Wise men say only fools rush in But I can't help falling in love with you Check me out! I learned this song. I can't help falling in love with you.
Totally learned it, totally playing it to you, making you have all the feels and everything. But I have this problem, and it's that soon, a really good friend of mine, he's an Elvis impersonator, he's coming over, and he wants to sing this song, and he can't sing it in B-flat, he says he's got to sing it in Elvis'key. So I've got to put it in D for him, and that's a problem. How am I going to do it? I don't know about that.
I mean, it's kind of hard, right? No, you guys, that's not going to happen. I don't know any Elvis impersonators.
If you're out there, call me. I really don't though, but it happens sometimes. You're somewhere and an Elvis, I'm just kidding, not an Elvis impersonator, but somebody might come up to you and say, hey, do you know whatever song?
And you say, yeah, I know that song. And they'll be like, can you play it in A flat? You might say, I don't know about that.
That's a problem. We've got to take your musicianship to the next level. We've got to just bump you up a little bit.
That's what I'm here to do today. Once you've learned a song and you feel like you've got it and you can play it and you can sing it on your guitar or on your piano, you've got to do a little bit more work than that to increase your musicianship. The thing that you've got to do is to learn to analyze that piece of music that you have learned. Now, I'm mostly just talking about popular music today. I'm talking about pop and rock music, and I've chosen this song because it not only has a one chord and a four chord and a five chord, which almost every piece of popular music has, but it's got a few more interesting chords as well, so we can dive in just a little bit deeper in, you know, musical content with this song.
There's one thing you have to be able to do to keep up with me today, and that is to know your major scales. I say it all the time. It's one of the most important things you can do to be a true musician is to know all of your major scales. Minor ones help too, but major is darn important. So if you're just out there watching, you know, and you don't know if you know your major scales well enough, I'll tell you, Hey Susie, play me an F sharp major.
Not Siri. Sorry, I missed that. I didn't say Siri. Play me an F sharp major scale.
And you have to be able to just play it. And if you're out there, Dougie, and I say, play me A major, you've got to bust it out without even thinking. You've got to be able to play your major scales. All right. So, so that, you know, because I'm going to say things today, like, all right, in the key of B major, what's the four chord.
And you're going to have to think in your head, B major. Okay. I know the fourth degree of the scale is an E, so it must be an E chord, right?
You've got to keep up like that. So major scale is super important. I'm gonna use my brand new manuscript paper that I'm kind of plugging, the Amy Nolte Music edition of the Musician's Notebook. I'll show you why I like it so much while we're doing everything for the lesson today. This notebook, real quick, it's got my jazz bible for everybody right here.
It's got perforated edges. The front part of the book is staff paper only, but the last part of the book is lined paper and staff paper facing sides. The first thing I'm going to do...
is to pretend like I only know this song in the key of B-flat major. That's the key I played it for you in originally, right? So, well, I'm telling you right now, I could play it in any key, but you're going to be able to do that right after this too.
I hope so anyway. So the first thing to do is to take, you know, your key that you're in. If it's B-flat major, what we're going to do is we're going to write out the notes of the B-flat scale. This is it.
a way that makes it just a little bit easier. It's not that I do this every time, you know, but it helps. So we need to write triads for every degree of the scale so that we know what the diatonic chords are.
We have to keep in mind that there's a Bb and an Eb in this scale and that's all. So the triad that we can build on a Bb is Bb major, all right? So I'm just going to write Bb major.
For C, it's a C minor, all right? That's because to build a triad using these degrees, we just play one, skip one, play one. So we go C, skip one, play one, skip one, play one, and it's C, E flat, and G, and that is C minor. We're going to do the same for D. D, F, and A, that's D minor.
E flat, G, and B flat, that's E flat major. F, A, and C makes F major. G, B flat, skip the C, D is G minor. A, skip the B flat, C, and E flat is actually A diminished. That's the first step.
The next step is for me to play the song and write out what it is that I'm playing. Alright? Now this, this part of it, we're just going to assume that that you know the chords to the song. So I do know the chords to the song, right? So I'm gonna tell you that the first chord is B-flat major.
Y's and that's for the first two beats, right? We're in 4-4. So what we do is we call that the major I.
It's just a capital Roman numeral I for two beats, all right? So we write it at the first part of the measure. The next chord is D minor. That's over here, right? We've got D minor.
It's the third degree, and it's a minor chord. So all we have to do is write a Roman numeral III in lowercase. We use lowercase for minor.
We use uppercase for major, all right? The next chord is G minor. Say we count one, two, three, four, five, six.
You shouldn't have to count if you know your major scale, right? But that's G minor, so it's the sixth degree, and since it's minor, we're going to write it in lowercase, all right? And that lasts for the whole bar.
Only fools. Now we've got an E flat major chord. That is four. And that's just for the first part, then we go back to one.
Rush, now we have this F major chord. In, F is the five. Two, three, four.
But I, E flat, that's the four. F is the five. G minor is coming up, that's the minor six. Help, and then we're gonna go back to the four.
Falling in love back to the one with you, right? Now, say I wasn't so well versed in these chords and I didn't know what they were. You know, even if you're going to, I don't know what a website is like, you know, chordsonthefly.com or look up chords or tabs or whatever, you know, you could look up these chords and then if you just, you know, if you've drawn out. your diatonic triads like this, it's pretty easy to just go through and put Roman numerals on everything.
Now this repeats. So that's cool, right? It just repeats. Uh, shall I stay?
