Recent progress of computer and network technologies makes it possible to store and retrieve a large volume of multimedia data in many applications. In such applications, efficient indexing scheme is very important for multimedia retrieval. Depending on the media type, multimedia data shows distinct characteristics and requires different approach to handle. In this paper, we propose a fast melody finder (FMF) that can retrieve melodies fast from audio database based on frequently queried tunes. Those tunes are collected from user queries and incrementally updated into index. Considering empirical user request pattern for multimedia data, those tunes will cover significant portion of user requests. FMF represents all the acoustic and common music notational inputs using a well-known string format such as UDR and LSR and uses string matching techniques to find query results. We implemented a prototype system and report on its performance through various experiments.