Keys and how to spot them

 

Yesterday I was working with a new student on a song called Woman Blue by Judy Roderick. I’d never heard of her, or heard the song, and that’s a shame, because it’s great (see below). Anyway, we started off by thinking about which key the song is in, and she (the student) said, What’s a key? Interesting question, and one which makes you think. Now, there are numerous theoretical approaches to establishing the key of a song, but that’s not something which is going to be helpful for beginners to hear. In fact, it would probably put them off playing. Anyway, the question was more fundamental than that: this student wanted to know how you spot one, with your own two ears. So I attempted to describe a key.

The key of a piece of music is its home. Listen to a song. Imagine it ending — that’s the key, the place where you imagine it ending up. In fact, you can often go to the end of a song and discover that, yes, that is where the song ended: it’s key was its destination. However, it’s often difficult for students to hear this home note, to separate it out from all the different notes within the home chord, and this from among the numerous other chords and all their constituent notes, and all this while the song is moving onwards, shifting from chord to chord. (There’s a particular form of panic that spreads over beginner students’ faces when they are attempting to work out a song by ear.)

So how do I get people to hear the key? It’s an open question, because there’s really no definitive answer. Everyone comes to music learning with different ears, and so everyone needs a different answer. Sounds like a cop out, doesn’t it? I’ve used many different approaches before, and none have been entirely satisfactory with all students. However, in yesterday’s lesson something suddenly dawned on me.

Most songs contain the I, IV and V chords; so, if you’re in G, you get C and D too: the first, fourth and fifth notes of G major. (If counting notes with numbers sounds complicated, it isn’t. You know the alphabet, so you can count through the letters from A to G and then from A to G again, and give each a number. It’s an incredibly powerful way of thinking about music — but I’m not going to go too far into that, because that’s the stuff that beginners hate.)

Moving on…my revelation was that, if you listen to pretty much any song, really listen to what the chords are doing, you’ll hear movement, or a kind of desire in the chords either to stay, or to move somewhere else. IV chords want to resolve downwards, while V chords want to resolve upwards. And the I chord is already where the song wants to be. My point is that, if you can hear two out of three or four chords wanting to become another chord, you can (1) eliminate them from the investigation and (2) use the movement they set up to identify the key chord. Using the numbering system for notes (degrees of the scale is the technical term I believe) also means you can work a song out without even having an instrument to hand.

In Woman Blue, at the very beginning of the song, we hear a country picking bass line (played on the guitar) alternating between two notes, the lower one on the strong beat, and the higher on the offbeat. Listen to the opening of the song, and the country picking bass line.

Sing these two notes. Notice the jump from the low note to the high note, how natural it sounds. This is a perfect fifth, and it establishes the key of the song. This is true for anyone who listens to and likes music, though they may not know that they know this.

After the first couple of beats, the opening chord moves upwards, hangs for a beat, and then comes back home. Listen to it — can you hear the way the song is lifted up, is suspended, and then relaxes back to where it started? This is the four chord: it raises the all important third note of the root chord up a semitone. It’s no coincidence that a sus4 chord’s full name is ‘suspended 4th’: the fourth suspends a chord (or song) in midair, and requires resolution.

The fifth chord, by contrast, wants to push up to the home note because it’s major third is one semi tone below the root note: you can sense a kind of pull upwards, as if the root note had a gravitational or magnetic attraction on the note below it (and on the listener’s ear).

So if two out of three or four chords are pulling down or pushing upwards to the same chord, then, if the average song contains four chords, the task of finding the key chord becomes a whole lot easier when you interrogate your ears in this way. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the fact that the IV chord wants to resolve to a different note of the I chord than the V chord does. But that’s a matter for another post.

Now giving lessons on Saturdays!

What have I been doing lately, I hear you ask. Well, over the last week, I have taken students through the circle of 5ths, diatonic harmony, establishing key both by ear and theoretically, key changes and how to solo over them, duplet and triplet rhythm, improvisation as musical conversation, swing time, the magical (okay, not quite magical) qualities of the dominant 7th chord, modal pentatonics (particularly the 3rd, used most notably by Tuareg musicians from Mali), and the Phrygian dominant. All of this has been done using specific pieces of music, so that the student hears the theory rather than thinks it. So, in each case, we’ve moved from the song to the technique, theory, structure, etc. Sometimes, as a student — and as a teacher — we need to think less in order to learn.

My band has also finally got its act together. We now have business cards and everything. Incredible. So we’ve been working our way round all the Norfolk venues looking for gigs. You can check us out here: bopkat.co.uk.

