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Learn “Ticket to Ride” for Guitar – (Beatles Cover Lesson)

August 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: Beatles Covers, Cover Songs for Guitar, Guitar Lessons, Keys in Music, Learn to Play Guitar, Music Theory Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Ring of Fire (Johnny Cash Cover) – Learn to Play for Guitar

July 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In this lesson, we’re going to look at Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” (that’s the YouTube link if you want to view there).  It’s a great song and also a pretty easy one to learn.

The neat thing about Ring of Fire is that it only uses three chords, and those chords happen to be the most popular chord progressions known to man.  That progression is called the 1-4-5 chord progression, and it is a staple of Rock n’ Roll, the Blues, Country, and just about every genre.  So let’s jump in and get started.  Further explanation is below the video…

Okay, so “Ring of Fire” was originally written and recorded by Johnny Cash in the Key of G Major, and it uses the 1st, 4th, and 5th chords of that key.  If you want to know more about understanding keys in music, visit the link.  Basically, what you need to understand is this:

Every Key will only have 7 letters.  It will start on the Root, or 1st tone, which is the name of the Key (i.e. the Key G Major starts on the note G).  Every key will then go thru 7 notes until it returns to the 1, or 8th tone called the octave.  Octaves are just groups of 8 notes that repeat the same pattern for as many spaces as our instrument can match.  On guitar we have at most 4 octaves, more on piano.

Anyhow…G Major starts on G and returns to G using our musical alphabet notes (A-G).  So this yields, G – A – B – C – D – E – F# – G.  That’s it!  Every key would follow the same pattern of starting on its key root note and using successive and unique alphabet letters (sometimes needing a sharp #, or flat b), but always going from 1 to 8.  Make sense?

As an example let’s just look at two other keys so you see the pattern.  A Major yields, A – B – C# – D – E – F# – G# – A.  C Major yields, C – D – E – F – G – A – B – C.  Hopefully that shows the pattern.  To understand this see the graphics below, or go through more of the lessons here.  You can always send me an email or leave a comment with questions.

Learn the C Major and A Major Scales

As you can see, a key is formed by first spelling out the 1 position or scale root, then we harmonize the 3rd position below it all the way thru, and lastly, the 5th position of the scale is then harmonized below the 1st and 3rd positions, until it repeats again back under our octave.  These stacks are known as guitar triads or chords.

Since we have 7 tones, and now 7 stacks of 3 notes (triads, which are the minimum 3 notes we must have to make a chord), we have 7 chords.  That’s our key.  Every key only has 7 chords, and the qualities of those chords relative to their positions are always the same.  So the 1-4-5 chords will always be Major chords.  The 2nd, 3rd, and 6th chords will always be minor chords, and the 7th chord is always a minor chord, with a flattened 5th note.

That might be a bit confusing, but understanding guitar chords doesn’t take too much time.  Hopefully this lesson has added a little clarity and we learned a great song in the key of G Major by Johnny Cash.  I love “Ring of Fire” and glad I finally got around to covering it and teaching it to your for guitar!

If you’re not already a member here at LearnToPlayGuitarTV.com, then be sure to sign up for more FREE lessons.

 

Wishing you the best in your learning,

Andrew

Filed Under: 1-4-5 Chord Progression, Cover Songs for Guitar, Guitar Chords, Guitar Lessons, Guitar Triads, Johnny Cash Covers, Keys in Music, Learn to Play Guitar, Music Theory Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Understanding Keys In Music

November 22, 2010 By 1 Comment

Understanding Keys in music is often a source of great confusion and frustration for those who have just begun to learn the language of music.  Although our site is about learning guitar, the language of music is the same for all instruments.  All of us are given the same 12 notes to work with (known as the Chromatic Scale).

What Exactly Is A Key?

I’m glad you asked! :-)  A musical key is defined by its scale.  If the scale is Major, then the key will be Major, and if the scale is minor, then the key will be minor.  Simple right?!  If you’re unfamiliar with what a scale is, you might want to see this lesson: Learning to Play Guitar Scales, which is relevant regardless of your instrument.  As a brief explanation though, we have our 12 chromatic notes in music, we pull out 7 of them to create the Major Scale and we then create chords from that scale by harmonizing each of the 7 tones, using a 1, 3, and 5 of the scale (this means with each separate scale degree as a root, we just pick every other note in the scale for 5 notes, thus leaving us a root, 3rd, and 5th).  If that has you confused at all, then see this lesson on Triads: Learning Triads for Guitar.

