On many instruments, you can play 12 consecutive notes before you get to the starting note, but higher. That's way too much for a simple melody. With only a selection of these it is much easier to handle. About five tones is fine. The Dutch call such a selection: a ladder. It's like a scale, but vertical. They must have thought: tones rise, like a person on a ladder... Ok. A melody maker cooks a very nice melody from a small handful of notes. Sometimes, at the end, he adds some extra tones for just that little extra excitement. What his handful of notes should be called, that is not his concern. Someone else'll figure that out later.
On gitaartoonladders.nl, you'll find about thirty handfuls of tones, each with a melody to try out.

Doremi faso la

1000 years ago, someone selected a set of six tones and gave them names: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So and La. These 'Guido six' are still doing very well. The melody 'My Bonnie is over the ocean' consists of exactly these 6 tones. Centuries later, this is 'revolutionary' improved (7 tones). Others have have thought to give Do a fixed pitch. We don't do that here. For fixed pitches, we already have the letters ABCDEFG.

Guido of Arezzo did not have a simple name for all twelve tones. That's why we had to come up with it ourselves. Don't have a name yet? Take your upstairs neighbor - turn it around - Fixed. You already knew how to play Do-Re-Mi, now you know Do-Er-Im! All tones together are called 'chromatic', 'colourful'. That's why we actually gave the tones a color. Green for the fine but a bit ordinary tones Do, Fa and So. Pink and purple for the seasoning Mi and La.

What you can do here

On gitaartoonladders.nl, you find out what your fingers are doing, with any handful of tones.

• Try it out on a backing track.
• Find example melodies.
• Read more about tones and scales.
• Sort out or write your own melodies.
• And, once you've done everything: take the quiz.

But first: select some tones other than 'All of them'. Twelve is way too much!