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Play Guitar By Ear - Finding the 'One'
Chord
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The first important step in learning to play guitar by ear was to
introduce the eight bar song form. Now, it's time to develop a
system for identifying common harmonic patterns used by
successful songwriters.
Musical content:
The key skills to learning to play by ear is the ability to
understand musical 'form' and 'content'.
Remember, all musicians who play by ear have learnt to do this,
they just don't know how to explain the process!
Finding the 'one' chord:
Our next step in learning to play guitar by ear will be to learn
how to play 'two chord songs'.
As we have discovered the eight bar song format is a great place
to start as our basic musical template, we will now need to learn
the underlying mathematical codes for creating successful,
logical chord progressions.
Professional musicians use a numbering system to identify chord
progressions that makes it easy for them to learn songs quickly and change keys effortlessly.
It's extremely simple, and as we all know ... simple works!
Here's how it works:
The first chord we need to be able to find by ear is the 'one'
chord, this is the 'key' chord. When a performer says "let's do
'XYZ' song in the key of G" the one chord for that song would be
'G'.
Chord 'one' reference chart:
Key of C ... 1 chord = C
Key of C# ... 1 chord = C#
Key of Db ... 1 chord = Db
Key of D ... 1 chord = D
Key of D# ... 1 chord = D#
Key of Eb ... 1 chord = Eb
Key of E ... 1 chord = E
Key of F ... 1 chord = F
Key of F# ...1 chord = F#
Key of Gb ...1 chord = Gb
Key of G ... 1 chord = G
Key of G# ...1 chord = G#
Key of Ab ...1 chord = Ab
Key of A ... 1 chord = A
Key of A# ...1 chord = A#
Key of Bb ...1 chord = Bb
Key of B ... 1 chord = B
In 98% of two chord songs the very first chord is a the 'one'
chord, as you can see we are off to a great start.
More good news ... 100% of two chord songs finish on the 'one'
chord.
That means if we were trying to play a two chord song by ear we
would have a good idea what the first and last chords were!
Here is an example of a two chord song in the key of 'D'.
D
? ? ?
| //// | //// | //// | //// |
?
?
? D
| //// | //// | //// | //// |
As you can see, we're not sure what all the chords are, however
we do know the first and last chords.
I'll include one more example in the key of 'A'.
A
? ? ?
| //// | //// | //// | //// |
?
? ? A
| //// | //// | //// | //// |
Each baby step forward in learning to play guitar by ear will
build confidence in our ability to work out other songs by
ourselves, eventually there's no limit to how many songs you can
learn and remember.
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