If we look at this example for the key of ‘A Major’, that key is built off of the ‘A Major’ scale (A-B-C#-D-E-F#-G#).  What this means is that all of the chords, melody and harmonies will use these 7 notes, and only these 7 notes.  Sticking within the scale’s note range is known as Diatonic harmony.  As you advance, you’ll learn that it’s possible to add in notes outside the Diatonic scale, but for beginning it’s best to get very comfortable with just staying in the Diatonic Key.

A song in the ‘Key of C Major’ uses the notes of the C major scale  (C-D-E-F-G-A-B) and a song in the ‘Key of C minor’ would use its 7 notes (C-D-Eb-F-G-Ab-Bb) and so on for every 24 of our scales (12 Major and 12 minor, one for each chromatic note).

Any major scale or natural minor scale can serve as a key for a piece of music.

Understanding the Center of Keys – The Tonic

The Tonic note is the same as the root note of a key or scale and serves as the center of the key.  It’s the same with chords, as we briefly touched upon above.  An ‘A Major chord‘ has a tonic, or root of A, a third of C#, and a 5th of E.  The same applies to the ‘A Major Scale’ and ‘Key of A Major’.  The tonic is the starting and ending point, as the notes create a tension that wants to resolve back to the start.  The tonic is pronounced (TAWN-ik).

A good way to think of the tonic and keys/scales, is that as you play through the notes or chords of that scale or key, a distance is being created that gets farther and farther, until your ear just has to hear the circle come back around.  The reason this happens is due to the intervals or steps between each of the 7 tones.  More on that later.

When playing our keys and scales, the music constantly is being drawn back toward the tonic, or root of the key.  The tonic is the most resolved note in a key and thus the key’s center.

So what’s the big deal about this tension and pulling?  This aspect of music is partly what makes it so enjoyable to listen to.  The music can stretch us and take us on a journey, creating excitement for our ears and body.  Rhythm is another key aspect of music being pleasing to listen to, but that is for another lesson and also a bit more subjective.

Understanding Tonality and the Role It Plays

We’ve talked about music being centered, having a root, or beginning, and cycling back to the end, which is also the beginning…the resolution.  This sort of music is called tonal music because it possesses tonality, consonance and tempered movement.  Basically all the music that we listen to today is tonal.  When music is missing a tonal center it is called atonal.  Although there is atonal music out there, the majority of people would find it actually painful to listen to.

Training Yourself to Know the Tonic

One great way to become more aware of the tonality in the music you listen to is to just actually listen…really pay attention to the movement of the music and where you hear/feel it resolving.  Most songs will end on the tonic, it is very common practice and not doing so can leave you with an odd feeling, or lack of resolution.  Analyzing music will greatly help in your understanding of it and its movement.

When Can I Get Outside the Key?

In due time grasshopper…in due time.  As I stated earlier, it’s really a good idea to become very familiar with Diatonic harmony and be able to spell out any key signature (all 30 keys) and be sure to know your note names and interval relationships.  Doing this assures you will have a command of musical movement and you’ll be ready to start mixing it up by adding in notes outside the key, as well as changing keys.  One genre of music that a lot of beginners start with, and then fail to get out of is the Blues.  Now I don’t want to knock on the Blues, ’cause it’s a foundation to rock music and just has some great things going on, but it breaks the Diatonic world and a lot of musicians find the blues and never get out of it or bother to learn why it works from a tonal and theoretical point of view.

There definitely will come a point when you are ready to move outside of Diatonic harmony, but until you master it, I recommend waiting.  It WILL pay off in the long run to get your head wrapped around this world, I guarantee it.

Just How Many Keys Are In Music and Do I Have to Learn Them All?

