I’m doing this mostly through a video today. Hopefully it will be clearer this way. We’ll see. I talk about each step of the assignment and then I perform it for you on a piano. I figure this way people who are not really playing along can still see what I’m up to here. It can’t hurt, can it?
I include the scores for each of the steps so you can see visually what I am talking about and playing. Here are the original chords of the exercise:
And next I add my melody to these chords:
And finally here it is with a better bass line:
You might notice that I added the note F in the melody of measure number eight. That makes the G Major chord a proper dominant seventh which provides a little more powerful drive to the ending C Major chord. I will try to get the final step done soon, I am going to be very busy tomorrow but I have a pretty good idea what I want to do with that melody. It is the bass that I have not given any thought to yet.
Soon if not tomorrow. Have fun with this!
No Stolen Cat Pictures 
Even I was understanding the C E G type notes you were talking about and picturing them in my head. When I was learning the organ in sixth grade (WHO takes “organ” lessons and needs to know that instrument in life?! I sure wish I’d had a teacher like you and learned the piano instead!) I did learn chords with the left hand but for the life of me… I am not sure why that so called “teacher” kept me on the pointer finger system for so long! I would love to learn how to write music! But for now I’ll stick to the lyrics!
Now this little tune is kind of how I ended up writing LIttle Jewel and Dedication. My friend just gave me the basic melody and I wrote from that. I can almost hear a song in my head in way of lyrics for this ONE!
You really are a great teacher! Maybe I should borrow my daugher’s keyboard??? JUST kidding!!!! I am so not in a place to even attempt that right now. But I do hope you get good feedback for this one. It truly was wonderful.
Your remarks are very supportive and encouraging, Diane. That helps me move forward with confidence.
My main criticism of myself on this presentation was not being upbeat and fun enough, but this was a major accomplishment in quality of presentation, of a good looking and sounding video. I’m tweaking away at this. I was very distracted by camera position and zoom and lighting issues — try talking to a camera lens! Honing the craft of presentation with recording video and audio from multiple sources and editing all that into little clips that can be joined into a unified whole is distracting me from the actual presentation. Creating the musical exercise and a solution is the tip of the iceberg.
Soon I will have this down to a science and my “product” will be polished. Then I will concern myself with increased exposure if I can find a way that suits me. I can’t and won’t aggressively shout out to the world, “Hey, look at this!” when I know I am doing subpar work. I want two or three paragraphs, a couple pictures, and a briefer snappy video. My perception is that I am selling me, and I want to be worthy of people’s bother. I’ll know at least when I’m good enough to sell myself on my own product and when I have this all down pat so I can reliably produce quality results without too much bother.
I’m very close now, so very close.