i am an offering

You can’t pass this one up.  Sovereign Grace has decided to sell all of their CD’s for $6 and all of their Pursuit of Godliness books for $5 for the whole month of February!  I was hoping to buy a couple of copies of the Savior CD to give away and replace my superbly scratched one and I’m glad I waited until after Christmas!

Anyway, head on over in the month of February and pick up some of the best praise and worship CD’s around as well as books that I’m sure are just as good (I haven’t read them, so I can’t honestly recommend them…yet!)

Speaking of Sovereign Grace music, we’re doing “Jesus Thank You” again this Sunday and I’m super excited.  It is such an amazing song.

The mystery of the cross I cannot comprehend
The agonies of Calvary
You the perfect Holy One, crushed Your Son
Who drank the bitter cup reserved for me

Your blood has washed away my sin,
Jesus, thank You
The Father’s wrath completely satisfied,
Jesus, thank You
Once Your enemy, now seated at Your table
Jesus, thank You

We’ve looked at several different things that can give you a quick boost in your theory knowledge in the last several posts: chords, chord suffixes, relative minor chords, chord progressions, key signatures and seventh chords. Now let’s put it all together and apply it.

Many people can use their ear to learn songs but have no idea what the structure is behind what they’re learning. They hear it and they can play it. Many people can look at music to learn songs and understand theory, but have a hard time learning something by ear. We want to develop our skills to be able to use both, and the two ways of learning really go hand in hand.

Every melody, hook, riff or whatever else makes up a song is really as simple as taking the notes of a chord and working with it to create the sound that is desired. Take for example, “Yankee Doodle.” The first four notes of the melody are directly related to the I chord. It starts out by using the root note twice on “Yan-kee.” Then, the goal of the end of the phrase is to get to the third note of the scale on the syllable of “-dle”. Instead of creating boring melody and playing the third note of the scale twice on “Doodle” the composer added what’s called a passing tone on the second note of the scale. The passing tone is used to pass through to the next note, creating interest. The melody basically stays within the I chord with one exception, the passing tone on the second note of the scale.

With this knowledge at your disposal, it is very simple to listen, apply theory, then learn. Here are some simple steps to do this:

1. Figure out what key you’re in. Do this either by listening and experimenting on your instrument while you listen or find out what key the song is in. Don’t find the music, though, as we’re trying to learn by ear at this point!
2. Warm up on the basic chords of the key (I, IV, V, iv). Break them apart and create your own little fills and melodies. You might find that these turn out to be the same as in the song you’re trying to learn!
3. Listen to the melody, hook or riff in the song (listen to very small chunks at a time). Take a short chunk of music, figure out the notes it is using by trial and error on your instrument, then figure out what chord these notes are basing themselves around. If you have familarized yourself with the basic chords, these melodies should come very easily as they are most often composed by breaking up basic chords and adding some passing tones.
4. Repeat, repeat, repeat. This could be very frustrating at first, but believe me, if you practice it enough, it will pay off. I remember when I was younger and my brother could sit down and figure out a song just by listening to it. I was amazed and wondered how in the world he could do that. Now, after many, many practice hours and a good amount of music theory knowledge later, I can do it just as easily.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to ask. Have fun!

Ha, how fitting that this post happens to be the 7th tip.

Okay, I was typing this post and realized that this is one of those posts that is probably impossible to explain with just words. As I don’t want to thouroughly confuse everyone, the best way to learn about seventh chords online is to visit our handy dandy musictheory.net site, specifically this lesson. Before you visit that particular lesson, though, familiarize yourself with basic intervals and basic triads.

So now that you’ve learned from a much better source than me on this one, let’s take a look at what you might use these various 7th chords for:

• V7 or dominant 7 chord: Very helpful for changing keys, playing in place of the vii dim* (in C, the vii dim* is made up of B-D-F, the V7 in C is made up of G-B-D-F; add one note on the bottom and you have a completely different sounding chord that can be used for the same thing!)
• min7: A great chord to use as a substition for the IV (four) chord, particularly the ii7 chord. As with the V7, the ii7 and the IV share notes (in C, the IV is F-A-C, the ii7 is D-F-A-C). This is particularly helpful when you’re writing music and you can’t move yourself out of using I-IV-V and vi.
• maj7, half dim* 7, fully dim* 7: All of these chords are used extensively in jazz music. If you’d like to learn to be a better jazz player or you want to give your playing a bit of a jazzy flavor, learn how to use these.

There are way more ways to use 7th chords, but that really would require me to teach a theory class to you! Next time: how to use theory plus your ear to learn songs.

