This is where I got it. The only note it has for the capo is “Capo on 4th fret”, if that helps.
Thanks for all the answers! I’m trying to keep up.
Ok, yeah, those are the chord forms rather than the actual chords by pitch (it treats the capoed fret as if it were open and names the forms as they would be played without a capo in relation to the open strings. The chord which is named as Em is actually G#m, for instance, but for guitarists, it’s easier to say “finger it like an open Em.”
Yes, all these forms make use of “open” strings relative to the capo, which makes them easier to play. If you move the tablature down four frets, all the “4’s” become “0’s,” so you can see that the forms would be relatively easy to finger.
My father had one good finger left after a sawmill “accident”, and he used to tune his guitar to an open G, fret to whatever key the song was in, and use his remaining finger to flatten notes for minors and sevenths. It was amazing how well he could play after many years of practice.
You are correct, Sir. I used to play one in Junior High, but switched to other horns and haven’t touched one for many years, so I think I have forgotten the fingering as well.
I have never in my life seen an add15. This must be just some sort of idiosyncratic guitar notation, because I’ve never seen anything beyond 13s in chords. That would be like notating chords as add8s because they double the tonic in the octave. Weird.
I thought it was pretty bizarre too and after looking at the chord charts on the linked page, I think whoever transcribed the song just screwed up on the notation. If we ignore the capo, the chord in question is defined as F#C#F#BbBE (it’s an F# chord played with the B and high E strings open). If my chord-fu is correct, that makes it an F#7(add11). There is no “15th.”
That’s internet tab sites for you.
Yep… just restating the question and re-wording another answer to try to help dinsdale find one that works for him. 
Absolutely! I figured that I’d avoid talking about resonant frequencies and such. I didn’t mean to imply that instruments were built to certain specifications and only afterwards was their harmonic properties determined, but I guess my post did come out that way.
This is how the Soggy Bottom Boys play “Man of Constant Sorrow” for the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? — except tuned in open F.
What determines what key a song is in? This has always confused me. Sometimes is obvious but on some songs, the song only goes the the key it’s in at some random part of the song. The other day I was watching Jimmy Webb, the writer of Wichita Lineman, explain that the song is “clearly” in the key of F, but never goes to F. Except he conveniently doesn’t explain why it’s in F.
Starting at 2:58
So what determines what key a song is in?
I don’t know that song that well, but have watched the video, listened to the tune a time or two, and found someone’s lead sheet for the song that seems to be accurate enough for this discussion.
Why is it in F? A few reasons.
- The melody and harmony are all based on the F scale. The middle section of the verse strays into some other territory (more on that in a later bullet), but then at the top of the verse and right before the outro goes back to F.
- The opening chords go back and forth between I and V in F, setting us up to feel that key (V to I is a core harmonic relationship in a key). There are a lot of unexpected resolutions in this song that make it great, and the fact that other than in the intro, V chords never resolve to I is interesting. Coming out of the intro, the verse begins on a IV chord.
- The second half of the verse modulates, moving from D mixolydian to D major, but like the first part of the verse, it never gives us a V I in D. There are two very nifty things at the end of the verse… first, it really sets us up to expect a resolution to D, with a cadence of I/V V7… but then instead of resolving inserts another more modern cadence of bVI-bVII-I… but also never actually resolves to the I. And, the bit of brilliance here is that the bVI and bVII in D are the same chords as IV and V in the key of F, which is the key we move back to at the top of the verse, but not with an F chord, but with a Bb (IV chord).
But, to answer the question at a high level, the key of a song is determined by a combination of the scales or modes that the melody and harmony derives from, as well as where the strongest harmonic tensions and resolutions occur. Not every piece of music will be equally ‘strong’ in a particular key. (If you really want to dig into a popular internet discussion about key, look up Sweet Home Alabama).
Thank you for that thorough answer. I even understood most of it! ha ha
A follow up question, what is the purpose of the song key? I’ve seen discussions on other sites where people argue about what key a song is in. If everything you need to know abut a song is in the sheet music and in some cases (as in Wichita) the song never goes to the key, how does that information help you? In the case of Sweet Home Alabama you referenced I looked it up. Some folks swear its in D others think it’s in G. If you were playing the song, how would knowing the right key help?
