Working Out a Song

The last lesson is the thing all of this was for — taking a piece of music you do not know and working out what it is doing.

Here is the procedure, in order.

First, find home. Let the track play and hum the note that feels most settled, the one the music keeps returning to. Then find that note on the fretboard using lesson one.

Second, decide major or minor. Listen to the chord built on that home note. Bright means major, sad means minor. Lesson four.

Third, read the chords. They are already on screen as the track plays, so this part is done for you here — but the skill you are building is doing it by ear, and having the answer visible while you guess is the fastest way to build it.

Fourth, number them. Work out each chord's Roman numeral relative to the key. Lesson five.

Fifth, look for anything from outside the key. A chord that does not belong is always the most interesting moment in a song, and it is usually borrowed from the parallel minor or is a raised-seventh V, as in lesson seven.

Work through the five steps on this one before reading on.

Here is the answer, so you can check yourself.

The track is in E minor. Its chords are E minor, D major, B minor and a C major seventh.

Numbered in E minor, those are i, VII, v and VI. Every one of them belongs to the natural minor scale — and notice that the chord on the fifth degree is B minor rather than B major, so this song is not borrowing the raised seventh from lesson seven. That is a real observation about how the track sounds, not bookkeeping: it is why the music feels gentle and unresolved rather than dramatic.

If you got the key and most of the numerals, you can now do something most guitarists never learn to do. Pick another track from the catalogue and run the same five steps on it.