Okay, well we touched on this earlier, but let’s revisit it.  There are 12 notes in the chromatic scale (that’s all we’ve got in the Western World) and hence, there is a key for each of the 12 notes, and each key has a minor and Major variety.  This gives us the sum of 24 keys, but really only accounts for 12 unique keys since every Major key has a relative minor key (the relative minor shares the exact same notes as its Major cousin, just starting on a different note).  As an example: ‘C Major’ (C-D-E-F-G-A-B) has a relative minor of A.  The A minor scale or key uses the notes A-B-C-D-E-F-G, which as you can see are the same notes.  All we did was begin the scale on the sixth degree of our parent Major scale.  This always holds true…the sixth scale degree of any Major scale is the relative minor.

In addition to our 24 keys (really 12 unique ones), there are three of the Major keys that can be named in different ways.  The reason this happens is due to the usage of sharps and flats.  Sometimes it becomes more convenient to write the keys in flats rather than sharps.  So this gives us a total of 15 different spellings.

If we look at the Keys of C# and Db as an example, we see they contain the same notes.  Db is spelled (Db-Eb-F-Gb-Ab-Bb-C) and C# is spelled with the same notes, but using sharps instead (C#-D#-E#-F#-G#-A#-B#).  It really just comes down to a matter of what other keys you’re transposing to and your personal preference.  If you were starting a song in a sharp key and wanted to modulate to another of our multiple spelled keys, you would want to pick its sharp variety so as to maintain congruence in your notation and brain.  It can get confusing jumping between the two!

The 12 Became 24, the 12 Became 15, and the 15 Become 30 (Yikes)!

Okay, really don’t worry though…it’s not anything to freak out about.  If you get the 12 key idea and understand that each of the 12 keys has a relative minor key, with the same notes, just starting from a different root (the 6th of the parent Major) and that there are three different spellings for each of the Major and minor keys based on the notating of either sharps or flats, then you’re set.  As with all things, practice makes perfect and the more you practice writing different keys out, the more comfortable you become.  So don’t be afraid of jumping into sharps and flats.  It can be tempting to stay in the safe ‘C Major’ but really that’s just no fun at all.

To really begin understanding key movement and the ability to break out of keys, you need to understand the Circle of 5ths (Also known as the Circle of 4ths), but that is for another lesson.  Until then, practice and have fun!!!

Wishing for your greatest success,

Andrew

P.S. Be sure to leave a comment below with any questions or thoughts you have, it really helps me keep helping you in your musical journey.

Filed Under: Guitar Chords, Guitar Lessons, Guitar Scales, Keys in Music, Learn to Play Guitar, Music Theory Tagged With: , , , , ,

Guitar Triads and the Music Theory Behind Them

November 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Guitar Triads: What They Mean and How to Form Them

If you want to understand guitar triads, then you must understand the music theory behind them.  To get to triads, we have to start with scales, and to start with scales we have to look at our master canvas.  That canvas is the Chromatic Scale.  The Chromatic Scale represents every note that we can play in Western Music.  On our guitar this is represented by our 1st 12 frets and on a piano, these are represented by any group of 12 successive keys.  Let’s look at a picture of all 12 notes and their relationship to each other below.

Forming the Major Scale from the Chromatic Scale

From the image above, you can see that when starting on A (you can start anywhere), we travel 12 notes or semi-tones and repeat again at the 13th, known as the octave.  A semi-tone is the same thing as a half-step, just another name for it and on guitar, each fret is a half-step apart (on piano a half step is each successive key).  So what do we do with these 12 notes?

The aim of music is to create consonance, that is melody and harmony that is pleasing.  Melody means a single string of notes played in succession, while harmony means playing more than one note at a time.  When we stack 3 or more notes together, we form a chord, and the fundamental base of a chord is called a Triad.  This is represented by a 1 (root note), a 3rd, and a 5th from it’s scale.  But first let’s go back to getting a scale from the Chromatic 12 notes.

The father of all scales we can create is the Major Scale.  It has been around since Aristotle, and it is the building block that we re-arrange to create our other scales in music.  The way that we create it, as you can see above, is to pick some starting point in the Chromatic Scale and pick out 7 notes using the interval or step series of Whole Step, Whole Step, Half Step, Whole Step, Whole Step, Whole Step, Half Step.  You can see above that doing this (starting on A) gives us A-B-C#-D-E-F#-G#, and thus we’ve spelled the ‘A Major Scale’.  All you have to do to form any other of the 11 Major Scales, is follow the same step series through all 12 notes.  Pretty easy right?

