David,

First. Great articles.

You have a way of presenting potentially complicated music topics in a way that the average musician can get their brain around.

Thanks and please keep them coming.

I have a question on the transposition article you posted, and this could be a dumb question.

Sorry in advance for that.

I understand the transpose proc ess, and I understand the various reasons for using a capo in some situations.

Here’s what I don’t understand.

In several examples in the article, “Edmund Fitzgerald” etc… You do both.

In other words, you first transpose the song AND use the capo.

I guess my question revolves around the reasoning there. Without overlooking that the capo transforms the texture of the chords/sound as a possibility… 

Why would there be a need to 1st transpose to a different key, and then use the capo?

Couldn’t the same be accomplished by just using the capo on the appropriate fret (for whatever key you desire..)?

I know I’m missing some fundamental here.

Any clarification would be a big help.

Thanks David

Best Regards

Now let’s see if I can justify those nice things you said about me!

There are one basic reasons for both transposing and using a capo and this should have been cleared in the article. Let’s even use “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” as an example. The song, as pointed out, is in C and I’ve transposed it into the key of A. So picking the first line (and hoping I’ve spelled “Chippewa” correctly), the chords in C would be:

The (C) legend lives on from the (Gm) Chippewa on down to the (Bb) great lake they (F) call Gitchee (C) Gumee.

We’re okay so far?

Transposed into the key of A, the chords of the first line would be:

The (A) legend lives on from the (Em) Chippewa on down to the (G) great lake they (D) call Gitchee (A) Gumee.

I’m assuming we’re still okay. Now comes the tricky part.

If I play the transposed chord without a capo, meaning just using regular position chords, I am playing this in the key of A. We’re agreed on this. But suppose I actually want to play it in the key of C. Maybe the vocals are easier or maybe I’m playing with a bass player who insists on playing it in the “right” key. The trouble is that I still want to play it in A because I think the chords are easier or have better voicings.

So I need to play in one key (A) but have it magically be a different key (C). This is where the capo comes in. Placing the capo on the neck of the guitar automatically raises the key that you’re playing in. If I put my capo on the first fret and play an A chord, it’s not going to sound like the A chord of someone who doesn’t have a capo on his or her guitar. In fact if we both play A chords at the same time, it’s going to sound positively dreadful. 

That’s because the minute I put my capo on, I stopped playing in “standard tuning,” Technically, my guitar is now tuned up a half-step on each string. 

Here’s where a little “intentional magic” comes into play. When I transposed “Edmund” from C to A, I changed each chord one-and-a-half steps lower. So if I still want to play in the original key but still use the chords I’ve transposed to, then I need to use the capo to raise my transposed chords up one-and-a-half steps in order to play in the original key. If I place my capo on the third fret and play an A chord, and have another guitarist (without a capo) play a C chord, we will be playing the same chord. Different voicings (my A will have a note higher than his) but still the same chord. 

So this two part process should be thought of in this manner:

1) Transpose down X number of half-steps20to make the chords easier or to get better voicings

2) Place capo X number of frets (the same “X” as in Step 1) to play transposed chords in the original key.  

I hope this helps. Part of all the confusion is the language involved, an issure I tried to address in my last entry here. And hopefully we’ll keep this discussion going on a more regular basis! It would be great to get everything back on track again.

In addition to being a mentor when it comes to balancing all the craziness of life and business and pursuits of happiness, he occasionally helps out by subbing for me and writing an issue or two of Guitar Noise News, the free twice a month newsletter of Guitar Noise. I think he likes to write these because he usually gets a lot of fan mail and that is cool.

Anyway, things have been very crazy and hectic here. If you’ve not read any of our recent issues of Guitar Noise News, then I guess you may not know I’ve gotten a new book contract from Alpha Books. Yes, I’ll be putting out another title in their “Complete Idiot’s” series and this one will be called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing Rock Guitar.  It’s scheduled to be out by the end of this year, which means that I have to finish it by mid-August. And that means that I’m not going to be doing much of anything for a few months.

