A note - continued

It might sound a bit boring to be practising an instrument without any sort of fixed goals. So , i am going to give you one !! Yes , so now you know how most songs are played  , since you have had enough practise playing them. Now , how about i tell you to play these songs without looking up the chords ??  Dont protest ! There is a way.

One thing i have learnt from experience is that , a lot of songs can be played with a very simple set of chords. These are called the major and minor chords , and yes , you already know them ! But how do you figure out what chord goes where ?? A rather foxing question if you are a relatively new guitar player. It was something that confused me too , and i am still not an expert at it.  But there are some tips that i have for you .

All songs , almost all the simple ones atleast , will be set to one key. This is the pitch or the scale at which the song will be sung . So , most songs will be in one key , and this key could be a C , C# , D , D# etc , and so on ... Now . How do you figure this out ?? This is where the ear comes in handy. Most songs you played with the help of the internet will also be set in some key right ? Its a good exercise to go back and check what these songs are set in... Now , this is the main part.

All major chords and minor chords will fall into some scale , and the simplest one is the Major scale. The major scale follows this order.  Let me start with an example.

The chords comprising the C major scale look like this --

C , Dm , Em , F , G , Am, Bdim  ( i am not sure if its dim or dim7..but i am not going to discuss diminished chords here ).

The D major scale will look like this

D , Em, Fm,F#,G#,A#m,,C#dim

You might be able to see a pattern here .. No ? Ok , let me tell you .

All major scales are based on an interval rule . The first note is called the root note , and that will be the key of the major scale . So C major scale has a C root note.  The notes are separated by the following intervals

full step , full step , half step , full step,full step,full step,half step

And hence , if you follow this rule ( also keeping in mind that E and B do not have sharps) , you will get a beautifully neat C major scale as shown below.

C- D - E -F-G-A-B-C

Now , lets apply this rule to D major scale  or also known as Major scale in the Key D

D-E-F#-G-A-B-C#

You can apply the same rule to all major scales in any key .... !

So ,now , coming back to chords, they also follow the same notes in the scale ! This means that if you are playing a song in C major scale , all the chords will be some form of C , D , E , F ,G , A or B ! Also these forms are usually either major or minor , and sometimes a diminished. Lets take a look at how chords look like in the C major scale .

The C major scale chords would be ...

C major , D minor , E minor, F major , G major, A minor , B dim .

Same way , D major scale chords would be ...

D major , E minor , F#minor , G major , A major , B minor , C# dim.

See a pattern ?  Yup , the chords will be of sequence   major (root note ), minor , minor , major , major , minor , dim !  This you will learn from some practise , and its nothing to worry about .


So , now we know what chords come in a scale . The next tough part is to figure out how these chords/scales fall into a song . Lets think about this now !

PS : these sequences of chords are usually called chord progressions. The above method is helpful in figuring out songs that have major chord progressions , as it lets you play/strum songs freely without making them sound too bad.

Playing by the ear - revisited, and the magic of chord progressions

To pick up any song by the ear , what you need to do first is figure our the root chord or the scale for the song . This can usually be figured out by humming that song in your head and trying , and hoping to find a major chord that goes with the song. This takes a lot of hit / miss , and practise. It is very essential that you have experience in playing some chords and some songs before you attempt this . But its totally possible that you are good , by the ear player and you get this stuff on the first go. So , once you have this figured out , try to work your magic by checking if its a major scale song by attempting the other chords in the major scale , of that key. As you keep experimenting , you will slowly understand which key the song is in .
For instance , say the song is in C major scale , and you do not know it , but  you got the stanza of the song with F major in it. Now the next thing you might want to check is if the next line goes with a G major or a C major and so on , and you strike up a E major chord in it. Now you know for sure that its not a C major scale song since there is no E major chord in a C major scale ( using the above rules) . And you go ahead and fiddle with a major scale progression that has E major chord and the F major chord in it. Once you start narrowing it down this way , it gets a lot easier to predict the chord progressions and for jamming the song on your guitar while playing along . Once you hit the right scale and the right progressions , its very hard for the song to sound wrong , even if you are not playing the exact chords. This is the magic of figuring out the right progressions  !!

A note - Guitar/Keyboard playing

Disclaimer : This is not really an experts post on learning the guitar/ the keyboard . These are some methods i found to be useful when i started learning the instruments. If anyone thinks there is a better method , you are most welcome to comment. 

Facts :  I am also an amateur guitar player , and my current skills involve finger picking , picking up simple songs by the ear , playing most major ,minor and sus chords , bar chords , and absolutely no solo playing. So before you dive into this tutorial , i want to promise you that this will not be the most organised or the most clear compared to the plenty of others available out there. However, i did not go through any tutorials to learn guitar and so there might be something different about this one that you might like . No promises though.

Right. Lets get started. The basics.

What you should know : a bit about the chords, its good if you are an avid listener , and it will be better if you are someone if you can sing along or at least hum along. Its essential that you learn all the major and minor chords. If you are a guitarist , it really helps if you know bar chords. You can learn and develop ease of playing them by trying out random songs and playing along to develop familiarity , or even learn them as you go along. Its a very parallel exercise , and there is always google to help you out.

What i am going to write about : Mostly about figuring out songs, my ideas on how some of these scales work , how you can figure out tough chords. All these methods involve experimenting , and is a long term process. I would like to look at this as more of a tip/pointers material than anything else. I will mostly be trying to relate to myself whenever i am talking about playing by ear/ playing chords etc , and this will probably be helpful (i think i think i think !) . Alright. Lets start !