How do we get from a scale to a chord?

Remember that I just told you how melody is single notes, played in succession and harmony is more than one note played at the same time?  Well to get a chord we harmonize our scale.  So to harmonize the ‘A Major Scale’ we need to spell out the ‘A Major Scale’ from the 3rd and 5th degrees (remember this gives us our Triad or chord).  Let’s see that in a diagram…

Creating Triads from the Major Scale

By so spelling our Major Scale from C# and E, we see that there are now 7 triads or chords that have been formed, and these chords create the key of A Major.  Harmonizing a scale works for all 12 scales and thus gives us 12 keys.  For more info on understanding keys, you’ll want to see this post:  Understanding Keys In Music

What Do Our 7 Chords Mean?

We now have 7 chords or triads formed, but what is the quality of them?  Are they Major, minor or beyond?  You can see above that I’ve gone ahead and labeled what the chord quality is and have the scale degrees listed with upper and lower cased roman numerals, but what does it mean?  Well let’s start with the roman numerals.  Roman numerals are used in place of and along with the traditional numbers 1-7 to represent our scale degrees.  The power behind using roman numerals for your chord writing is that is identifies whether the chord is Major or minor.  We see that ( I ) is in place of the 1 and this is our root or tonic, also called the Ionian scale degree.  Next we have ( ii ) for 2, indicating a minor chord (lowercase=minor, uppercase=Major).  The ( ii ) is called the Dorian scale degree.  Following we have ( iii ), ( IV ), ( V ), ( vi ), and ( viib5 ), representing the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th scale degrees and named Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian and Locrian accordingly.  Also in accordance, the 3rd is minor, 4th Major, 5th Major, 6th minor and 7th is minor with a flattened 5th (this means from it’s parent Major Scale).

To determine why these chords are major, minor and diminished (that’s the 7th degree with the flat 5), we have to look to each scale degree’s Major Scale counterpart.  B Major is B-C#-D#-E-F#-G#-A#, and we see that its’ triad is B-D#-F#, which in relation to our B triad in the key of A Major, has the 3rd flattened, or lowered in pitch one semi-tone.  This is what makes a chord minor.  If the triad has a flattened third in relation to its parent Major Scale, then the chord is minor.  Raise the third back up a half-step and you have a Major chord again.  The flattened 3rd is the only difference between a Major and minor chord.  If you went and spelled out each of ‘A Major’s scale degrees using their Major Scales, you’d see that the ii, iii, and vi all only differ by the 3rd being lowered.  This brings us to the only odd duck, which is the 7th scale degree.

If you spell out the 7th degree’s Major Scale, you get G#-A#-B#-C#-D#-E#-F##, which you can see would give the G Major triad of G#-B#-D#.  If we look back to A Major, we see our G triad to be G#-B-D.  What has been lowered is the 3rd (making it minor) and the 5th (thus making it diminished).  To diminish means to lower in pitch one semi-tone (only applies to the 4th and 5th scale degrees).  The 7th scale degree will always be a minorb5 chord or a diminished chord as it’s also called.  No matter what key you’re in, these are the scale degrees for any and all Major Keys.

Scales to Triads, Triads to Keys, Now What?

If you’ve managed to follow along thus far, then you understand what creates a scale, how scales are turned into chords and how chords create a key.  The next thing to understand is that a Key will always contain these set chords and interval patterns.  The Major keys all are the same and the minor keys all are the same.  Staying within a key is called Diatonic harmony and this is a great place to practice before you’re ready to start moving out of keys and between keys.

The bottom line is, practice these chords, learn the triads, and work in a lot of different keys to get comfortable.  This not only will help your guitar playing and understanding, but it will help in songwriting and composition on guitar.

I hope this lesson has been helpful to you and be sure to leave me a comment below telling me what you’ve thought or any questions you might have.  I’m here to help you learn.

See you in the next lesson,

Andrew

Filed Under: Guitar Chords, Guitar Lessons, Guitar Scales, Keys in Music, Music Theory Tagged With: , , , , ,