The upshot of all this is, I’m really, really busy. My weekday evening spaces are pretty much all gone, and everyone’s at work during the day, so I’m now taking on students on Saturdays. So, if you’re looking to start playing the guitar, get back into it, or develop your already impressive skills, why not get in touch?

Bopkat, bands, and improvising

My band Bopkat have finally finished recording and mixing, and also getting a half-decent website together. We’re pretty pleased with the results — please have a snoop around here: bopkat.co.uk.

It can be very difficult being in a band. Not because of the music, but rather because of the people. The more people are in the band, the harder it is to organise anything; and the more people there are in a band, the more each person has to listen; and, in fact, the more everyone has to play less.

I’ve been working with several students on ii V I progressions with a view to getting them playing, and in particular improvising, with other people. What’s become apparent is just how much we want to play — how many notes we want to use to fill the space of a beat or a bar with — and how this seems to be part of learning this new technique to improvisation. And this is not something that just students get — it can seduce the most seasoned players.

A lot of this desire to play fast, at least for learners, has, in the case of ii V I progressions, to do with getting from the root of an arpeggio up through all the chord tones and back again before the song moves on to the next chord, when we have to use our next arpeggio. Of course, this isn’t really playing music; this is technical exercise, or practical application of theoretical principles. In a way, you have to play unmusically, complicatedly in order to learn to play more simply — with less notes, moving from arpeggio to arpeggio, but (and here’s the important bit) not sounding like you’re playing exercises by rote.

It’s a strange process: playing lots of complicated runs in order to learn how to play hardly any notes at all. But it seems to me to be the only way.

 

NGD, and an offer you can’t refuse

Have you seen that? ‘NGD’. It stands for New Guitar Day. I’m a member of a forum on which members post their NGDs all the time, and all the guitars — well not all, most — are really dull. You know, another mass-produced Fender/Gibson/PRS/etc (del. as applicable).

I’ve never written a NGD post, but that’s about to change. Why? Well, because Jim Fleeting Guitars have finished building it. Nearly. It still lacks frets I think. And varnish (yes, it’s going to be violin-varnished). It’s taken a very long time, but I think it’s going to be worth the wait. It’s a 16″ solid carved spruce archtop on a 2″ deep routed bowl of flamed maple. The fingerboard, bridge, pickup cover and pickguard are plum (with maple in places). It’s beautiful (just look at it!) And it’s mine. Happy NGD to me.

To celebrate, I’ve decided to offer any student beginning lessons between 4th September and 4th October a 20% discount on their first five, and they’ll still get a free first lesson. That’s a good deal. And if you do come got lessons, you’ll be able to meet the NG. Now there’s a really good deal.

The Importance of Singing, part II

Let’s return to singing. If you’ve followed the exercises in part I, you can sing the first five notes of the major scale. The major scale has two more notes (the 6th and 7th) before arriving again at the root note (the 8th, hence the name of that interval: the octave).

Sing a full octave of the major scale. Test the note you’ve reached against the note you started from by going between the two. This takes a bit of practice, but it’s useful practice.

(By the way, even if you’re a proficient or advanced player, these singing exercises — if you haven’t done them already — will improve your musicianship — we’ll get to how this is the case in a minute.)

After going up and down the scale, start singing the major triad. This is the first, third and fifth notes of the scale, which is the commonest arpeggio around. (In fact, it’s the foundation for the description of all harmony, because it constitutes the three notes of a major chord. Any divergence from these notes, or any additional notes in a chord, are indicated by the chord name. When you see C indicated in a chord chart, you play the I, III, and V of C — which is C, E and G; when you see Dm7b5, you start (theoretically speaking) with a D major chord, and alter it by, in turn, flattening the III to make it minor, adding the minor VII, and flattening the V — easy-peasy.)

But to return to singing: sing the I, III and V of the major scale as an arpeggio. Go up and down. Get used to the ‘feel’ of each one, both in terms of the sensation in your throat (tightening/loosening) and in your ears as a listener. Jump between I and V. Keep practising the intervals until they become familiar. Test them against a song — can you sing the arpeggio over a chord in a song? This is another important step to using your voice and ear: you will be able to listen to a song and know instantly how to build each chord.

Now add the VII note to the arpeggio, so you are singing I, III, V, VII, VIII and back again. Test this against the guitar: play a Cmaj7 chord and sing the I, III, V, VII and VIII (the simplest way of playing a Cmaj7 is to play a C major chord and lift the first finger off, leaving an open B string).