Guitarists ,learn to tune  - Eventually , no hurry 

Guitar - Its a beautiful 6 stringed instrument. One of the first things , if you are a guitar player.. Learn to tune your guitar. Doesnt matter if you cant do it now. It doesnt matter if its taking you ages to do it . Learn to do it !! At first , yes , it would be very helpful to get the tuner along with your brand new guitar , or even take a tuner wherever you go in case you dont have your own guitar. Tuning without the help of the tuners though, is essentially that one thing you should be good at at some point of time , and its better if  that time doesnt tend to infinity in this case.

There are a couple of reasons why i think this is important. Tuning is a listening exercise. It hones your skills of picking up sounds and comparing them with a reference note. This is very essential for a musician. It doesnt matter if you are not aiming for John Petrucci . Your ear is the ultimate instrument.

Keyboardists , no tuning for you , how lucky!

Or are you ? May be you are missing out on some ear exercise. But saves you that frustration and time.

Kick-starting the guitar/piano playing

I started playing the guitar some time ago , and i was mostly stuck playing songs like " Twinkle Twinkle little star, how i wonder... " , " Tujhe Dekha toh ye jaana sanam...  " etc, for a while . I realize it was because i did not really know what i should be doing with the guitar . I had no guidance , i had no reference material  , and i was a kid who hardly listened to music with guitars / keyboards in it.  So , for anyone who is an aspiring guitarist / keyboardist , my first request. Start listening to your favourite music !! If it doesnt have guitars or keyboards, well , explore !  People are too serious about their tastes in music , let me tell you this, it will definitely evolve.. So explore , and never stop !

By the way , the step above will take a while. But music is all about the experience and we know that dont we !.So , yeah , once you are done with that , you probably know what kind of music you like and the style of music etc. The next thing you would want to decide is how you are going to use your instrument to play your kind of music.

Impromptu disclaimer :  This stuff is strictly experience based, and these are not rules.

Picking up notes by ear and playing chords

Playing by the ear is something that comes in handy if you are a singer. Its very useful for picking up and playing songs that you hear on a daily basis . This especially helps if you are playing chords to the songs. The difficulty with playing by ear though is that , well , some people find it difficult. This is something that cannot be explained simply because i am not a neurophysicist , and there are a very few neurophysicists who i talk to on a daily basis to discuss such things...Ok OK, i digress. So the point being. A lot of people think that playing by the ear is tough. Well , to some extent it is .But it may not be as tough as you think. A lot of us do have this ability , and this probably is something that was built into us evolutionarily. Some of us dont have it either because

1. we have forgotten it over time
2. we have it but we do not know
3. we do not have it. at all .

I would like to believe that we are all in the first 2 categories , and just go ahead with this tutorial , and talk about other possibilities later :)

When i was around 19 or so , i realized that i had lost this ability to play by the ear. When i was probably a 10 year old , i was sent to one of the quintessential music classes. I obviously did not know what the hell this was all about really ,and i was probably one of those dumb kids who knew nothing about music when they were 10 years old .Ok , that is a heck of a lot of them , but you know what i am saying. I was ignorant about the musical ear and stuff and i didnt value that part of music much. So , when i was 19, i was struggling to sing to the scale/ chords that my music teacher was playing on his guitar ,and this bothered me . VERY MUCH. So , on one of those fine days , i picked up an old yamaha 20 odd key keyboard  , found a song i like on google , got the chords for it , and started singing the first line while just playing one major chord. After i made sure that i got this relation between the chord and what i was singing,  i started playing around with the chord. For instance , if my songs first line was in C major , i would shift the chord to D major , and then try to sing in this new scale. This would obviously mean that i would need to pick up the scale of the song by hearing what D major sounded like . Once i did that after a couple of tries,  i shifted it to E major. This went on for a while , and i realized that its not that easy.

Disclaimer : Playing by the ear is a breeze for a lot of people out there. This could be because they managed to develop it really well , or it just never left them.  That is nothing to be intimidated by.

So ! One thing you can definitely do as a part of playing or improving your musicianship is to listen to as many songs as possible, and then trying to figure out what chords comprise them. And at first , i would recommend that you do what i did , that is , to use google/chord libraries to get the real chords and just blindly copy and play them as you sing along or sing in your head, or hum along , or jam with someone. Once you are an expert on some songs , you will slowly get the hang of how these songs feel with these chords. And by this  , what i mean is this - At first the chords you are playing and the song that you are singing or humming / have heard many not seem to have any connection at all. As you keep playing them , your ear will slowly get better at deciphering the notes that you are playing , and you will slowly understand the relation between the chord you are playing and the phrase or the part of the song you are singing. This will really help you later towards being able to play songs on your own (without google!).

An easy song all of us can start playing is  Knocking on Heavens door . Its one of the first songs that i started out with on my guitar , and it is really a simple and beautiful song. There are millions of other songs out there that are simple and probably simpler ! I encourage you to check them out and get a feel for the chords. ( This stuff is harder to do on a keyboard, but its definitely useful if you can hold the chords and hum the song along).

This part is sometimes more enjoyable than you think , and i think i spent a long long time in this process of getting to know chords more closely by just playing them.

New York

Took a trip to New York state with my cousin during the July 4th (American Independence Day) weekend. It was a very fun trip . Made some great memories. Had a lot of time in backseat of a Toyota Corolla , and was fiddling around with my camera for a bit. So here are some snaps of the wonderful countryside shot from my mobile phone. I have developed this liking for my phone as a camera , because it allows me to quickly capture moments without too much fidgeting around.

Fields with yellow flowers and mountains in the background

House and farms and the road

Road and Clouds

Rain and the mountains

Rain and the road

Blue skies

sepia sunset

Willow

Willows and Lovers