*dim stands for diminished. Check out the lessons on specific intervals at musictheory.net for more information on dimished intervals. By the way, I have no partnership with that website…it’s just the best online website for music theory that I’ve come across and wanted to pass the word along

What happens to you when your worship leader says something like, “Just play something nice while the pastor is praying” or “when I’m introducing this song, vamp something from the song until we’re ready to go?” Do you freak out and think, “How do I play something nice with no music…and what in the world is vamping??? Help!!”

There is a way to play something nice without even planning ahead of time, and no, vamping does not have anything to do with older Anne Rice novels.

Earlier we looked at building the basic chords in any key, the I (one), IV (four), V (five) and iv (six) chords. With these chords placed in your musical tool belt, you can create “something nice” on the spot without any music. You do this by vamping a progression of a combination of those four chords.

Vamping means to play something over and over again. Vamping can be used to extend an intro or an outro to a song. It can be used to let someone solo on an instrument or create a space of instrumental music in the middle of a song that the worship leader can use to continue to lead with speaking during the song.

So how do you create a chord progression that you can vamp with? Here are some ways:

• Find the built-in chord progressions. Is there an intro to the song? Figure out the measures of the intro and play it over and over again. Memorize that progression and the next time you’re in the key you can use those chords.
• Play I, IV, V, I over and over. It’s a little bit vanilla, but it will do the job until you’re used to something different.
• Understand the natural progression of chords. As obvious as it should be, we miss the fact that scales have a definite pattern to them that include each note’s chord: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1. So learn to play the scale progression of I, ii, iii, IV, V, iv, V7 (we substitute this chord instead of the vii..more on that in a future post), I.
• Listen, look, learn. Listen for progressions in recordings that you have of a certain song. Look for progressions as you play songs. Learn those progressions and use them the next time you’re asked to vamp.
• Learn progressions in different keys. Once you’ve learned the intro to a song in G, transpose that same progression to Bb, then C, then A, etc.

Be careful that you are following the time signature as well while you vamp. It’s a little bit tricky to get into a song if you’ve been vamping in 4/4 time and the song is in 3/4 time! Trust me, I know from experience on that one! So be careful if you’ve just played a 4/4 song and you’re asked to vamp the intro to a 3/4 song. Take a breath, count in your head and make sure you’re going to be playing in 3 instead of 4!

Amazingly, one of the most basic concepts of music theory doesn’t seem so basic: key signatures.  I am constantly running into people who either a) don’t know how to tell what key they’re in or b) know what key they’re in but consistently forgot to add the sharps and flats in the key signature.  Before we look at the steps to figuring out how to find the key signatures, let’s realize that the absolute best way to know what key you’re playing in is to memorize what every key signature is so that you can tell at a glance what key your in AND get comfortable playing in all of those keys so that you won’t miss the notes in the signature.  Visit musictheory.net for some helpful practice on key signatures.

Step one: figuring out the key.

There are several ways to figure out what key you’re playing in.   The most basic way is to look at the first and last note of the song and determine from that.  If the song starts on an E and ends on an E, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re playing in the key of E.  That’s not the case all the time, however, so let’s figure out the no-mistake ways to find your key.

Sharp keys (keys with sharps in them):

Find the last sharp in the key signature and go up a half step.  That’s the major key your playing in.  It’s that simple.  The key of D has F# and C# in the key signature.  Going up a half step from C# brings you to D.

Here’s the catch, though: remember the relative minor chord we talked about in tip #4? It’s possible that you might be in that key instead of the major key.  A few ways to tell are to look at the first and last note or chords in the song.  You can also play the song and listen to whether or not it sounds more joyful or more somber.  If it’s more somber, you’re in a minor key.  So to find the minor key, first find the major key, then go down 3 half steps (minor 3rd) to the relative minor and there you have it.  As I mentioned earlier though, it is much more effective to memorize all key signatures and relative minor keys of each major key so that you instantly know that D major and B minor have the same key signature.

Flat keys (keys with flats in them):

Find the second to last flat in the key signature. That’s your key.  In the key of Eb the signature is Bb, Eb, Ab.  The second to last flat is Eb, thus your key.  The one exception to this is the key of F, which only has one flat.  We can also find flat keys by going down a perfect 4th (5 half steps) from the last flat in the key.  So, since Bb is the only flat in the key of F, and the last flat, going down a perfect 4th brings you to F.  The same applies for the relative minor for flat keys.  Once you’ve found the major key, go down a minor 3rd (3 half steps) to find the relative minor key.

Memorize the Key Signatures

Again, it is much better to figure out every key signature and memorize them so that you can know them in an instant.  The more you familiarize yourself with how key signatures look, the quicker you’ll be able to tell what key you’re in.  The more you familiarize yourself with how keys feel as you play them, the more comfortable you’ll be playing in those keys.