How do you do that?

Hi fellow twanger, it sure has been a while. I'm still atop Tamborine Mountain, which these days is parched and brown from the worst drought of the century and I'm still working this Internet and playing my guitars at every opportunity.

One of my favorite kind of gigs occurred last night. I got a call from an old pal asking whether I'd be interested in joining his lineup for a private function, playing the swampy bluesy kind of kind of music I love to play. There's nothing I enjoy more than just turning up, plugging in and playing - no rehearsals, no agents, no organizing. Just playing.

During one of the breaks, a guitar enthusiast came up and commented on the band and how we must have been together for years to sound so tight. He was flabbergasted to learn that the four of us had never actually even plugged in together at the same time before. How was that possible, he wondered. How do you know what to play if you haven't rehearsed? So I told him.

I explained to him that once you understand the way music works, how it's all connected up, then all you have to do is listen and choose any one of an unlimited number of parts to play. I told him that the main structure of any piece of music, the chord progression, sets the rules for any given moment of that piece and can be 'heard'... that is to say "listened to and analyzed". Music always has a center, the key of the piece, and the chords that the composer chose are connected to that key in a very specific manner. Even if the chords are borrowed from a different key, which is allowed, they still relate in a very specific way to the original key. When you've been playing for a while and consciously listening and taking mental notes, music becomes transparent and these relationships are simply heard and understood.

A simple example is the twelve-bar-blues. It doesn't take long as a musician to hear and understand the sound of those twelve bars of music: 3 different major chords, one of them a 7th. If it's in E, then the chords are E, A and B7; if it's in C, they become C, F and G7; for G, they are G, C and D7. There are of course 12 possibilities, but all will sound the same when played through. The first chord, the One Chord sets the scene, the tonal center, the second chord, the Four Chord, has an uplifting effect to the song... kind of takes it to a new level. The last chord, the Five Chord, says "take me home", take me back to One and we'll start again.

No wonder we all find it easy to hear those changes: those three chords are the three major chords from any key, which, if you've been reading my articles, consists of seven chords. For some reason, we humans love the sound of those three major chords together. Twelve-bar-blues use them in a specific, recognizable sequence, but any order will do. The fact is, just about all major-key music is based around them. Classically trained musicians know them by their own official names

I explained to the guy that once you can hear those in any musical situation, then the other chords become just as easy. They are the 3 minor chords (the Two, Three and Six chords) and the half-diminished Seven Chord. The Six Chord is the main minor chord. Very easy to hear. The Two and Three are more subtle and less often used, but it doesn't take long before your ear recognizes the sound of them too, the context, for that is what is meant when I say that you can hear the music. If someone plays you one chord alone, you should be able to say whether it's minor or major, but you'll never be able to say whether it's a Two, Three or Six chord. The numbers assigned to chords reflect their order in the sequence of the scale, and is therefore a measure of context. As I've said before: music IS context.

Just before I had to go back for the next set, he said he kind of understood but was convinced there had to more to it than that, that it still didn't explain how I knew what to play. I realized he was right. There is more to it. I told him that to me, there are three flavors of music, and three only: Major, minor and the blues.

A "major" tune is one written in a major key, using the chords of the key in their pure form. Examples of major music are folk, traditional country, anthems, hymns, some pop, nursery rhymes, etc.

Minor music is simply music written in a minor key, where the center of tonality is a minor chord. Examples are tunes like Summertime, Moondance, All along the Watchtower.

The third category is my favorite. Call it whatever you want, but it's a flavor that is basically major, but borrows elements of the minor to create a distinctive tang. It's what makes the blues the blues, jazz jazz, rock n roll rock n roll. Some players explain it as a scale, I see it more as a distortion of the major chord, where the third can be flatted to the minor third and the seventh is the flat seven.

So that's it: hear the chords and pick the flavor. Easy!

If any of this reads like so much Greek to you, you should consider acquiring my book PlaneTalk - The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book. In it and with the use of simple graphics, I explain the structure of music, the interconnecting layers, the design and mystery of the guitar and how it all comes together on the fretboard, but mostly I divulge the TRICK to seeing it all there on the fretboard, a simple visualization technique. Check it out at http://www.lorange.kirk.net. My other site, http://www.GuitarForBeginners.com is another source of plain English guitar tutorials.

All the best, I'll certainly try and make these more frequent. If you have a specific topic you'd like my opinion on, drop me a line. I'd love to hear from you.

Kirk