Tom Petty is just an amazing icon of American rock n’ roll and his songs possess a deep heart and soul.  Growing up, he was one of my favorite artists and still is today.  In this video lesson I’m going to teach you the Learning to Fly chords and how this song is structured.  Watch the video below, and then I’ll dig into the theory below:

Click to watch this Video on YouTube

Understanding the Theory Behind the Learning to Fly Chords

So this song is in the Key of C Major, or A minor…those are the same things.  If you’re not already familiar with how every Major Key has a relative minor, then you might want to check out our guitar keys lesson to get you up to speed.  The short of it is this:  Take any Major key, re-order it from the 6th scale degree, and you’ve built its relative minor.

If we take C Major (C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C) and now just start it from A, we get A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A and that’s the Key of A minor when we harmonize the scale out.  Make sense?

Basically, we can choose to look at this song as being in A minor or in C Major, it’s really up to you, but because it starts on an A minor chord and that’s kinda the hinge chord here, it definitely has a more minor feel to me.

If we start at C though, then this song is a 6-1-6-5 chord progression, being that we go from A minor (the 6 chord of C Major) to C Major (the 1 chord of C Major), back to A minor (6 chord), and then to G Major (5 chord of C Major).  Are you with me here?  Now lets look at these Learning to Fly chords in terms of A minor.  Doing that makes this a 1-3-1-7 chord progression in the Key of A minor.

The real takeaway here is to see how you can use something as simple as 3 chords, get a groove going, and then keep that going thru the entire song.  The chord progression never changes.  So I hope this inspires you to grab that note pad and your guitar and model this song to write your own!

I recently did a full breakdown of this song for our Music Made Easy members and showed them how to write a song using Learning to Fly as an example.  Modeling is DEFINITELY something you should start doing to write better songs, or just write your first one.

Okay, well I hope you got something out of this Learning to Fly chords lesson, and shoot me a comment below, tell me how the lesson went for you and anything you’d like to see in a future lesson.  I look forward to hearing from you!

Andrew

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The Major Scale is one of the first things to learn when you’re trying to figure out what the major scale notes are exactly.  It is a specific formula that always yields 7 notes of specific distances apart.  All that changes are the letters, but the distances between those letters stays the same.

Watch the video below to get the skinny on the Major Scale notes, and I’ll go into it below the video:

Click to Watch this Video Lesson on YouTube

What You Need to Know About the Major Scale Notes

Okay, so we want to explain the Major Scale notes and how we get them right?  The first thing is just to choose a beginning letter of the alphabet to start on.  How about we do the E Major Scale?  To do this we are going to use a formula of steps.  It looks like this, W-W-H-W-W-W-H (where W = Whole Step and H = Half Step).

Now where are we taking these notes from?  That would be the Chromatic Scale, which is the name we give to all 12 notes we have in Western Music.  There’s only 12 of ‘em.  We use 7 letters of the alphabet in music (A-G) and then # and b (sharps and flats) to add to these letters.  It are these notes that we use to form musical keys.  Let’s look at a graphic of your guitar neck and the low E string to see this in effect.

So now we just need to start on E and travel our first Whole Step to F#, another one to G#, now a Half Step to A, a Whole Step to B, a Whole Step to C#, a Whole Step to D#, and finally a Half Step back to E.  So the E Major Scale notes are:  E-F#-G#-A-B-C#-D#-E

Now you might be wondering why I’d do E when in the video I do C, and so many people do C.  The reason is that it’s important to see it’s the SAME for every key.  Only the letters change and sharps or flats get added to maintain the same distances between them.

Takeaways for Major Scale Notes:

• Choose your desired scale (that’s any of the 12 chromatic notes) and spell out the Major Scale Formula
• Remember that each alphabet letter has to be unique, so no duplicating (i.e. C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C, not C-D-E-E#-G-Bb-B-C)
• You always end back where you started, so C-C, E-E, A-A, etc, etc

If this lesson was helpful, let me know in the comments below, and please do like, +1, tweet, and whatever other social sharing you like to do.  It helps me keep more lessons coming for you.