Thanks again for taking the time.
- Why do we enjoy listening to music with vibrato, rather than without? Is it a cultural thing or physiological?
I’d love a psychological answer to that, but I’ll take a stab at it, saying that vibrato makes a vocal sound richer, with more depth.
I love Bob Weir’s vocals with the Grateful Dead, but Jerry’s voice just seemed too ‘thin’ for me, too plain. I mentioned it to a friend who said “There aren’t too many rock singers with no vibrato, but Jerry Garcia’s one of the few.”
My kid asked what vibrato was so I played her a snippet of the Bee Gees: “THAT is maximum vibrato.”
I’ve periodically had that discussion with my bandmates. I’m pretty ignorant about music theory, but I try to understand some minimal amount of it - especially when I play classical music. At times my (non-classical) bandmates have said, “What does the key matter, so long as you just play the notes as written?”
For me, playing bass other than classical, it pretty much just matters whether I play major or minor shapes on the neck. Playing classical, I just play the notes as written. Instead of thinking what key something is in, I think, “How many sharps/flats?” I thought the same when I used to play piano.
I often think I SHOULD learn much more theory. But I don’t find it especially fun to study, and it doesn’t come easily/naturally/intuitively.
The key determines what notes and chords are written in the first place. The examples mentioned show that if a piece is sufficiently non-classical, it may not be obvious what the key is. Music can even be atonal— in which case there will be no key signature, and there might be alternative accidental styles (e.g., every note gets one).
Some modal music may be written in a parallel major or minor key signature.
I don’t want to get into any argument. I KNOW my position reflects my ignorance. But my reality is that I have enough on my plate trying to motivate myself to practice more. In terms of what would make me a better player, music theory - which I do not particularly enjoy - comes in a pretty distant last place.
Yeah - but If I look at a piece and see 2 sharps, I can just say, “OK, play every C and F #.” Explain to me how it improves my playing for me to also think, “BTW - the NAME of the key is ‘D major’”? On the bass (or piano) it just requires that I tell my brain what patterns my fingers play.
Embarrassing admission - the only 3 key signatures I can tell from reading sharps and flats are C,D,G major. My wife (our 1st fiddle) has flash cards and all. But that is nothing I care to do. Or that I see any real benefit to other than being able to say, “Hey - this is in E minor!”
Another admission - I know NOTHING about jazz. And am convinced that most of those aren’t even real chords! 
Our ensemble has played many songs where we will look at the key signature and ask our 2d fiddle - a HS music teacher - whether it is in the major or the relative minor. GENERALLY his explanations make sense - but I’m not sure how much the explanation affects our playing.
At times he will explain - at length - what is going on in a classical piece - why it goes from one key to another, etc. It is the kind of thing where I don’t know if I actually have a blindspot preventing me from understanding, or that I’ve convinced myself that I can’t undestand so I just don’t try…
And let’s not even get into why the instruments play in different keys!
Hell, I generally play cello parts and was recently thrown for a loop when I encountered alto clef for the first time. Really stumped me, as there was nothing so high that it couldn’t be handled with a few ledger lines.
I play a lot of modal oldtime music. I think a lot of folk just like to say “mixolydian”! For the most part, I just have to hear the order in which the chords come. And where the “off” chords are in addition to the 1/4/5. Knowing I Don’t Punch Like Muhammed Ali does not add to my playing enjoyment.
And I’ve had the circle of 5ths explained so many times - often even with helpful visual aids provided! 
Eventually I realized that I know and can hear/play it, even though I couldn’t write it out. If a song starts out HERE, I know/feel/hear that it goes THERE - without being able to explain why or pull up a mental image of the circle.
As for atonal music - I’m personally not interested in that, so I personaly have no need to know much about how it is written.
Like I said - not trying to argue or defend my ignorance. Just explaining where I am at and how I can still enjoy making quite a bt of music despite my ignorance.
All I know, as a computer programmer, is that “concert A” is 440 Hz.