Assuming all of this is going well, you now need to start broadening your palette with minor 7th and dominant 7th chords. Start with C7, which has the same major triad as the major chord, but has a minor 7th on top. When moving from maj7 to 7th arpeggios, you’ll need to loosen the throat for that VII at the top.

When you’ve done this, move on to the minor 7 arpeggio — a m7 arpeggio has the same I and V as the maj7 arpeggio, and the same VII as the dominant 7, but the III is flattened/diminished.

After doing all of these separately, try going between C maj7, Cm7 and C7 arpeggios. This is really difficult if you haven’t tried it before, but persevere with it and it will be enormously useful — and I’l talk about why in Part III.

Rebellious Digits

 

It is very reassuring to watch a video lesson made by a complete master of the guitar in which he or she tells the audience to do what I’ve been telling my students to do for years! Guthrie Govan, a fantastic teacher of technique and of music in general, always takes people through his techniques at a sensible pace, and uses analogies to get up close to what he’s trying to convey.

But so too, I just discovered, is Tommy Emmanuel. I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise: he is one of the best players of acoustic guitar – or any guitar – currently living. But in this video he takes us through the various stages of learning a notoriously tricky technique: country blues fingerpicking.

I remember the first time I learnt this. It was after I’d already been playing for 20 years, and I thought, ‘How hard can it be?’ Bloody hard is the answer. The main difficulty is that your right hand has to learn to do two different things at once. In effect, you are dividing your hand in two — one part is your thumb, the other is your fingers — and the thumb is plotting out the rhythm of the music in the bass while the fingers embellish it with chord tones and melody lines. It’s the reason the guitar became such a popular instrument: just like the stride piano of the first third of the 20th century, the guitar could become a whole band; but unlike the piano, you could carry it on your back.

Anyway, here’s the video…

 

And talking of the guitar being a whole (bluegrass) band, here’s the amazing Muriel Anderson tearing it up.

What song shall I learn?

Whenever I have a new student starting, I ask them to write a list of ten songs or pieces of music they would like to be able to play — songs they really love, and which they know well. If you love and know a song, you want to learn it; and so you will practise it; and therefore you will improve, and feel further motivated in your learning.

I was messaging a new student today, and asked her for a list of songs, and she was reluctant. (She won’t mind me writing this about her because she also happens to be an old friend, not that I’m about to dish any dirt!) Anyway, she said she just wanted to learn techniques and improve her playing generally.  This is a great aim, but how do we achieve this? By playing music. Which music? The songs she loves and knows well, of course.  We were no closer to getting a list of songs together, so I suggested that I write a list of all the charts I have taught, written out and scanned, and she can see if anything appeals to her. We both liked this idea, so I started writing out the list…

…and it kept on and on and on.

Generally, when I teach a song, I print off a blank chart with bar and tab lines, and chord boxes. The student and I then work out the song together, and I write the song out as we work our way through it.  It’s a really good method, and the student gets a real sense of the process of working music out by ear, which is a very important skill to acquire. Anyway, this means that in general I don’t keep copies of the songs I teach. I only started taking scans of these sheets recently, and obviously I keep copies of any songs I have to TAB out on Word. So I was quite surprised to see that I have charts for over three hundred and sixty songs — the total of songs taught over the past ten years must be over two thousand!

Here’s the list. What would you learn?

A Foggy Day, Joe Pass

A Night In Tunisia

Aicha Talmomt

Ain’t Misbehavin’, Fats Waller

Air Mail Special

Airegin

Albatross

All Night Long

All Right Now

All the Young Dudes

American Pie, Don Maclean

American Tune, Paul Simon

And it Stoned Me

Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene, Hozier

Angelina Baker, trad.

Another Brick in the Wall, part 2

Another Love, Tom Odell

Auld Lang Syne

Autumn Leaves

Baby Can I Hold You

Baby What’s Wrong With You, Mississippi John Hurt

Back in Black, AC/DC

Back In Black, Amy Winehouse

Ballad of Mr Jones, Jake Bugg

Banana Pancakes

Band On the Run

Beat It

Beautiful Love

Besame Mucho

Big Legged Woman (Heritage Blues Orchestra version)