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When a student of mine asked me to teach her the Taylor Swift Mean chords, I was pretty excited to check the tune out.  Now a little back story might be in order.  See, before this particular student started with me, I was NOT a Taylor Swift fan.  In fact I looked at her as a sign of where the music industry was going wrong.  See, I had made a fatal error of judging based on my impressions, rather than actually looking at her songs.

I’ll continue this story below, but if you just wanna jump in and learn this great tune, then go ahead and watch the video:

Click to watch this Taylor Swift video lesson on YouTube

Why I Like These Taylor Swift Mean Chords and Her Songs

The first song of Taylor’s that my student brought was “Speak Now”…now it wasn’t exactly what I’d call a great lyric, but I definitely felt it was well constructed and had great melody.  That’s what started to change my mind about Taylor Swift.  Her songs are incredibly strong melodically, which of course is one reason they’re so popular.

We continued down Taylor land and each song began winning me over more and more.  The subsequent songs had deeper lyrical depth and really conveyed some good messages.  Taylor Swift is also great for beginners because of her extensive use of the 1-4-5 chord progression, though not arranged in that exact order usually, and she loves the Key of G, which is a great one for beginners.

Now back to these Taylor Swift Mean chords though.  This song is in the Key of G Major and uses the other most popular chord in a key, the 6 chord.  So that would be an E minor chord.  If you’re not somewhat familiar with musical keys, you may wanna use that link there to check out a lesson on them.

Basically the deal is that G Major is our 1 chord, C Major is our 4 chord, D Major the 5 chord, and E minor the 6 chord.  The progression of these chords goes from the Verse: E minor to D Major to C Major, then Pre Chorus: D Major to G Major to D Major, then to the Chorus:  G Major to D Major to E minor to C Major.  There is a Bridge section too that uses these same chords, but just watch the video to get that part.

Hopefully this lesson was helpful for you and you enjoyed seeing how these Taylor Swift Mean chords come together to really form a great melody and some lyrics with a good message too, which I always like!

Please leave me a comment below and share your feedback.  Did you like it, what would you like to see more of, or whatever.  Also, Facebook like/+1 this and Tweet it out if you dug it.  It’s a big help to keep people visiting and more free lessons coming.

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If you want to learn guitar rhythm, it’s important to understand how to count a beat out and the ways to alter your rhythm techniques.  The most important thing to becoming a good rhythm player however, is the ability to tap your foot while playing.  It’s vital to begin building your inner clock and meter to have a steady beat.

Watch This Video and Learn Guitar Rhythm Basics to Help You Succeed

Click to watch this Guitar Rhythm video on the YouTube Page

What you’ll find in a majority of popular music you’ve grown up with is that it is in 4/4 time.  Although you can do many time signatures, this is by far the most popular and easiest to learn.  I think we’re kinda built to count in fours.  Or maybe that’s just that we’re conditioned to it because of all the years of 4/4 prevalent music…who knows.

Anyhow, when you want to learn guitar rhythm and increase your skill, you’ll need to be able to count a beat.  What this means in 4/4 time is that there are 4 beats to a measure and each beat gets a count.  When I do this, I’m using quarter notes.  So 1, 2, 3, 4…that’s 4 quarter notes.  Now if you want to speed this up then the next step is to double it – So we count 1 &, 2 &, 3 &, 4 & .  Notice how there’s now 8 notes there.  These are appropriately called eighth notes.

You will improve your speed and meter as you learn guitar rhythm, and theoretically, you can keep increasing the note value within those 4 beats of a measure.  Double eighth notes, you now have sixteenth notes (still fairly easy to play) – counted as 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a, 3-e-&-a, 4-e-&-a, double that and you have thirty-second notes.  Mostly thirty-second notes are reserved for the shredding lead guitar licks (very fast).  Beyond that, I’ll leave it to your fingers to aim for such speeds!

These are the basics of understanding 4/4 time and just note that to learn guitar rhythm effectively, you should find the guitarists or bands you like and begin to find what accents and divisions of the beats you like to strum your chords on.  Chugging rock, Staccato Reggae stabs, rumbling train beats?…the list goes on.