Paul (”Paul” being Paul Hackett, the gentleman who created and still owns and runs the Guitar Noise website, has long been advising me to get a personal assistant to help with the work load. And while I think it’s amusing to think anyone would want to have me as a boss (let alone be happy with what I could offer in terms of payment), Charley has given me a bit of insight on how to cope. And that’s to not worry so much about things. Yes, there’s a lot to do. Yes, there’s always more to do waiting in the wings. Do what you can when you can. Worrying about it usually causes more worrying and keeps you from doing things in the here and now. And you have to be in the here and now to get things done.

Okay. I’m good. Now let’s get on and see what we can do…

Be chatting with you all again soon.

Peace

Most guitarists will say “D.” And that’s the start of a lot of confusion. In reality, when we place the capo on the third fret (as in this example) we raise all of our chords up a step and a half. So your D chord is actually now F. If you don’t believe me, place your capo on the third fret and check the open D string against your tuner.

Now it goes without saying that we do already know this. Or kind of know it. Somewhere in those brains of ours wheels are clicking and our ears are also telling us that this D chord doesn’t sound like D.  But when we think about the actual chord we’re playing, our fingers and brains are saying “D” and not “F.” It might be even better to say that our fingers and brains are on autopilot and not thinking or saying anything.

This is part of the accepted “doublespeak” of the guitarist when it comes to using a capo. We’ll acknowledge that using a capo changes the simple chords we play but we continue to call the chords by their open position names. When you think about it, it’s interesting because we don’t do the same thing with barre chords as we move our index finger around the neck like an instantly adjustable capo.

And all this discussion might also be a big yawn, but not acknowledging the doublespeak is usually what makes us second guess all the time when using the capo. We know what we do but haven’t taken the time to understand what it is that’s exactly happening. And that understanding is key to help us make using the capo easier.

Now, this isn’t to say that you want to start thinking of the new chords and keys each time you use the capo. That’s like expecting some shredding lead guitarist to name off every note in a lightning-fast lick. It’s just not going to happen. We learn patterns, whether those patterns are scales or chord shapes, and we use them without thought once we know where to start, once we have a reference point. And what is a capo if not a reference point?

So begin to acknowledge, if not embrace, the doublespeak. When someone says, “This song is just G, C and D with the capo on the fourth fret,” somewhere in the back recesses of your mind you should be thinking, “Okay, that’s really B, E and F#” and then go back to talking about the chords as if nothing’s changed. Doing this will help you when you’re trying to change a song in a difficult key, because you’ll be starting to recognize the “real” chords as well as the “capo position” chords. And it will also start you on a path where you’ll be thinking about chord progressions in terms of scale degrees. Which is where we’ll pick up next time…

Peace

It can also be a little frustrating, especially if everyone you jam with is a guitarist. More times than not you end up with a big guitar chorus, where everyone is strumming the same open position chords with close enough to the same strumming pattern that it’s almost overwhelming. Being able to bring something different to the table is not only good for the group, but it also allows you to hear your own playing a bit better.

This is one instance where using a capo can be helpful. If you’ve never heard of one or used one before, please take a minute to read an old (very old) Guitar Column of mine at Guitar Noise, called The Underappreciated Art of Using a Capo.  

One thing I mention at the very end of this article can’t be stressed enough: “All this can be a little confusing when you’re just starting out.” It’s rare that people don’t do a lot of second guessing when trying to decide exactly where to place a capo, or why, for that matter. Having a reasonable working knowledge of the fretboard can help a lot. 

So, too, can having a firm idea of what, exactly, you want to do in regard to placing your capo on the guitar. Being somewhat familiar with the concept of transposing (see Turning Notes Into Stone) will likewise give you a lot of guidance.   

What we’ll be doing the rest of February is looking at the thought process involved in capo use and we’ll employ a lot of examples so that, hopefully, by the time this month is out, you’ll be able to use your capo confidently. Or at least not be second guessing near as much as you might be doing currently!

So check in next time as we discuss the importance of being musically bi-lingual. No lie!

