Community Challenge 13 | Write a melody on one string

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Hi Everyone,

Every week, I've been posting a Community Challenge. This is an opportunity for my Patrons to explore writing music. Sometimes it's about apply some specific music theory concept. Sometimes it's about a specific technique. Sometimes it's an exercise in limiting yourself to some really specific parameters. Other times it's about writing with a very open ended writing prompt.

The goal is to practice being creative and actually use the music theory you've been learning here. In my opinion, the whole point of learning guitar is to express yourself musically.

This week's challenge is: Write a melody on one string

This is pretty self explanatory but here are a few approaches:

1. The Easy Way: write a simple melody on one string. This could be completely unaccompanied. Just a nice, simple melody recorded to your phone. It could be freeform without a chord progression, or you could have a specific chord progression in mind while still submitting just a lonely melody. 

2. Intermediate: Pick one of my Jam Tracks and write a melody to it. The melody only needs to be somewhere between 4 and 16 measures, certainly not the duration of the whole track. Perform the melody on only one string. You could record this to a cell phone, or use recording software. Whatever is comfortable for you.

3. Advanced: Write your own accompaniment for your one-string melody. You could even try a verse chorus or A section B section type thing. If you write two sections, each section's melody could use a different string. This could be with recording software, a loop pedal, etc.

4. Advanced II: You could write a whole song and have the intro riff be a one-string melody. If this challenge inspires something like that, go for it!

5. Advanced III: I suppose you could write a melody on the high E or B string and surround that melody with chords up and down the neck. If you try this option, keep your melody simple or you'll have a hell of a time trying to grab chords all over the neck. Or keep your chord progression simple and try to write in a key where you can use a lot of open notes. 

Post your creations, explorations, frustrations, questions for this Challenge on the community forum.

If you have a different approach, you're welcome to try it, but here are the ground rules:
1. This must be something you wrote after seeing this post
2. This one-string melody must be performed on the guitar in your recording and not transferred to another instrument or voice. Although, if you use it as an intro riff and then sing the same melody later, thats just fine.

Check out the Lesson Archive for more Community Challenges. You are welcome to participate on any past Challenge at any time!

P.S. Now that I've been doing Community Challenges for a little over 3 months, I think they should be a permanent, regular part of my Patreon. The outpouring of creativity from my Patrons has been so exciting and encouraging that I don't want it to stop. What do you think? Should the Community Challenge be a permanent weekly thing from now on? Let me know in the comments below. If you have some ideas for challenges, post those in the comments, too!