To get to “B-flat”, you multiply 440 by the 12th route of 2 (approx 1.059); to get to ‘B’, again, multiply by the 12th route of 2, and so on, for every semitone. ‘C’, ‘C#’, ‘D’ etc all follow a mathmathical progression, even if their names do not really match the sequence.
Music can also become scientific pedantry, you guys!
I am not sure that the musician has to think hard about it; they learned it early on (assuming they did) and now they just know it. Conversely, if you tell them to pick up a guitar and that you are going to play “blues in E minor”, they will know which chords and scales to play. If they are into Indian music and you tell them a song is Shankaraabharanam, they will know what is going on, and they can tell it from the sheet music.
Now imagine a computer audio workstation which is going to generate MIDI notes to be played through a synthesizer. If you explicitly specify every note, it will play them, and you need not specify if it is in D major or even figure it out. It does not necessarily matter to a human pianist, except
even without giving it a name, when you practiced those patterns you learned the D major scale. Obviously, it is possible to go through a bunch of scale exercises and read music without explicitly thinking, “This one is D major, next I am doing E-flat major…”, and you say yourself it is not something you consciously think about while you are playing. I am sure many musicians do not either, but if you asked them what key the song is in they would answer immediately or pretty quickly (similarly, they could tell you the song uses such-and-such chords, e.g. i—bVI—bIII—bVII…, at least if is something they are familiar with)
tl;dr answer- the key of a song contains two pieces of information that matter: the intervals between notes in the scale, and the pitches on which to build those intervals from. All musicians, even if they don’t read music or “understand theory”, are utilizing the concept of key all the time. They just may lack the vocabulary to communicate about it, or to describe consciously what they are doing intuitively.
(I’m going to dig into some explanations here, and gloss over others, in an attempt to get most directly yet completely to the answer. Please let me know if any bits of this don’t make sense and I’ll happily expand more on them).
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The most fundamental pitch relationship is an octave. When two people (or instruments) with different ranges, say one that sounds low and one that sounds high, are singing the ‘same’ note but lower or higher, we might describe that as singing the “same note, but in a different octave”. It turns out that the reason why they sound so similar as to be described that way is because the frequencies of notes an octave apart are exactly 2x (or 1/2) from each other. If I sing a note at 220hz, and you sing one at 440hz, we would be singing in octaves. Applying our note-letter nomenclature, all notes that share the same letter name (all F notes, or all D-sharp notes) are all in that 1:2 relationship with each other, with the frequency doubling each octave going up, and halving each octave going down.
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Our system of music utilizes a “chromatic” scale, which takes an octave and divides it into 12 distinct pitches, each being the same frequency distance from each other, on a logarithmic scale. I won’t get into the hows and whys of this, but this 12 note chromatic scale
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We describe the distance between one note on the chromatic scale and its nearest neighbor as a “half step”, and two half steps can be described as a “whole step”.
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Our major scales are built out of repeating sequences of seven notes, defined by the distances between each note. That sequence of distances is “whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step” - often written as W-W-H-W-W-W-H (the final half step gets you to the first note of the next sequence).
Let’s take F major as an example. What is F major? It’s the seven note sequence of intervals that sound the major scale, using F as the initial pitch. If I do so, I get: F, G, A, Bb, C, D, E … and then the final half step brings me to the next F, where I could repeat the pattern and sound the F major scale up an octave. -
There is a difference between a key (what are the notes in the scale), and a key signature. What is a key signature? It’s the collection of either sharps or flats required to build that scale given a particular starting pitch. The key of F major has one flat in its key signature, Bb. What if we wanted to play a major scale starting on E? Following the W-W-H-W-W-W-H pattern above, we would have: E, F#, G#, A, B, C#, D#, (E). So the key of E has 4 sharps in it, F#, C#, G#, and D#. We generally put the key signature at the beginning of a piece, which communicates right off the bat probable information about the harmonic center of the piece, melody notes that will be used, and likely chords. Do you need to write the key signature at the top of a piece? No, but it will be much more useful than writing out each sharp or flat every time it is required.