Effective guitar rhythm is just about really being able to lock into a beat and then bring what you feel out.  I hope you enjoyed this intro lesson.  If you did, please consider Facebook liking this post, Retweeting it, and the rest of that social sharing goodness.  It helps a lot to keep visitors coming to the site and me making free lessons for you .

Lastly, please leave me a comment below and share how this lesson went for you and any questions or feedback you might have.

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If you’re a U2 fan then this is probably one of their best songs to learn on guitar.  The U2 One guitar chords are super easy to play and it makes a great song for beginners and advanced players alike.  This song is in the Key of C Major or A minor (those are the same thing).

In this video lesson we’re going to learn the three parts that make up this song.  It has a verse, a chorus, and a bridge, but it only uses 5 chords, 3 of which are from the 1 4 5 chord progression (A staple of rock, pop, country, the blues, etc, etc).

Go ahead and watch the video and I’ll dig into some of the theory behind it below.

Click to Watch this U2 One guitar chords lesson on YouTube

Understanding These U2 One Guitar Chords of This All-Time Classic

So to get at what’s going on in One, we need to first just spell out the key its in (That’s C Major) and then we’ll see the progressions it uses.  The Key of C Major is made up of the notes C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C, we get this by forming The Major Scale, but you don’t even have to worry about that if you’re not ready to dig that far into the theory behind it.

Just look at these 8 letters as 8 numbers.  C is our 1 note of C Major, D is our 2 note, E the 3rd note, F the 4th, G the 5th, A the 6th, B the 7th, and lastly back to C as the 8th or Octave.  When we make chords out of these notes, we get C Major, D minor, E minor, F Major, G Major, A minor, and B minor (diminished).  Out of this key One uses C, D, F, G, and A.

Now the verse sections go A minor, to D sus2, to F Major, to G Major.  Which we’d call a 6-2-4-5 chord progression, only that 2 chord is just modified a bit (a sus2 chord is neither Major or minor).  To understand Sus chords or suspended chords, we need to look at guitar triads, but that’s not necessary unless you wanna dig into deeper theory.  All you need to do is just play the chord shape!

The chorus goes C Major, to A minor, to F Major, to C Major:  So that’s a 1-6-4-1 chord progression.  The only other part to the song and our last bit to learning all these U2 One guitar chords is that bridge section.

The bridge of this song goes from C Major to A minor (2x), then goes back to C Major, and then to G Major, then to F Major, and finally back into a C Major chord to start the chorus.  So this would be a 1-6-1-5-4 chord progression with the 1-6 part happening twice.  Now if you look at these three progressions, it’s all 1′s 6′s 4′s and 5′s (save for the one 2 chord that gets used).

Apart from the 1-4-5 chords, the 6th is the next most popular chord in a key.  That’s why the 1-6-4-5 chord progression is just a distant second behind the 1-4-5 chord progression as being the most popularly used.

Well I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at the U2 One guitar chords and that you’ll have fun playing it!  If you did like this lesson, then Facebook like the page, Tweet it out and help spread it around.  It helps me keep more free lessons coming for you…so Thanks!!!

Oh, and leave me a comment below with your feedback or questions.

To You Guitar Success,

Andrew

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In this video lesson we’re going to learn the Ring of Fire chords and how to play it on guitar.  This song is a real classic from Johnny Cash, and it’s great for starting out on guitar, because it only uses three chords.  If you’re not familiar with chord progressions, just know that this uses what’s known as a 1-4-5 chord progression.  This progression is a staple of rock n’ roll, pop, country, and the blues, just to name a few.

Click to Watch this Ring of Fire Chords video lesson on YouTube

What Makes these Ring of Fire Chords Work So Well?

One reason that Ring of Fire works so well is that it has an insanely catchy melody.  An important thing to understand about great songs is that melody is the real star here.  A chord progression just supports that note phrase that you sing along to and that gets stuck in your head.

When we choose chords to go over a melody, those chords most often contain the melody note within them.  It’s definitely good to learn about musical keys and guitar triads, but you don’t have to dig into that stuff until you’re ready to.  The truth is, you can learn all your open chords and play most of your favorite songs (perhaps needing to change the key or use a capo, but it can be done).