Peace

Two things I’m trying to get a lot better at this year are keeping up with my email correspondence and being better at juggling all the different tasks that seem to need to get done. For whatever reason, it seems the busier I am, the more I actually get accomplished. Not really sure why that works, and it’s certainly not always pretty (as those of you who found MP3 files for my Dust in the Wind lesson in the new Hey There Delilah lesson at Guitar Noise can attest!), but it seems to work.

So when Ava, the coordinator of the Community Blog at Jemsite recently asked if I might write a short piece for them, I said sure! And though it took me longer than planned, I did manage to put together Two Tenets to Live By, a short musing on the importance of going out to listen to music as well as the importance of playing with others whenever you can.

The Community Blog at Jemsite is a very cool place, full of lots of short pieces by quite a number of writers, from guitar teachers to performing musicians to everyday guitar enthusiasts. Ava’s just started in on a fascinating series of interviews with guitar players out there in the everyday world, which she’s calling “The Guitar Hero Series.” Definitely compelling material. The rest of Jemsite is worth the visit, too.

Now let’s see if I can’t make this place worth more than the casual stop as well…

Peace

Remember when we talked about key signatures a few posts ago? Well, truth be told, even key signatures can fool you. For instance, that bit of notation with the three flats? Yes, three flats does indicate a key of Eb major, but every major key has a relative minor and the relative minor of Eb is C minor. So is that particular snippet of music in Eb major or C minor?

The trouble is that we really can’t tell, at least not given what we were given to work with in that particular example. Having some information on harmony would give us some help. For instance, if Eb major was supposed to be played over the first two measures and Bb or Bb7 over the second, then we could (relatively) safely say it was in Eb. If Cm were the chord over the first two verses and Bb over the second two, then we’d still be a little unsure of which of the two choices to go with. But if Cm were the first chord and G7 (G, B, D and F – the D and F being the melody notes here), then you could go with C minor as the key with a little more certainty.

One of the problems here is language. Many musicians use the words “key” and “tonal center” interchangeably. But any key can have different tonal centers other than the root note of the key, as we see all the time with relative minors.

To give yourself a better grip on minor keys, you might want to take a look at an old Guitar Column at Guitar Noise called Minor Progress. There you’ll read about the fact that there are three minor scales to deal with! Each has a different way of resolving the feeling of “home” or of the tonal center, if you will.  

Another easy (and obvious!) thing you can do to familiarize yourself with chord progressions in minor keys is to listen to songs in minor keys. Listen, for instance, to a song like Neil Young’s Like a Hurricane and compare it to Dion’s Runaway. Don’t laugh! They both start out with Am chords and then progress from Am to G and then to F. Like a Hurricane then changes to Em and back to G (and you might already know somewhere in the back of your mind that Em is the relative minor of G) while Runaway goes from F to E7, giving it a much different feel even though both songs share the same tonal center of A minor.  

One last point to keep in mind is that any song can change keys. These keys changes can be temporary shifts, or modulations, or can leave the original tonal center far in the dust. This is one reason why it’s important to look at a lot of songs in segments or sections, when trying to determine just what key you may be in when soloing.

Speaking of which, we have covered quite a bit of this information (and will be covering even more in the near future) in our Turning Scales into Solos series at Guitar Noise. If you’ve not yet read any of these, you can find the very first one, Choosing Colors, here.

I realize that the discussion on this particular topic is far from complete, but hopefully you have enough to get started. Please feel free to post any further questions you might have right here or on the Guitar Noise Forum pages.

Until next time…

Peace

Sometimes it’s the use of a chord progression. Yesterday I mentioned an old Guitar Column at Guitar Noise called Five to One. Nothing really sounds more like coming home than hearing a V to I chord progression, such as G to C in the key of C. Using a seventh chord for the V (that would make our example G7 to C) makes the progression even stronger. If you hear this progression at the end of a song, or at the end of a verse of a song, then you have another strong indication of key.

Some songs take this a step further, going from IV to V to I (F to G to C in the key of C) or from ii to V to I (Dm to G to C). This latter progression is used a lot in jazz, but you’ll find it in songs across all genres. Both these progressions help to solidify the feeling of coming home. They create a strong sense of a tonal center, which in the case of our examples would be C major.

