Melody vs. Harmony


Hi everyone! I'm Kara and I've been playing piano for 11 years. I play piano and keys, electric and acoustic guitar, ukulele, and violin. I have not taken any music theory classes besides scale books in first grade but I was just made the new leader of my church worship team. I figured it would be beneficial to understand scales, chords, and inversions. In the beginning, I initially thought this book was pretty simple and that it wouldn't help me very much but as I kept going, I realized that my teacher failed to teach me a lot of the basics. One of the things I have never learned is melody versus harmony. Melody is the relationship between pitches that forms a song (Carter 29) whereas harmony is defined as "the vertical relationship between pitches" (Carter 29). For any kind of music, having a strong melody is impertinent. When playing music, the melody should be like the chips to your guacamole, you need to be able to notice the chips at all times or else you just have a mouthful of avocado. In the same sense, you need to be able to hear the melody which is the most important part of the song. Also, in writing songs, you must understand that melody consists of tension and release meaning the pitch moves away from the harmonic center, and then finds an interesting way to get back to it again.

The pink dots are a C major third and the blue dots are a E minor third. The C third would typically be the melody and the E third would be the harmony. When you play or sing, you use the corresponding note (play C and E, E and G, or G and B). These would be the harmony and melody sets for these two chords.

(I tried showing this in a video but it wouldn't upload. Next post with probably be a video.)

Do you think a typical two step harmony sounds better than the rest? Why do you think the pitches blend together so well?


Carter, Nicolas. The Building Blocks of Music - Harmony, Melody, and Rhythm. Music Theory From Absolute Beginner to Expert. N.p.: Nicolas Carter, 2016. 29-30. Print.