At some point though, you will best be served by learning more about music theory.  The Ring of Fire chords that we use in this song are G Major, C Major, and D Major.  The reason these are called 1-4-5 chords is because this song is in the Key of G Major.  Basically all you need to know to start with is that a musical key will always start on the letter it’s called.  So G Major starts at G.  Next we just go through the alphabet without skipping letters.

The musical alphabet goes from A-G and then just repeats over.  So just to spell it quickly for you, the Key of G Major is made of notes, G-A-B-C-D-E-F#-G.  That eight note sequence is called an octave, and each letter gets a number.  So G is 1, A is 2, B is 3, C is 4, D is 5, E is 6, F# is 7, and G is back to 1 or 8.

By this example, you can see how when we make chords in this key, G Major is the 1 chord, C Major has to be the 4 chord, and D Major is the 5 chord.  Make sense?

So what happens with these Ring of Fire chords is that G Major is played all thru the verse sections, then the choruses of the song play D  Major to C Major, to G Major.  That’s it!  The entire song just uses these two parts.  Verse parts and chorus parts.  That’s why it’s such a great song to start out with on guitar and learn about the 1-4-5 chord progression.

I hope this lesson has been helpful, and if it has, please Facebook like this post, Retweet it, and leave me your comments below.

Wishing you much guitar success,

Andrew Hand

PS – For more Free lessons be sure to sign up on the form on the upper right of this page.

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In this video lesson we’re going to learn the Ticket to Ride chords and how to play this Beatles classic for guitar.  This is a great tune and has a really strong melody.  You’re going to be able to hear all the lyrics and play along with me as we go thru this tune together, and below the video, I’m going to break down the some of the theory behind this song.

Click to Watch and Learn these Ticket to Ride chords on YouTube

Mastering these Ticket to Ride Chords Isn’t That Hard and You’ll Learn a Lot

This song is in the Key of A Major, though the recording by The Beatles actually won’t fit in any key quite properly because it was recorded on a tape machine and slowed down, thus making the tuning somewhere between A and A flat.  That really doesn’t matter though, because we can play this song in any key we want when we understand the chord progression.  Just note that, trying to play along with the original recording will yield you scratching your head as to why your Ticket to Ride chords don’t sound right.

So to jump right into it, this song uses an A Major chord, B minor7 chord, E7 chord, F# minor chord, D7 chord, G Major chord,  and lastly, a regular E Major chord.  Don’t let all these chords intimidate you.  With the graphics below and lesson, you’ll be able to play these Ticket to Ride chords in no time.  Now this lesson is going to require some music theory and understanding of guitar triads if we really want to master the music behind it, but that can be learned in other lessons we have (just sign up on the form up on the right to get more free lessons sent to you).

[Show as slideshow]

Just as an overview to keys:  If we want to get these Ticket to Ride chords all sussed out, we have to break down the Key of A Major and the 7 chords that fit into it.  Those being A Major, B minor, C# minor, D Major, E Major, F# minor, G# minorb5.  If you’re not somewhat familiar with understanding musical keys, then use that link to learn more.

Now we can see that really the only letter out of place is that this song has a G Major chord instead of a root note of G#, which it needs to be to stay in the key of A Major.  Basically, I want you to just see that this song is breaking key and understand that this is totally okay and done a lot in music.  I don’t want to overload you with the theory behind all of this unless you’re ready for it.  In which case, you would definitely want to check out my Music Made Easy Guitar Course, which breaks down the entire system of music, keys, melody, harmony, and how everything works.

Just to finish this idea of showing you the Ticket to Ride chords that are out of key, there’s only one more.  That D7 chord doesn’t belong to the Key of A Major, it belongs to the Key of G Major.  This type of substitution is VERY common and a big part of what creates the Blues.  Since The Beatles where so influenced by the Blues, it’s no wonder these techniques worked themselves into so many of their songs.

The Key of A Major is spelled A – B – C# – D – E – F# – G# – A.  Our two out of key Ticket to Ride chords of G Major and D7 contain notes G-B-D and D-F#-A-C respectively.  So we can see that the G note and C note are the lone key offenders.  Both G# and C# have been flattened a half-step down, these are the 3rd and 7th tones of A Major, so we’d say there’s a b3 and b7 note in this song.