Would it be a sin if I can't help falling in love with you? Then we've got the bridge coming up, right? Usually what we do is we will call that B and we'll call this a, now the bridge goes to this chord D minor. Like...
and we've already determined that is the minor three, right? But it only lasts for the first part of the bar. Like a river flows...
And we've got an A minor chord here. So the A minor chord, you know, it starts on the seventh degree, and even though it's not diminished in nature here, it's just minor, we can just, we'll still call it just a minor seven chord like that. Alright, and I know it doesn't really function in the 7 kind of way, but that's, it'll make it easier, we'll just call it that for sure. And so we got D minor, like a river flows, A minor, and then it does the same thing again, so we can just do like this, surely, surely to the sea, darling so it goes, does it again, then we got back to the D minor, some things, and then we have a G chord. G7 chord, this is something we haven't talked about yet because, you know, this is not in the key.
We've got a, that's a B, just a regular B, not even a B flat. So what we have to do, if we have some kind of a chord that is totally out of the key, we have to think about, well, what's the function of it? Where is it going to take us?
Where is this G7 chord going to take us? Some things, here it comes, G7, are meant to be. The place it takes us is to C minor, which is the 2. Alright, so what we have to do for a second, just for a second, is to think like we're in the key of C minor.
And we have to think about what is G major? to C minor. The answer is that it's the five, right?
It's the five of the two. So the way that we write that is like this, all right? G is the five of C minor. Go back, we've got something, it's G7. I didn't write the seven, we can do that.
R-Met-2-B, C minor, relax the whole bar. Five, right? F. Do do do do do, four.
Do do do do do, do do do do do, do do do do. Oh, what did I do? You guys, what did I do?
This should not be right there. Alright, we'll pretend I didn't do that. It's actually like a five bar bridge. It's kind of crazy. But, you know, we're also doing this song in 4-4, and we're actually probably supposed to feel it in 12-8.
I don't know. There are things that could be discussed here. I'm just going to hop right down and write the last... Actually...
Do we even need to write the last section? I don't think we do because I think it does the same thing. Take my hand.
Take my whole life too, for I can't. We don't really need to. It's going to do the A section again, you know, just one time this time.
But for our purposes, this is about all we need. Okay, so now that we've got this, we can kind of just see what's going on. And it's nice.
We can see that we've got this cool little departure. I think it brings a lot of emotion, don't you? Right off the bat.
And we have a lot of normal stuff here. Just four and one and five, four and five, minor six, four. Like this is really the kind of only interesting thing.
And this too. But it's interesting and it's nice, right? So now what we have to do is think about another key. And let's go ahead and think about the Elvis key, which is D, all right?
So let's go ahead and write everything in D, all right? Here's our D major scale. Again, I don't know if I said it before, but we've got lined paper here, staff paper here. Oh my gosh, it makes everything so nice.
I can make lists over here. I can just, you know, write without having to be all weird and write in between staff lines. I just write on normal lined paper.
So nice. All right, so there's our D major scale, right? So all we have to do is just, I mean, these are going to tell us what's major and what's minor.
So we don't really have to write that out again. But if we've got these notes here in our head, I mean, I guess what we could do is just, we could just go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 to make it easier. And then when we see the 1, we're going to play D major. When we see the minor 3, we're going to play F sharp minor, right?
When we see minor 6, we're going to go to the 6, we're going to play B minor. And if you know your scales and you know your chords, it's not that tough. right B minor now what's the four chord in D there it is G major back to one that's the five chord it's a a major right now we go to the four chord again it's G and then a duh what's this one minor right B minor four back to g da da da one five one and then here we're gonna go to the three minor right we already did it once but if you don't remember we find the three you guys understand yeah well let's say the seven right we go to the seven and play a minor chord c sharp minor c sharp e g sharp let's let's see if it works it will always work that's the cool thing so we've got f sharp minor Like the river flows, surely to the sea. F sharp minor to C sharp minor, back and forth. When we get here, we have F sharp minor again.
Darling, so we go some things. Now, we need to find what the V chord or the V7 chord of the II is. So what's this minor II, right?
It's E minor. You can just count up V from E. One, two, three, four, five.
There it is. It's B. So we're going to go B7, right? We'll see how it fits.
some things some things there we go are meant to be and it leads us right to the e minor which is the two chord and i should be able to tell you any key at all and you should be able to do this for it and it's the magic of roman numeral analysis that's what it is as soon as you take a song the chords to a song and you put it in this kind of language You can do so much more than you could do just with, you know, D major, F sharp minor, B minor. If you've got these numbers and you're kind of quick at it, you can just think in any key, and it's such a nice thing to be able to do. Nashville musicians kind of live and die by this.
Now, they don't exactly use Roman numerals like this. They've got their own number system. You can find plenty of videos on YouTube about the Nashville number system. It's fascinating.
But all of those studio musicians that play all the country music, all you have to do is write out something like this, you know, with numbers. and tell them what key and they're on it and they'll just play it. It's automatic. BAM!
I hope you can get automatic at this and that you can take the songs that you're already very comfortable playing, do a little analysis, and start playing them in different keys. Like I said, it'll help you level up. Thanks for watching everybody.
Don't forget, pick up one of these manuscript paper books. I really really do like it. themusiciansnotebook.com or you can get it at my website amynolte.com. Darn sexy logo too, right? Thanks for watching everybody.
I'll see you next time on Amy Nolte Music.