Big Mama’s Door

Bigmouth Strikes Again

Billie’s Bounce

Billy Jean

Black Dog

Blackbird

Bleeding Heart

Blower’s Daughter

Blue 7

Blue Bossa

Blue Jeans Blues, ZZ Top

Blues in G

Body and Soul

Boneyard, Guy Tortora

Boots of Spanish Leather

Born To Run

Born Under A Bad Sign

Brazen, Skunk Anansie

Bridge Over Troubled Water

Brother Wind

Brothers In Arms

Bullet In the Head

Bye Bye Blackbird

Cabron, Red Hot Chili Peppers

Caleb Mayer

California Dreaming

Can’t Stop, Chili Peppers

Cannonball Rag

Carey, Joni Mitchell

Cello Song, Nick Drake

Chaghaybou, Tinariwen

Chan Chan, Buena Vista Social Club

Cherokee

Cherry Wine, Hozier

Cherry, Amy Winehouse

Chilly Jordan

Chocolate Jesus

Cissy Strut

Cloudbusting, Kate Bush

Come Get To This

Concrete Jungle, Bob Marley

Count on Me

Crazy Love vol II, Paul Simon

Creep, Radiohead

Crossroads, Cream

Dancing Queen, ABBA

Daybreak, Stone Roses

Dog Days Are Over, Florence and the Machine

Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright

Don’t Explain, Billie Holiday

Don’t Speak, No Doubt

Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright, Bob Dylan

Don’t You Worry Bout A Thing, Stevie Wonder

Down Around My Place

Down to the Waterline, Dire Straits

Dreadlock Holiday

Dream A Little Dream of Me

Dream On, Aerosmith

Dreaming of You, The Coral

Driving Towards the Daylight

Empty Promises

Eternal Flame, The Bangles

Europa, Santana

Every Day I Have The Blues, BB King

Everybody Hurts, REM

Everywhere, Fleetwood Mac

Fairytale of New York, Pogues

Fast Car, Tracey Chapman

Fire and Rain, James Taylor

Flying Home, Charlie Christian

Folsom Prison Blues, Johnny Cash

For the Widows

Freedom Hangs Like Heaven

Fur Elise

Gee Baby Ain’t I Good To You, Kenny Burrell version

Gimme Some Lovin, G Love and Special Sauce

Girls, The 1975

Give a Little Bit, Supertramp

Go Your Own Way, Fleetwood Mac

Going Down South

Gravity, John Mayer

Green Dolphin Street

Half A World Away, Oasis

Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley version

Happy, Pharrell Williams

Hard Come, East Go

Hard Times

Hard Times, Heritage Blues Orchestra

Have You Seen the Rain, Creedence

Hazy Shade of Winter

Heartbeats, Jose Gonzalo

Hello, Adele

Here Comes the Sun, Beatles

Hey Jude

Hiawatha

His Blood Can Make Me Whole

Hold Back the River

Holding On To Heaven, Foxes

Honeysuckle Rose

Honky Tonk Women, Rolling Stones

Hotel California, Eagles

How Can A Poor Man

I Can See Clearly Now

I Can’t Stop this Feeling I’ve Got

I Don’t Know My Name

I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know

I Mean You, Thelonious Monk

I Put A Spell On You

I Wanna Dance With Somebody, Whitney Houston

I’m Done Cryin

I’m Your Puppet

I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, Bob Dylan

I’m A Good Woman, Barbara Lynn

I’m On Fire, Bruce Springsteen

I’m Yours, Jason Mraz

If Heartaches were Nickels

If I were a Carpenter

If Not For You, Bob Dylan

Importance of Being Idle, Oasis

In My Room, Beach Boys

In the Shape of a heart

Is This It, The Strokes

It Will Come Back

Jazz Crimes, Joshua Redman

Jealous Guy, John Lennon

Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed

Jitterbug Swing, Bukka White

Johnny B Goode, Chuck Berry

Jolene, Dolly Parton

Just Like A Prayer, Madonna

Just Like A Woman, Bob Dylan

Karma Police, Radiohead

Kashmir, Led Zeppelin

Keep your eyes on the Prize