The takeaway that I want you to learn is that as long as the melody note we sing is a note of the chord being played on-top of it (be it an in key chord or an out of key chord), it’s okay.  That’s what harmony is all about.  Singing or playing a single note and playing a chord on-top of it that sounds good.

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning these Ticket to Ride chords, and remember that for more on understanding music and how it all works, sign up for more free lessons.  If you liked this, please Facebook like this post, Retweet it, and leave me a comment below.

To Your Guitar Playing Success,

Andrew Hand

This has been a post from LearnToPlayGuitarTV.com. Be sure to sign up for more free lessons.

Demystifying Guitar Keys to Take Your Playing Further

Click to Watch this Guitar Keys lesson on YouTube

If you’ve struggled with the concept of guitar keys, you’re NOT alone.  Musical keys can often feel like this elusive idea that seems to be shrouded in mystery.  In this lesson, we’re going to break down exactly what musical keys are and how to apply them to guitar.  The good news here is that keys are the same for all instruments and they all rely on one single beginning point…The Major Scale.  This Major Scale is the beginning to forming guitar keys.

To introduce you to keys, you first need to just get familiar with the group of notes we have available to us in Western music.  All of our instruments in the western world, be it piano, guitar, trumpet, or violin, have the same 12 notes to work with.  These 12 notes are known as the Chromatic Scale.  On your guitar, these notes are represented by each fret you have up until the 12th fret (that’s where you have the double dots on most guitars).  After this marking point, the chromatic scale begins over again.

To help illustrate this point, and start clearing up how guitar keys get formed, let’s look at the low E, or 6 string, on our guitar.  When played open, this note is at the pitch of E (in standard tuning).  Now moving thru the chromatic scale, one fret at a time, we get an F note at the 1st fret, F# at the 2nd, and continuing on down each fret as G, G#, A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, and finally coming back to E at the 12th fret.

Each string of our guitar follows this same pattern, except beginning from it’s open note value.  So the 5th string is tuned to A when open, and the alphabet would continue from there to be A# at the 2nd fret and on thru to the 12th fret where we’d be back at A.  I think you can figure out the rest and the graphic below should help.  So what do we do next to actually build guitar keys??  Glad you asked!

The next step to actually doing something with these 12 notes is to pick a group of them out that go well together.  This is where the aforementioned, Major Scale, makes its debut.  What the Major Scale does is take 7 notes out of these 12, and does it in a series of steps that makes a very harmonically smooth group (this scale makes our guitar keys).

To form the Major Scale, we simply need to pick a letter of the musical alphabet to start on.  How about we choose C, thereby forming the C Major Scale and subsequently the Key of C Major.  So we now need to look at what the Major Scale formula says.  It says, take your beginning note (C in this case) and go 1 Whole step (or 2 frets) to get to your next note.  This gives us D.  Next, we go another Whole step, to get E, then a Half step (or 1 fret) to get F, then a Whole step, to get G…then another Whole step, to get A.  One more Whole step to get B, and finally a Half step to return to C.

We have now just created the C Major Scale: C – D – E – F – G – A – B – C.  And the formula was, W – W – H – W – W – W – H (Where W is Whole step and H is Half step).  This formula is what we use to spell any Major key we’re wanting to form.  We would just start with our desired key letter and proceed thru the formula.

Forming guitar keys truly is just that simple.  Now how we then form these notes into chords is our next step.  A fundamental chord, or triad, has just 3 notes (hence the name tri-ad, with tri meaning 3).  The way that we form this triad is to take each note of our Major scale and then add a 3rd and a 5th below it.  So taking our C note, we would go a 3rd over to E, and now go a 5th from C, to get to G.  So the notes of a C Major chord are C – E – G.  Doing this for each note will yield us 7 chords, and these 7 chords are the key of C Major.

