Hearing aid.

Hi fellow twanger, I hope your calluses are crisp.

The big news on Tamborine Mountain is that it's raining. Who knows, perhaps the relentless drought that is ravaging our part of the World has finally broken. Knowing Australia, we'll probably be flooded tomorrow.

I've been doing one of my favorite things recently: sitting in with a good band as the colorist/soloist. A good friend of mine, Chris Aronsten, was able to squeeze a bit more cash out of a couple venues in famous Byron Bay and invited me down to augment his trio. Fronting your own band is a wonderful thing, something we'd all love to do, but being able to just arrive, plug in, add some color to a tight well rehearsed unit, play solos to some great songs for an appreciative audience... that's even better. No hassles, no agents to call, no invoices to lodge, no PA to set up, no rehearsals to go to. I've got a couple more coming up and I can't wait.

The only way -- of course -- to be able to feel confident enough to get up in front of several hundred music fans and play along to a bunch of songs that you may have heard before, but never worked out before and certainly never rehearsed before, is to be able to hear (without experimenting) the structure of the song. If you know the key and you can hear the structure, you know the tune. Hearing the music in this sense -- being able to analyze it as you listen -- is a skill which develops over time, and to a beginner seems like magic. It's not. It's really not very difficult, and it becomes so ingrained, once you know how, that you can't stop. You wind up picking apart everything that you hear: every ad, every sound track, every song.

This is what goes through my mind when a tune starts up that I've never heard:

What key is it in? If it's a guitar band, it'll probably be in a friendly key. If not, I'll think about using a capo, depending on how the tune develops.

Is it major or minor? Fortunately, as complex and rich and varied as a bunch of tunes can sound, their structures are almost always similar if not identical, and they all fall into either major or minor keys.

Once I have those two bits of information, my ears and brain are tuned. This is where knowledge of what a "key" really is comes into play. To my mind, a key is a family consisting of seven notes and the seven chords that arise from those notes. Now I really start to listen, and my mental landscape begins to take form. I already have (for example) established that the tune is in C, and it's not the blues. Let's say it's a Bob Dylan tune. I'm waiting for the chord change, and I'm expecting the IV chord. Why? Because in my many years of playing and picking tunes apart, I've found that 8 out of 10 move from the I chord to the IV when they start out. The IV of the key of C is F, so I'm expecting an F chord and I"m ready for it. If it's not the IV chord, then the next most eligible candidate is the V chord. That's G, in the key of C. If it were a bluesy kind of tune, I'd be thinking slightly differently, a topic I'll take up next time.

These three chords, the I, IV and V, are the three major chords of any (major) key. They are the most commonly used because they are the strongest sounding. The IV naturally leads on from the I, and V is always the best way back to the I. They are also the easiest to hear. The IV chord sounds very "comfortable" to the ear when it follows the I; the V chord never fails to feel up in the air, like it's trying to get somewhere (home), like it's not going to finish here. What you're listening for is obviously not a particular chord (although that's the end result) but rather the difference between the two chords -- the change. There are few analogies that help out here, because sound is so hard to describe, but with a bit of practice it's as real as smelling the difference between a garden and the seaside, or a city street from an Italian kitchen.

The I-IV-V takes care of three of the seven. The next most important to hear is the VI chord, A minor in the key of C. It's not called the "related minor" for nothing, and plays an important role in the key.

Then there are the II and III chords, also minor, a bit harder to nail down; the VII chord is a half diminished, theoretically, and rarely used in modern music, so don't waste too much time on it. All can be "heard".

A good idea would be to look at all the tunes you play and to write them down in Roman numeral format*. This could take a while, but it's EXTREMELY important to know exactly what you're playing at all times. To be faking your way through certain passages or just "feeling" your way is not good enough if you want to really play music. Once you start to see your repertoire charted out like this, you will start to see that their structures follow certain formulae and you can then start to train your ear so that you can recognize chord changes as easily as recognizing blue from red from yellow.

Knowing exactly which chord is which at any given moment -- and how that chord fits into the context of the music -- is vital, as the chord sets the rules for everything. A G chord in the key of C is treated differently than a G chord in the key of D. The first is a V chord (and will probably be a 7th); a G chord in the key of D is a IV chord, and should be approached differently.

The next thing needed to feel totally confident is to be able to see your whole fretboard as the chord. I spent far too many years thinking chords were little clusters of notes in one position. I now know that this way of thinking is wrong, time wasting and limiting. Chords at their most basic are three-notes-big, and anywhere you can get those three notes ringing is the chord. On a fretboard, there are many such places, some more obscure than others, but the positions all connect up and form one continuum. Knowing it, and seeing it, is the secret to achieving total freedom on the instrument.

There is a trick to this way of thinking, of seeing the whole fretboard in one swoop. It's a simple visualization technique I "discovered" many years ago. It boils everything down to three little shapes that point to everything else. If you've been playing for a while, you probably already have started your search for that one "master pattern" that can lead you through everything else. Save yourself the effort and visit http://www.lorange.kirk.net where you can read about my book PlaneTalk which has been selling from that site for 6 years now. Several thousand have gone out to all corners of the English speaking World now, revealing the hidden logic of the guitar. The slide rule that comes with it will show you in 5 seconds more about the workings of the guitar than you will read about in years. Truly.

If you're into slide guitar, join us at the Slide Guitar Forum: http://www.bottleneckguitar.com You can also join the Slide Guitar web Ring there if you have a relevant site.

For a look at the basics, check out http://www.guitarforbeginners.com, another site of mine which gets over 800 visits per day now.

Until next time, all the best and keep that twangin' going,

Kirk

*Use the Capo Chart I have put up at http://www.guitarforbeginners.com to convert your tunes to Roman numerals. It's linked from the nav bar on the left.