| Author |
Message |
JohnS
| | Posted on Friday, October 08, 2004 - 11:08 am: | |
I need a little intro and to fill a couple of bars with some lead. The song is CGFG with a chorus of FGFGFGC. No biggy at all.
When experimenting I played the blues scales in all the keys that match the chords but it didn't click. If I trusted my ear, A sounded the best. Is this right?
Any help would be appreciated. |
Robert Tolar
| | Posted on Friday, October 08, 2004 - 11:08 am: | |
The progression you've shown has C as it's tonal center, so A blues (or A pentatonic minor) could make sense because A minor is the relative minor of C. If that works for you then go for it. There aren't really any hard and fast rules about what scale to use so it's difficult to make a suggestion without knowing what mood you're trying to convey. I'd also try A dorian and see how you like that.
Hope that is in some way helpful. |
JohnS
| | Posted on Friday, October 08, 2004 - 11:08 am: | |
Robert:
Thanks very much for the help. Actually that song is called Truly, Madly, Deeply...but I'm not that familiar with it. So, I usually try to play the blues over anything I don't know.J
BTW, how do you determine what is the "tonal center" of a bunch of chords? This is one of many parts of music theory that has eluded me.
As long as I'm showing my ignorance, here's another question. If I'm jamminging along fine (usually to a CD) in A and all of a sudden it doesn't sound "right", does that mean the key has changed or that all of a sudden I've gotten really crappy? <don't answer that. J>
It flips me out and makes me wander all around looking for the "right" key. For example, Clapton's Layla. Does that change keys or is it me not finding the right 2 melodies in the same key?
thanks |
Robert Tolar
| | Posted on Friday, October 08, 2004 - 11:08 am: | |
As long as were sharing our ignorance I'll do my best to answer your questions. Hopefully someone will jump in who actually knows what they're talking about.
As far as tonal center or determining what key a song is in, just having a bunch of chords may or may not be sufficient. In the very simple case you gave it was easy because there were only three chords and they happened to be the three chords (the I, IV, and V) upon which a large number of songs are based. If you like playing the blues I'm sure you would have no trouble identifying the key if I gave you E, A, B. Songs are often characterized by the way they move away and come back to the tonal center. In your example the F gently pulls you away from the C and the G makes you want to go home to the C. If you make that G into a G7 you'll see what I mean more clearly.
Up until now I've kind of been using "tonal center" and "key" loosely as equivalents. From what I've gleaned from other musicians it seems like tonal center is often used to refer to a "localized key" of a song. A lot of songs may not change keys altogether but they may a sort of do a local key change in parts. You'll have to excuse all of my layman's terms but the way I understand it is that songs may undergo changes in tonal center without changing keys. In other cases the change is so dramatic that it definitely indicates a change of keys.
I think I've blown enough hot air for now. If I'm not careful I'll start adding to the already massive collection of ambiguous sounding music theory books on the market. I'll have to title it "Blue Collar Music Theory: an unofficial guide to music by a half-educated guitar hack" |
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