All the keys, and hence, guitar keys, we’d ever want to form follow this exact same pattern.  The 7 chords will ALWAYS be the same, just with different letters.  So the 1st chord will always be Major, the 2nd chord in a key is always minor, the 3rd is also minor.  The 4th and 5th chords will always be Major, the 6th chord will always be minor, and the 7th chord is always minor with a flattened 5th (also called a diminished chord).  You don’t need to worry too much about the 7th chord right away, it gets left out of just about every genre and style of music, save for jazz and the adventurous rock composers.

So just to refresh: We took the chromatic scale starting from C (C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B, C) and used the Major Scale formula of W – W – H – W – W – W – H to give us C – D – E – F – G – A – B – C.  Lastly, we took our individual notes and built them into chords by going a 3rd over for our 2nd chord note, then a 5th over for our 3rd chord note, and thereby got a triad, or fundamental chord.  Doing this for each note of our Major Scale gave us 7 chords and thus the Key of C Major.

I hope this lesson has been helpful, and if you enjoyed it, be sure to Facebook like this post, Retweet it, and sign up to get more free lessons to help you learn to play guitar via the form on the upper right of the page.

Feel free to leave any questions or comments below and I’ll try to respond to each of you.  Thanks for reading and watching!

To Your Guitar Keys success,

Andrew

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Learn Come Together Chords by The Beatles in this lesson

If you’re looking to learn this great tune on guitar, then we have to start with the Come Together chords to get up and rolling.  The chords we’ll be playing in this song are D minor 7, A Major, G7 (that’s the verse) and B minor, B minor 7/A, G Major, G Major/A (that’s the chorus).  Here are the graphics for those chords and a video below to walk you thru the song with me.

[Show as slideshow]

Now if we want to dig deeper into the Come Together chords, then we need to look at what key this song is in.  Although quite a few rules get broken in staying in key, this is a powerful example of how you can break out of a key signature as long as your melody note is within the chord.  If that seems at all confusing, then you may want to check out our lesson on musical keys first to get you familiar.

In looking at the Come Together chords, we see that this song is really based around the key of D minor and that means its relative Major key is F.  Both F Major and D minor have the exact same notes.  We would say that D minor is the relative minor to F Major.  Every key has a relative minor, and it is always going to be the 6th scale degree of your Major Scale formula.

Let’s just spell out D minor…we get, D – E – F – G – A -Bb – C – D and the resulting chords are D minor, E minor b5 (diminished), F Major, G minor, A minor, Bb Major, and C Major.  So we can see that several of the chords in our song are ‘out’ of key.

That A Major chord shouldn’t be there, G Major shouldn’t be there, and B minor shouldn’t be there.  Wow…we’ve got a lot of broken rules!  How can this be working…what’s going on here.  To answer this mystery of the Come Together chords, we should take a look at the key of D Major.

There’s a neat thing that happens a LOT in music, and especially in the Blues.  In fact, it’s what the blues is all about.  And that is this:  Taking a Major key and mixing it with the same lettered minor key.  So in this case, mixing D Major with D minor is going to give us some good ‘ole bluesy funk.

The key of D Major is spelled: D – E – F# – G – A – B – C# – D, with chords of D Major, E minor, F# minor, G Major, A Major, B minor, and C# b5 (diminished).  Ah-ha, here we’ve found our non-belonging Come Together chords.  G Major, A Major, and B minor all get lifted from D Major and dropped into this song that’s in D minor.  Pretty nifty right?!

The reason that this kind of substitution works with the Come Together chords, is that the melody is still using either the root of the chord or the 5th.  Remember that a triad (or chord) is made of a root (1), a third (3), and a fifth (5).  So D Major is D – F# – A, while D minor is D – F – A.  As long as my melody sings a D or A note, then I could drop either D Major or D minor on top of it.  If I was singing an F# note but put that D minor chord on-top of it, it wouldn’t sound too good.  The F# and F would clash, but for roots and fifths, we’re solid.

If you notice, the only difference between Major and minor chords is the 3rd.  The root and fifth will always be the same.  This is what allows us to swap Major and minor chords around when our melody is a root or fifth of the chord we want.

