Class #7, March 2nd 2011
Level 2- Uhhhh, only one person showed up for this class. Y’all must be sick. (or sick of me….sniff) So, you’re off the hook for new material, we’ll do this week’s lesson next week. Keep working on those alternating bass notes til then.
Level 3- We played a couple John Prine songs, with a few new concepts. First, we looked at minor chords, and the role that they can play in our ubiquitous I-IV-V pattern. Typically the minor chords in a given key fall on the 2nd, 3rd, and 6th degrees of the scale. So, for example in the key of C:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
C D E F G A B
the major chords, would be I-IV-and V, or C, F, and G and the minor chords would be ii, iii, and vi, or Dm, Em, Em, and Am. If you follow this formula through our 5 most common keys, C,G,D,A, and E, you’ll find that all of them contain a lot of bar chords, except for C and G. This can be a helpful hint at what position a song might be played from, as most people don’t like bar chords, and are more than happy to move the capo around to avoid them.
We talked a bit about some other clues to learning by ear, and they involve listening to notes that ring out. You can often, with a little practice, figure out whether a song in the key of C, for example, might be played in open postition, or capoed somewhere up the neck.
Our songs for this week were John Prine’s “Six O’ Clock News”, and “Hello In There”. These help to illustrate both above points, using minor chords to create drama, and “Hello in There” is in the key of C, but is played in G postion with a capo at the 5th fret.
Here’s “Hello In There”:
And “Six O’Clock News”:
