**In fact, in your last two examples, there is no way of showing what the melody line is. And simply chords and rhythm isn't going to do it.**

You can write the melody line on the staff, Don. That's a very common convention, in fact.

Also, you can take any standard piece of sheet music and make it into a chart. Takes a bit of practice. And when you learn the rules of how to embellish your structure, you can redo it in any number of ways. And you can reuse structures to make new songs. Junior Brown has a whole slew of songs that follow the same formula but yet each has its own character. Now, I don't know if he uses charts but if you made charts of these songs, there would be very little difference between them.

**I was a jazz bassist in my earlier days, until I felt like if I heard one more "ii-V7-I" my head would explode.**

Nobody is a jazz musician in their earlier days. You were, perhaps, a jazz student. You obviously were not a jazz musician just by making that statement. No shame in that but you can still learn to use a chart for whatever it is you can play.

***It does mean that I sometimes have to make up a tune because the dots stubbornly refuse to become a tune.***

One of the things that is wrong with how music is taught is that rarely is ear training part of it. I think everyone should ear train FIRST and THEN learn the dots. You have to have a musical idea that you can set the dots to. You can't just start drawing the dots and a piece of manuscript paper and suddenly a song magically appears on the page. Nothing turns a kid who wants to learn music off faster than throwing a bunch of sheet music in front of him. Help him develop his ear first and then he'll do a lot better learning the notation part of it.

Some people never learn it even though they play and sing pretty good. The Beatles certainly come to mind here. There's an emotional side and an intellectual side to music. Without the emotional component, no one is motivated enough to learn the intellectual side. Ear training is that emotional component because it gets you going quickly. Right off the bat, you're playing songs instead of sitting there plucking note exercises out on a printed page wondering when you're going to get to the good stuff. How can you gauge how good you are if you can't play anything but exercises? Once you hit an impasse in your ear training where suddenly you can't do a certain thing then the intellectual, practical side kicks in and you realize that to be able to play that requires exercises that you need to master. To me, that's how it should be done.