I wanted to play this song for my wife. Our anniversary is coming up in a couple weeks.
I don’t understand this guy’s fingering. The fret positions match up with the chords he posted to the video. But they aren’t standard E barre shape or A barre shapes. The only barre cords I know are based on the E shapes or A shapes.
heres two examples. If these chord fingerings are explained that should be enough for me to learn the song. He repeats the same chords throughout.
Whatever fingering he’s doing seems to match the piano. I’m comfortable doing a standard A or E shape barre, Am, Em shape barre. But I need to finger it to match the piano.
pause at the times I listed. I got errands to run. I’ll check back later today.
at 1:20 11th fret E flat minor using an Em barre (looks right to me) yay!!
1:22 6th fret B flat minor using E barre (???)
1:23 7th fret B major using E barre shape (???)
1:26 14th fret F# major using E barre shape (???)
at 1:57 9th fret - F# using an A barre chord shape (???)
9th fret C# using E barre shape (???)
2:01 12th (the octave) E using E barre shape (???)
11th fret E flat using E barre chord (???)
I played violin in school for 7 years. That was thirty years ago, but as I recall a sharp key signature means you play sharps. Flat key signatures indicate the number of flats. I don’t think you mix up the two.
if someone says they are doing a F# on the 9th fret. Wouldn’t you expect his third finger to barre the 2nd, 3rd,4th strings on the 11th fret? If I’m doing it right the 1st string sounds clearly from my 1st finger barre on the 9th fret. Otherwise its muted. depends on how tired my hand is and how quickly I’m changing chords.
They look like regular barre chords to me, just leaving off the top E and A strings, like reggae chords (instead of your whole index finger barring, you just flop it over the bottom strings you need to fret and don’t play the top two strings). I think the problem is that he’s flashing up five or so chords in a row on his captions and leaves it up to you to follow along.
Seems to me he’s indicating F on some captions but playing C, as well (but I believe they’re relative to each other (I’m not exactly up on my theory)). Idunno, hard to follow along that video for me.
Judging by the minute I watched they are all straight forward E major and minor shapes just playing the D-G-B-E strings. You shouldn’t really mix sharps and flats but there’s a couple of funny changes in there. I’ll get back to ya,
Because he’s a guitar player? Key signatures and the like are for proper musicians. Guitar players are sometimes a bit more… *pragmatic *about that stuff.
On the sharps and flats subject, lots of guitar players don’t spend much time looking at musical notation or sheet music. There is a tendency to refer to Bb and Eb chords even in a context where A# or D# would be technically correct, because most guitar players learn those chords in songs that are in F or Bb, not A# or whatever.
Agree completely, rock/blues theory is descriptive, not prescriptive (plays double-neck guitar with violin bow over a theramin solo while pounding piano keys with foot heel). If you try rationalizing David Bowie chord structure and progression, for example, you’ll only be hurting yourself.
I appreciate the help with this. I’m going to try playing along with the song and see if I can get the chords to match up. Transcribing by ear isn’t my strong suit. Especially piano chords. I ran into that problem at church trying to learn hymns to play.
The sharps/flat thing doesn’t bug me. I tend to think in terms of sharps. Takes an extra few seconds for me to work out that B flat minor is A# minor.
Chordify has At This Moment in their library. Yet another resource to get the chords. They look similar to what the youtube player posted.
This is one of those piano songs that needs to be transcribed into an appropriate guitar key. Piano chords on a guitar get tricky. Sometimes you never quite get quite the same sound.
I would not use this guy’s rendition as anything to emulate. He’s using only two voicings (E major and E minor “shapes”) and moving them on the neck to get the different chords. As a result, it jumps all over – the opposite of nice legato fingerings – and uses soupy effects to muddle up the lack of art.
I’ve always liked this tune. Maybe I’ll get a bit of time this weekend to work out a nice clean and simple (ideally, elegant, but I won’t promise) arrangement.
While I can read music (from my school days playing alto sax and oboe) and know a certain amount of music theory, I’ve never really applied to much of it to playing guitar…certainly not reading off a staff or anything like that.
So regardless of a song’s key, you can be sure that my chords going up the neck will always be:
F#
Ab
Bb
C#
Eb
It would seem very weird to me to refer to these chords by their “alternate” names in any context.
I’m all for sanity. Theres no need to make music hard. Any guitar key works. I really appreciate any help you can provid Learjeff. My wife loves this song and I’d enjoy playing it on our anniversary. Music brought us together back in college.
Yeah, and as a keyboardist who sometimes plays guitar and other instruments, that naming feels a bit schizophrenic to me. I know, pain in the ass keyboardists. I would write it either in terms of F# or Gb. But I haven’t read/listened through the song. It’s not wrong to have flatted chords in a key signature with sharps. It depends on context. So these chords might be right, but, just looking at them with no context, I’d be guessing I’d call them Gb, Ab, Bb, Db, Eb or F#, G#, A#, C#, D#. But I’m not unused to playing in either Gb or F# (blame it on Chopin.)
And I’m not trying to be a stickler. If I’m playing in Db and somebody calls out a Db chord and then announces a chance to F# instead of Gb, that causes me a mental hiccup, because F# is not a chord you expect in Db, while Gb is (even though they are enharmonic.)
A friend told me a couple years ago that the new electric pianos have a key change switch? It lets the pianist play chords in a key thats easy for them. But what comes out is in a key thats guitar friendly. I haven’t seen that feature on our Church’s piano. Probably too old. That key switch sounds like a really good idea.
They exist, but they aren’t usually too easy to use live. I actually marveled at the fact that people would wait for a guitarist to move his capo.
But pulykamell’s problem isn’t transposing. It’s how we keyboardists think of our keys. When we play a song, we know what key it is in and know the notes of that key. If we are playing in Db, the notes in our head are Db, Eb, F, Gb, Ab, Bb, Cb, Db. So when we hear F#, it sounds like some chord that’s not in the key. We have to think about how we are going to get from whatever chord we are currently playing to the new chord one.
I think it might have to do with the fact that we are usually picking on the fly which voicing to do for each chord. Chords aren’t just some memorized shape. But I don’t know, since I don’t play guitar. I do know I find it hard to play if I can’t determine what key I’m in.
Yes, almost all electronic keyboards these days have a “transpose” function and a good bit of older electric/electronic keyboards do as well. It makes life handy when you’re not a terribly good on-the-fly transposer (like me). But it’s best to learn to play fluently in all twelve keys and practice all your progressions in them rather than rely on the transpose button. I feel like it’s a cheat, and I feel a bit dirty using it. Plus it screws you up when you come to a non-transposing instrument (like an acoustic piano) and need to quickly, say, transpose from E major to Db major because the song is just a little out of range for the singer. (I could do this relatively well if I have the song memorized as a numerical chord progression [like ii7-V7-I instead of F#m7-B7-E] and don’t have to play the exact notes on the page, but anything more complex than that, forget it. That’s a big reason why these days I try not to think in terms of absolute chords, but relative chords and a key.)
depends on how tired my hand is and how quickly I’m changing chords.
Theres no need to make music hard. Any guitar key works. I really appreciate any help you can provid Learjeff. My wife loves this song and I’d enjoy playing it on our anniversary. Music brought us together back in college.