The Beatles were masters of this kind of substitution and if you start getting your head around it, you will truly begin to master music!  Looking at the Come Together chords has been a perfect opportunity to see this principle at work.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this lesson, and be sure to leave me a comment below with your thoughts, comments, or questions.  Also, Facebook like this post, +1 it, and Retweet it if it’s been helpful to you.  It helps me a lot!

Thanks for joining me,

Andrew

This has been a post from LearnToPlayGuitarTV.com. Be sure to sign up for more free lessons.

In this lesson, we’re going to learn “Ticket to Ride” by the Beatles (That’s the YouTube link incase you want to watch it there).  This is a super easy song to play and not only that, but it’s got great melody.  I don’t actually think I know a Beatles’ song that doesn’t have great melody, but anyhow…

Watch the video below and under it we’ll dig down into the theory behind it.

Ticket to Ride is tonally in the key of A Major, but it does break out of key a bit.  If you’re not familiar with musical keys, then use that link there to check out a lesson here on the site to catch you up to speed.  For those of you familiar with keys then you know we first build the A Major Scale before we harmonize out to get our 7 chords (or triads) in the key of A Major.

So, after we do that we have the notes A – B – C# – D – E – F# – G# and back to A.  When we look at the chords used in Ticket to Ride, we see several notes that don’t fall in key.  What about that D7 chord (dominant 7th)?  Its notes are D – F# – A – C…so we can see that C (the 3rd scale degree) is off by a half-step or semi-tone.  The other chord that doesn’t fit in key is the use of G Major here.  Its notes are G – B – D…so we can see that G (the 7th scale degree) is also off by a half-step.  What’s happened here?  We have a flattened 3rd and 7th.  This is a really common thing to do in the Blues and something the Beatles did a ton.

By these two “out of key” chords only being off by one note each, the other notes are in fact in key and contain notes that the melody is using, so it works.  This is the real power of harmonization.  When you understand that every song is really melody being supported by chords, then the flood doors open to make your choice of chords open increasingly.

The most common thing to note is that the melody note I happen to sing at any point in my song should be contained in the chord I choose to play over it (to create tonally pleasing music at least).  The most common and consonant harmonization is to have the melody be either the 1 (root), 3rd, 5th or 7th scale degree of the chord you choose.  6ths and 4ths are okay too…4ths are probably the least common.

Just know that roots, 3rds and 5ths are the most common, while 7ths create tension and 6ths flow pretty smooth…like 3rds.  If that’s at all confusing then follow this example.

If I’m singing a melody and hit an ‘A’ note at one point and think, ‘hmmm…what chord would sound good over that?’  If my song was in A Major, an A Major chord would work, F# minor chord, and D Major chord in key based on root, 3rd and 5th harmony.  Our ‘A’ note is the root of A Major (A – C# – E), the 3rd of F# minor (F# – A – C#), and the 5th of D Major (D – F# – A).

Additionally, in key we could ask what other chords could contain an ‘A’ note?  We could use Bmin7 (B – D – F# – A) where are ‘A’ note takes the 7th degree.  We could use C#min6 (C# – E – G# – A), where ‘A’ takes the 6th scale degree, or we could use E Major 11 (E – G# – A – B), where ‘A’ takes the 4th or 11th scale degree (11 just means an octave higher, like how 1 is also 8 when our scale repeats).

Those could all be choices and you could test it out to see how it would sound to sing an ‘A’ note and play each of those chords.  You’ll find the sound appears to change, even though you continue singing the same note!  Fascinating (to me at least).  That’s the power of harmonization, and it’s easy to see how one could play a chord ‘out of key’ over that ‘A’ note, like D7, because the chord still contains an ‘A’ note.  That’s what the Beatles have done.

This is a ton of information, but I hope it has been helpful and opened your eyes a bit as to the incredible power of understanding music theory.  If you’re wanting to really take your theory understanding further, then I’d definitely recommend you check out my guitar course here on the site called “Music Made Easy“.  It’s a comprehensive course that teaches you the fundamentals of theory and how to apply that to guitar to truly free up your playing and creativity to play chords anywhere.

Feel free to ask any questions or leave feedback in the comments below, and I look forward to hearing from you.

To Your Music Success,

Andrew

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