| | | Hey Friend,
So I'm sitting here trying to get this email hammered together. Daylight is burning and I'm starting late. I've got a cat in my lap, demanding my attention and time is running out...
What's a guy to do?
Work around it, I guess. Power through..
The cat can take care of herself - she's just happy to have a lap to sit in. At least it's quiet - a luxury I don't often get on a Saturday morning.
I've already had a chance to mess around a bit with my guitar this morning, experimenting with a chord progression and riff I was hearing in my head. I usually take an idea like that and sit down to map out the chords (hint: I usually don't know what chords or notes I'm hearing in my head until I sit down with my guitar and find them).
Once I have a rough idea what the basic progression it, I start trying to mix it up to find something different sounding. All too often the "voices" we hear in our head are echoes of something we've heard before. So I try to take the initial idea and butcher the progression to uncover other possibilities.
I hate it when I get an idea, play it, and find it boring after I've had a chance to hear it out loud. That's why I'll tear it down - looking for something fresh.
It doesn't necessarily mean I throw the chords out. I'll try changing the tempo, or the strum pattern, change a chord fingering to see if a slight change produces more energy.
It's definitely not a science - you just grab an idea out of thin air and give it existence by playing it somehow. Hum it, sing it, find it on your guitar or a piano. The point is to solidify it in some physical way. You can decide later if it's something you want to flesh out more.
That's how every song comes to life. The songwriter gets an idea and starts giving it life with physical sound. Even if the songwriter comes up with a lyrical idea first, the physical act of writing it down has to happen before they can move forward.
The song you chose to learn - it came about the same way.
Thought >> Idea >> Physical demo >> Full arrangement >> Performance
Seeds of greatness, Baby!
LESSON
If you did your exercise for yesterday, you have some basic notes to work with, right? So far we've...
- selected a simple, three to four chord song to learn
- listened to the song
- hummed along with the chords being played
- found the hummed notes on our guitar
The next step to learning this song is to now list the notes on a piece of paper in front of you. Again, don't worry about strums or tempo or beats. Just write the notes down in the order you have been humming them.
As you saw from the exercise files yesterday, my notes are C, G and F.
What your going to do is try out the chords named by the notes you played. In my case, I try playing a C chord for every C note I played, and the G and F chords for every occurrence of the respective notes. They might work... they might not. Here's the exercise files.
Check it out! They work!
Now what if they didn't work? What if the chords don't line up the same as the notes we were humming? If this is the case, you have to do a little detective work. You can take that note and see what other chords use that note. For example, an E chord has the notes E, G and B. An A chord has A, C# and E. If the E note is the one you're trying to line up and an E chord doesn't work, try the A chord or vice versa.
Granted, with most Rock songs you're not going to run into too many difficult chord choices, but I thought I'd throw it out there in case you picked an obscure one.
Okay, so that is your marching order today. Play with it, see of the chords sound right. If you're feeling particularly saucy, try to play the chords along with the song. Again, this is another great instance where Song Surgeon can help you out by slowing the song tempo down without losing the pitch.
Be proud of yourself. This is a big step!
You don't always have access to tabs or sheet music. Why let that hold you back?
With a little practice, you can now figure out the fundamental melody and chords of a song. That's a major building block in becoming the player you want to be.
The key point here is that you've gone from just dreaming about playing songs you like to the process of figuring them out on your own. This is a major transition from just being a beginner. You are now combining listening skills and you'll soon have an intuition about which chords work together.
Take a look at Song Surgeon to get a demo copy. Use it to test out tempo slowing capability. Create the looped sections so you can practice the chord progressions for each section. Every tool you can find that helps you get closer to your goals is worth least checking out, right? Get the Song Surgeon demo here...
Now...
It's free.
Peace~
Dave
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