So you can understand why so many musicians will tell you that one of the most important skills you can develop is your ear. Being able to hone is on the sense of tonality is vital. But it’s also a lot easier to do with help. If you listen to enough music, and start to understand what chord progressions you’re hearing, you can’t help but get better at picking up chord progressions. As you do that, you’ll also start to pick up on the sense of key and you won’t have to even ask what key a song is in after a while.

If you don’t think you can pick this up on your own, then get help. There are more than enough ways to get a chord chart for most songs. Granted, they may not all be right (and this is especially true of Internet tablature), but it will give you a place to start from. If your Internet tab says that a progression is F to G to C and the F doesn’t sound correct, try other chords and see if you can find the correct one.

Listen intently to songs. Can you hear the difference between a major and minor chord? Can you hear a chord and say that it’s a seventh? Or a major seventh? This is where it all starts. We’ve a number of articles on ear training at Guitar Noise. You can’t go wrong by starting off with the trilogy of Happy New Ear, Unearthing the Structure and Solving the Puzzle.

Of course, there’s still more to cover on this subject. And in our next post we’ll take a look at songs in minor keys.

Peace

Hello David;

I have a question for you – how can you tell what key a song is in? I thought that it was in the key of the first note or chord of the song, but that does not seem to hold true. I have a Fender GDEC Amp that has drum and bass background and there is a key switch to set what key the song is in. At times if I set it to the first chord the bass sounds fine, but at other times the bass notes seem not to match the chord I would be playing, so I am wondering if I am wrong for how to tell what key the song is in. I also have a song book that all the songs are suppose to be in the key of C, but some songs start with a Am chord or a F chord, etc.

Hope you can help me with this question, I really enjoy the Newsletter and the Pods that you and the people at Guitar Noise put out. Keep up the good work; it has helped me and, I am sure, many others.

Thank you.

Right off the bat, we need to establish a few things. What do we mean when we talk about the key of a song? This alone is something that many people quibble about. Let’s go with the obvious answer first – if you have a piece of sheet music (music notation, not just guitar tablature), then the key of a piece of music is given to you right at the start. It’s called the key signature, and you’ll find it just after the clef at the beginning of a line of music, like this:

Here you can see three flat symbols (they look like slightly squashed “b”s), which indicates that this particular piece is in Eb. You can find all twelve possible key signatures listed out for you in Your Very Own Rosetta Stone, as well as other articles on the Guitar Noise Beginners’ Lessons page.

Recognizing the key signature, though, is just one part of the puzzle, one we’ll return to in a moment after we deal with how to determine the key of a song when we don’t have the music handy.

And, naturally, this too requires a small diversion. Remember that music theory is never meant to be an answer as much as it is an explanation of why things are the way they are, music-wise – why we like certain combinations of sounds, why some chord progressions just seem meant for each other, things like that. There will always be exceptions to any “general rule,” sometimes thousands of them. That’s just the way it is.

Back on track – if you go on the assumption that the starting chord of any given song will be the key of your song, you will often be correct. Often enough to beat the house, in fact. But there are, as you’ve pointed out, more than enough exceptions that make using this method as a way to determine the key of a song questionable.

One of our old Guitar Columns at Guitar Noise, titled Five to One, explains keys as “feeling at home,” or having the sensation that it’s okay for a song to end at a particular place. Even more than the starting chord, the final chord should give one the satisfaction that the song has played out to a final conclusion. So if you look for the final chord of the song as being your indicator for the key to the song, you’ll do even better than you would by going by the first chord. Better still if the beginning and ending chords are the same.

But none of this is foolproof. Even having the key signature can occasionally put you on the wrong path. And we’ll pick up from this point next time…

Peace

A belated “Happy New Year” to all!

The holidays and last few weeks of December tend to be, for me anyway, a time of reflection. And for whatever reason, I’ve been reflecting a lot on all the music I got to play this past year – whether solo performances or the occasional Farmers’ Market performance with my adult students from the Berkshire Community College (or the wedding anniversary party we all got invited to play!) or the group shows, such as at the Monterey General Store or Dewey Hall, or the open mics with my songwriting students (and guests from England) at Crissey Farm, or the trasncendent show for FODfest at the Mahaiwe Theater or just the informal jams between friends. There was so much music and so many good times to think about.