Keep Your Head Up, Ben Howard

Kid Charlemagne, Steely Dan

Killing Me Softly

Kooks, Naive

Late July

Layla, Eric Clapton

Let Her Go, Passenger

Let It Be Me, Elvis

Life’s Been Good, Joe Walsh

Lilac Wine

Little Blue Thing, Suzanne Vega

Little Wing

Lonely This Christmas

Loud Pipes

Love On the Rocks

Luka, Suzanne Vega

Lullaby Of Birdland

Mad Sounds, Arctic Monkeys

Make it Rain

Make Me Smile

Mary Had a Little Lamb

Master Blaster, Stevie Wonder

May I have a little talk with you

May You Never

Mayfair

Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard, Paul Simon

Michelle, Beatles

Midnight At the Oasis

Midnight Blue, Kenny Burrell

Milestones, Miles Davis

Minor Swing, Django Reinhardt

Miserlou

Mister Sandman, Chet Atkins arrangement

Misty

Moondance

Moonshiner, Bob Dylan

More Than Words, Extreme

Move, Miles Davis

Mr Bojangles

Mr Brownstone, Guns N Roses

Mrs Robinson

My Cherie Amour, Stevie Wonder

My Favourite Things

My Funny Valentine

Need Your Love So Bad, Fleetwood Mac

Nervous Breakdown, Brad Paisley

Never Going Back Again, Fleetwood Mac

No Woman No Cry

Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out

Norwegian Wood, Beatles

O Mary Don’t You Weep

Obviously, McFly

Old Love, Eric Clapton and Robert Cray

Old Man

Oliver’s Army, Elvis Costello

On the Road Again, Willie Nelson

Otherside, Chili Peppers

Pachelbel’s Canon

Paranoid, Black Sabbath

Parastite, Nick Drake

Patience, Guns N Roses

People Help the People, Birdy

People Make the World Go Round

Perfectly Good Guitar

Piece of My Heart

Pink Moon, Nick Drake

Piper At the Gates of Dawn, Van Morrison

Plateau, Nirvana

Po Black Mattie

Police Dog Blues, Blind Blake / Ry Cooder

Poor Black Mattie, R L Burnside

Poor Johnny

Purcell, Fairy Queen, Act V symphony

Purcell, Rondo

Purple Haze

Purple Haze, Jimi Hendrix

Purple Rain, Prince

Red Cross, Charlie Parker

Redemption Song, Bob Marley

Rehab, Amy Winehouse

Rhinoceros, Smashing Pumpkins

Road, Nick Drake

Rob and Steal, Paul Wine Jones

Rocket Man, Elton John

Rockstar, Nickelback

Rolling and Tumbling, R L Burnside

Romeo and Juliet, Dire Straits

Runaway Train

Saffron, Jake Bugg

Sailing to Philadelphia, Mark Knopfler

Sangria, Blake Shelton

Save Tonight, Eagle Eye Cherry

Scar Tissue, Red Hot Chili Peppers

Seven Come Eleven, Charlie Christian

Sex On Fire, Kings of Leon

Since I’ve Been Loving You, Led Zeppelin

Since You’ve Been Gone, Rainbow

Sister Morphine

Sitting on Top of the World

Skinny Woman

Slide, Goo Goo Dolls

Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana

Smokestack Lightning

So What?

Solo Flight, Charlie Christian

Somebody That I Used To Know

Something, Beatles

Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart

Sometimes It Snows In April

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Sonnet, The Verve

Spoonful

St James Infirmary

Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin

Stand By Me, Oasis

Starman, David Bowie

Stay, The Vamps

Stepping Out, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers w/ Eric Clapton

Stormy Monday

Strange Creatures, Jake Bugg

Street Spirit, Radiohead

Streets of London, Ralph McTell

Strong Enough, Sheryl Crowe

Suddenly I See, K T Tungstall

Sugarman, Rodriguez

Sultans of Swing, Dire Straits

Sunny, Pat Martino version

Sunshine of Your Love, Cream

Suspicious Minds, Elvis

Sweat (A La La Long)

