Cape Cod Acoustics
  • Home
  • Your Lessons
  • Performance services offered
  • About Gene
  • Contact
  • Guitars, Ukes & Accessories
  • Acoustic Guitar Blog
  • Tips for guitarists
  • Guitar Gallery
  • More...

Playing by ear, Part 1

3/3/2011

0 Comments

 
Ever notice how certain chords always seem to be found together? Or that certain songwriters seem to always use a certain set of chords? These things don't happen by accident. Understanding the basics of music theory will help you figure songs out, and then you won't need a guitar teacher to lay out a song for you. Hey, wait a minute .... (!)

I have a couple students right now who are delving into the mysteries of "playing by ear," which roughly means to listen to a song and then be able to come up with the structure and changes and at least have a starting point for playing that song. Way back in my early years of playing I viewed that ability with awe. I had a friend who could do it and I supposed (with not a little jealousy) that he was endowed with some magical musical ability that I would never be able to understand. Well, maybe he was endowed with skills that made him an awesome player but after I went to college and began learning the basics of music theory much of the mystery disappeared. It can happen for you , too!

The first thing to understand is that just about all Western music for the last three hundred or so years has been based on the major diatonic scale. You know it: "do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do." From that major scale come many of the chords we play in American popular music. Before I go any further, understand that I'm talking about the less complicated forms of popular music like folk, country, blues and rock. Jazz is another thing entirely in that the diatonic scale is just a basic starting point and from there the player of that wonderful music goes in many, many directions.

To understand the major diatonic scale and the chords that are constructed from it you have to know a bit about intervals, which are the musical distances between the notes. It would be a wonderful thing if all the notes were the same distance apart but alas, that is not the case. For example, the notes C and D are what is called a "whole step" apart. Between them is another note, which has two names: C-sharp (C#) or D-flat (Db). Why does that note have two names? It has to do with the "key" a song is played in. Don't worry about that for the moment - just accept that the note between C and D has two possible names.

The interval between C and C# is a "half step" and the interval from C# to D is a half step so we say that C to D is a whole step. However - and here's the rub - the musical distance between B and C, and E and F, is a half step! In other words, for now, you can assume there is no B#, Cb, E# or Fb. (There is - those notes are really C, B, F and E, but you're not supposed to think of them that way in certain keys - more on that later)


Because of that lack of consistency in the intervals, to attain that "do -re-mi" sound of the major diatonic scale has to be adjusted depending on where you start and stop a scale. Here's the formula:


There are 8 notes in the scale if you move one complete "octave" from, say, one C to the next C higher up. Wait a minute! you say. Two C's ?!! Are they the same note?


Well, no...but yes! There are only seven "natural" note names in Western music: 
A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. There's no H! But there are literally hundreds if not thousands of notes that we can hear, from very low to very pitches so you can see that  there must be many, many notes with each of those seven names.

You need to think of the names of the notes in a circular fashion. That is, moving through notes in sequence, after G comes A again. Keeping that in mind, here is a one-octave diatonic scale moving from C to the next C:


C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C

Now, remember what I said above about which notes are a whole step which are a half step apart and applying that to the C scale I just wrote, the intervals between the notes in that scale look like this:

whole - whole - half - whole - whole - whole - half

And THAT is The Formula of a Major Diatonic Scale! If you start with C and move to the next C, it happens that all the intervals between the notes line up perfectly with The Formula. Because of this, the Key of C Major (the notes found in the key of C) are ALL "naturals," i.e., no notes need to be raised or lowered ("sharped" or "flatted") to make that one-octave scale match The Formula!

For now, just re-read what I've written here in Part 1 and digest it. Read it a couple times if you need to! Next we'll look at adjusting notes to make all the keys. After that - the chords and how they are developed from the major scales.

Peace & good music,
Gene

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Gene Bourque

    Archives

    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed