I’ve been trying to pick out the melody to as many different songs as I can in order to help my ear training ( as Justin suggests)
My question is what If the melody can be played in 2 different positions within the scale the song was written in?
I’ve struggled with this part of the guitar probably more than anything.
The song in question is Learn to Fly by the foo fighters.
I’ve very roughly tabbed out the two separate melodies I’ve picked out from the B mixolydian scale, which I believe the song was written in.
There’s a lot of repeating within the song so I’ve just tabbed the bear bones of it.
And apologies for the rough state of it. There’s no rests or rythmn indicated so I hope you’re familiar with the song.
Yes I think the first melody sounds better and would doubtless be the one I’d use if I were trying to work out a finger style arrangement but I guess I’m asking from a theory perspective as to how you’d know which one to use and maybe the chords would be different for the second version and which chords etc?
Do I understand correctly that you would like to know which octave is the correct one for the melody? It happened to me too that at first I found the melody an octave lower than what was played on the original recording. I don’t know the reason for this, probably my ears were tuned a bit lower, so to say. After a few attempts it just occurred to me that the melody sounded more “right” an octave higher.
Yes Jozsef
That’s part of it. I’ve also used different notes in the lower octave which I’m not sure is totally right anyway.
Higher octave starts on F#
Lower on B which is the key of the song. Both sound ok because they use the correct scale but it’s just interesting to know how songwriters work this stuff out