Sweet Child O Mine

Sweet Creature

Sweet Home Alabama

Sweet Home Chicago

Swing to Bop / Topsy, Charlie Christian / Django Reinhardt

Take Five, Dave Brubeck

Take It Easy, Eagles

Take Me Home Country Road

Take the A Train, Duke Ellington

Tears In Heaven, Eric Clapton

Telegraph Road, Dire Straits

The Claw

The Day I Cry for You

The Drugs Don’t Work, The Verve

The Man in the Long Black Coat

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Band

The Pretender

The Thrill is Gone

The Times They Are A Changing, Bob Dylan

The Whale has Swallowed Me

The Wild Rover, Dubliners

There She Goes, The Las

There’s No Other Way, Blur

They Don’t Make Them Like You Anymore

They Shall Be As Happy, Purcell

Thinking Out Loud, Ed Sheeran

This Masquerade, George Benson version

Thrill Is Gone, BB King

Time Makes Two

Too Many Angels

Tune Up

Two Outta Three Ain’t Bad

Under The Bridge, Red Hot Chili Peppers

Valerie

Van Halen, Jump

Vincent, Don Mclean

Visions, Stevie Wonder

Voodoo Chile

Waggon Wheel

Walk On By

Walk This Way, Aerosmith

Walking Blues

Weightless Again

West Coast Blues, Wes Montgomery

Wheel Within A Wheel

When I lay my burden down

When it all comes down

When the Blues Catch Up With You, Buddaheads

When You Walk In the Room

While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Beatles

Whisky In The Jar

Whisper Not

Whispers In the Dark

Whoever He Is

Why Is It So

Why Worry, Dire Straits

Wild Is the Wind

Wildest Moments

Wildwood, Paul Weller

Wonderwall

Words of Love, Buddy Holly

World Of Idiots

Yellow Submarine

Yellow, Coldplay

You Do Something To Me, Paul Weller

You Don’t Love Me

You Know I’m No Good

 

The importance of singing, part 1

Something I’ve noticed from teaching several hundred people over the past fifteen years is that, the more you use your voice, the quicker you’ll learn the guitar.  This applies to all aspects of playing: reading music, working a song out by ear, improvising, building chords, writing melodies, navigating the fretboard, and so on.

Let’s try an experiment.  Sing (or hum if you’re embarrassed) the first line of ‘Three Blind Mice’. In musical theory, the first note you sing (‘Three’) is the major third, the second note (‘blind’) is the second, and the third note (‘mice’) is the root. So, if you sing the line in reverse (‘mice blind three’) you are singing the first three notes (or degrees) of the major scale.

Now sing the first line in the correct order again, but then sing the second line of the song (‘see how they run’) straight afterwards. Concentrate on the muscles in your throat. Can you feel how with each line, your throat relaxes as you go down? And can you feel how you have to tighten your throat for the beginning of the second line? If your throat tightens, the note pitch goes up; if your throat relaxes, the note pitch goes down.

With the second line of the song (‘see how they run’), we have with the first note (‘see’) the fifth degree of the scale, with the second and third notes (‘how they’) we have the fourth degree of the scale, and with the fourth note (‘run’) we have the third degree of the scale. And so we are back where we started with the first note of the first line.

Paying attention to the feeling in your throat is a foolproof way of working out melodies: if your throat relaxes, you go down in pitch; if it tightens, you go up.

Now try singing from the root (‘mice’) up to the fifth degree of the scale (‘see’). (This is the do re me fa sol of solfège, and the scale of Sunday churchbells in reverse.) Once you’ve got the hang of this, try singing the first, third and then fifth notes. Once you can do this, you have the basics for working out melody and harmony.

I’m going to assume that you have no desire to learn how to play ‘Three blind mice’ on the guitar. So think of a song you do want to play, or a melody you know well, and sing the first line or two (this can be a guitar, keyboard, vocal or any melody — up to you). Take the notes and see if you can sing the scale. Can you work out the root note? (The root note is the note that feels like the ‘home’ of the song – the one you’d expect it to end on.) Are there any notes that outside of the first to fifth notes of the scale? Does the third note sound wrong, or is it difficult to sing?

The above exercise is only an introduction to using your voice, but it lays the groundwork for understanding the whole tradition of Western harmony which dominates almost all forms of music which you are likely to encounter — from metal to jazz to blues to hip hop to prog to classical. The more you sing, the better musician you’ll be capable of becoming — and that is my aim: to help each of my students become a musician, not just a guitarist.

Diatonic seventh chord arpeggios using CAGED

Arpeggios of the diatonic scale in C major-A minor using CAGED

Getting to grips with arpeggios can be a bit of a headache.  But if you use the CAGED system, you can move methodically through each arpeggio shape as you get to know them.  Moving up through the C major scale gives us Cmaj7, Dm7, Em7, Fmaj7, G7, Am7 and Bm7b5.  As you work your way up the scale, you learn four different arpeggio shapes for each of the five CAGED positions.  Because they are organised diatonically, you will hear when it is right and when it is wrong, which encourages you to hold on the memory of the shapes by ear, which helps with improvisation.

Modes and Scales – a comparative overview

I made a diagram!  It has all the modes and scales that I could find with each of the intervals clearly marked.  They are grouped together in major, minor and ‘neutral’ groups so you can experiment with each, and compare their different effects over chord progressions.  It looks complicated, but it really isn’t.  Starting from the left is the root note (I), and on the far right is the root note an octave higher (the VIII note).  Every semi-tone in between is given a separate column, and the presence of each semi-tone in a given scale/mode is marked by a grey rectangle.  Simple.

TABLE OF SCALES AND MODES