And all this reflections makes me first realize how lucky I am to be able to do this and to have such talented friends who love to play music.

And it also makes me realize that helping others do this is something I truly care about.

So I’d like to spend what time I can this coming year helping out. I’m going to regularly use this blog as a “Q & A” forum for guitarists and would-be musicians and try to give what advice and encouragement I can. It’s about time this space was used constructively, no?

If you’ve questions you’d like discussed, you can post them hear or send them to me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Looking forward to spending more time here with you in 2009!

Peace

(left to right): Joel Schick, me, John Roche, Jeff Brownstein, Greg Nease, Nick Torres, Kyle Roth, Helena Bouchez, Karen Berger, Kathy Reichert

Hello to all!

Even though it’s been the better part of the week, I’m still recovering a bit from last weekend’s show at Dewey Memorial Hall. It was a lot of fun, not to mention being wonderful just to see and play music with some of my friends again.  

We were billed as “David Hodge and the Players to be Named Later.” If you’re familiar with how many of my shows work, you know that I get a gig and then see who might be available to play and perform. I don’t always know who’s going to be free to make the gig, so this seemed like a good name. Not good as Kathy Reichert and “the Company She Keeps,” but good enough of a name to have some folks say they wish they’d used it first.

This time out, the “Players to be Named Later” turned out to be:

Karen Berger – keyboards
Helena Bouchez – bass guitar
Jeff Brownstein – guitar, percussion, keyboards
Greg Nease – guitar, percussion
Kathy Reichert – guitar, vocals
John Roche – guitar, vocals, percussion
Kyle Roth – drums
Joel Schick – harmonica, percussion
Nick Torres – guitar, vocals, percussion

Almost everyone showed up at some point during the day Friday and we spent the afternoon and evening rehearsing. Likewise, Saturday morning and early afternoon. We’d put together a list of thirty-some-odd songs for playing and quickly ditched some and added others. I think we played Man in the Moon twenty-six times Friday evening.

Saturday night we packed the equipment and caravaned over to Sheffield and got going on setting up and working through the soundcheck. Originally, we were going to open the show with the Moody Blues’ The Story in Your Eyes, but after playing it close to what seemed like nineteen times during the soundcheck, we dumped it (many of the audience came early and got to hear it anyway) and went with Suspicious Minds, a song we hadn’t rehearsed at all that weekend as the first number. So much for planning!

Anyway, the set list was as follows:

Suspicious Minds – Elvis
Love is the Drug – Roxy Music
In the Sun – Joseph Arthur
Dancing With the Stars – Kathy Reichert
One by One – Nick Torres / David Hodge
Hey Eugene – Pink Martini
Eurotrash Girl – Cracker
Do You Remember – John Roche
Jack McKenzie – Kathy Reichert
Rosie – David Hodge
Time Bomb – Rancid

INTERMISSION

Alison – (the other) Elvis
Monday Morning – Kathy Reichert
Lost Summer Days – Nick Torres
Piano Through the Ceiling – Kathy Reichert
Orange and Cinnamon – David Hodge
Man in the Moon – R.E.M.
Sultans of Swing – Dire Straits
No Reflection on You – Kathy Reichert
I’ll Be Around – Spinners
Evil Ways – Santana

We had a moderate (fifty, maybe?) and enthusiastic crowd and I hope they had as much fun as we did. The entire show was filmed by John’s wonderful wife, Karen, and with a little luck (and a bit of time as I know they’ve a number of other projects going on) we’ll have both video and still photos. John Roche has posted some pictures here.

We’re also sure to get some photos from John Reichert for your entertainment, once he’s had time to got through them himselves.

I’d like to thank both musicians and the audience for making this a very fun weekend. Being able to have the “world premiere” of Nick’s Lost Summer Days, as well as Kathy’s Jack McKenzie was inspiring. I’m honored to have such talented and terrific (and patient!) friends, both on and off the stage.

I’ll be posting up more material as it becomes available. Thanks, as always, for reading and listening.

Peace