “Skip to My Lou” and see the steps required to go from lead sheet to chord melody.
Skip to My Lou
“Skip to My Lou” is my favorite two-chord song to teach beginners to switch between two chords. For complete beginners, I use the one-finger chords of Fadd9 (0010) instead of F and C7 (0001).
I included this song with lyrics and suggested strum patterns in the 80-page Fun with Uke and 20-page Fun with Uke Festive edition.
Lead sheet
A lead sheet refers to sheet music that contains the bare minimum you need to sing and play a song. The single melody notes. The chord names. The lyrics.
For the ukulele, there are many ways to play the melodic notes as shown in the above extract.
The way I indicated in the 20-page Fun with Uke Festive edition is for campanella style playing, making use of the high G string on the ukulele and allow a “ringing” effect for sustain.
The second way is to allow for playing on low G ukulele.
Block chord melody arrangement
It’s easier for the human ear to hear higher than lower pitched notes. As such, putting the melody notes as the highest pitched makes it easy to play the entire chord with the melody and still hear it.
By rewriting the melodic notes such that they are played on the A-string, we can now play the chords and “end” where the notes are, as shown in the above example.
This is known as “block hcord melody arrangement” – you can strum the chord or use your fingers to play them simultaneously.
I think of this as four-part harmony and practical for church hymns.
Broken chord melody arrangement
By the same token, we can “break up” the chords. There are many ways to do this.
In my arrangement, I show a different way in each section, such as – part block, part broken; alternating bass; and full broken chords.
In the extreme, I like additional notes such as the arpeggiated version below.
Next steps
If this topic is of interest, I can give a workshop using this song.
There are 23 other nursery rhymes in the 80-page Fun with Uke I can apply this approach to create instrumental solo versions (chord melody). Likewise, these popular tunes are tempting me to write original pieces quoting the jingles, such as in theme and variations.