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Ok, now let’s briefly consider harmony. What is harmony? Two or more pitches sounding together. Most often, harmonies that sound “good” or “correct” are harmonies that are built off of the notes in a scale. Or, when the harmonies are built off of non-scale tones, they’re done in expected ways, and ways that tend to resolve quickly back to scale tones. Chords? They are explicitly named collections of pitches (generally three or more).
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Chords are so grounded in their keys that our harmonic analysis comes from identifying the chords in relation to their position in the scale sequence. So, a C major chord is a “one” (I) chord in the key of C- the chord built on the first note of the scale. But C major can also be built in the context of the F scale, where it serves the role of a “five” (V) chord, C being the fifth note of the F scale.
So, what is the purpose of the key? It’s simply a description of the scale being used, and of the likely harmonies being derived. It’s notational short hand and a communication tool that makes it easier to express what should be played.
You can learn music in many ways. One does not need to know the key in order to learn a melody or harmonic sequence. However, the key will make itself apparent as you play a piece- its harmonic relationships exist in the context of a particular scale/key. You might not “know” the key, but if you are playing Mary Had a Little Lamb in the key of C, you probably are going to know intuitively that an F# chord will not sound good against that melody.
The reason there’s spirited debate around the key of Sweet Home Alabama and Wichita Lineman is that some of the usual short-hands and guideposts we use to describe the keys of a song are missing from those songs. But that doesn’t really matter so much- as I hope is apparent from my long-winded post, the key of a song is a description of a collection of details, not all of which are required.
Wichita Lineman never resolves to the tonic after the opening intro. So what? The chords, chord sequences, and melody all utilize a major key sound with a tonic of F. Let’s say the song did resolve to an F major chord at the end. Could I identify the key before getting to that last resolution? Absolutely. If I was improvising over the song, would I use notes like G#, D#, or F#? Nope. Because I already hear the key, even if no one tells me, and even if I’m not reading sheet music.
Sweet Home Alabama? That’s a fun one because the song is just three chords long, and there are two very common, pleasant-sounding chord relationships using those three chords, using a different note as the tonic. You can hear that song as either:
- V-IV-I in the key of G
- I-bVII-IV in a ‘modified’ D scale (D mixolydian, which is basically a major scale with a flatted seventh note)
Depending on how you hear the key you might make different choices on a solo, but because there is so much overlap between this collection of chords and the G major and D mixolydian scale, one will successfully play the song regardless of what key they perceive it to be in. You’ll just “feel” it differently.
Sweet Home Alabama issue simplified:
- There are two ways you can describe the relationship between D and G. You could say that D is a fifth above G. You could also say that G is a forth above D. Both of these relationships are very strong, and the movement from D to G could be a V going to a I or a I going to a IV depending on other pieces of musical context. Because the chord progression never changes, we don’t really get any additional harmonic information on which to base our analysis.
- In rock music, modified major scales are incredibly common- one of the most common is one that lowers the 7th note of the scale. It so happens that the version of the D major scale that lowers the 7th note uses the exact same notes as a G major scale.
- So, we have two scales with identical pitches, and chords relationships that are almost equally strong. Enter in-depth analysis and pedantry!
It really depends on what kind of playing and what kind of communicating you want to do.
In some ways you’re right… if you are just playing the notes on the page (or the notes you learned by ear) and that’s all you need to do, then knowing the key doesn’t matter. But even in that most simple of uses for the key, a key name serves as short hand for the collection of sharps or flats and the “root” note of the scale. If someone said to me “ok, we’re going to play this song, and every B, E, A, D, and G are flat”, I’d ask “ok, why didn’t you just say ‘the song is in D flat’?”. It’s much more concise and leaves less room for error to name each specific collection of sharps or flats, and doing so based on the key they describe makes a lot of sense. And, it will help me understand and anticipate chord changes and melodic choices without having to read/think about them.
You are likely already understanding the key of most songs. Knowing where the melody gravitates toward, where things seem the most settled/resolved, where “do” is, is something that you are probably experiencing most times you play a song. Naming the key D (or whatever) just helps you both communicate outward about the piece to other musicians as well as collapsing a lot of probabilities about what might appear in the piece which should make it easier to learn and to play.
Thank you, that’s very much appreciated!