Chapter 4: Out of Order, Out of Tune

I’m getting lost! In the chord wilderness…

Greetings, my fellow companions! Get ready for one of the first (and definitely NOT the last) troubles I’ve encountered. This week, I actually started analyzing the songs.

And…I went through a grand total of TWO songs!!!! I know, it’s a lot!

I. The Learning

Click. Click. “How to identify chord progressions from a song,” I typed on the YouTube search bar. Enter.

I clicked on a video by Karen Ramirez from 2008, in which she discussed the circle of fifths (I’ve actually covered this in my past blogs), so it wasn’t much help. Pass.

Next, I clicked on a YouTube Shorts video. The guy was talking about the circle of fifths again. Pass. Another one just shared the most common pop chord progressions with some extra ear training exercises. Sooooo…pass again.

I went through this process for, let’s say, a long while. Most of the videos were interesting, but… they didn’t really teach me “how to identify chord progressions from a song,” as I’ve searched. Finally, I came across “#40: How To Determine Chord Progressions In Songs” by Piano Tutorials with Chris Ebute.

I’ve summarized his suggestions into 3 main steps: 1) Determine the key; 2) Know the melody; and 3) Play a chord that contains the melody!

Easy enough right…? That’s what I thought too, and so, I confidently began my very first analysis!

II. The Analysis

Since this week is basically a trial run (practice) for the actual data collection in the upcoming weeks, I just chose random songs that I knew.

First up, Taylor Swift’s Long Live.

When I revisited the song, I recognized the first few notes to be G, A, C, and B. With the G being the tonic of G Major and all these notes belonging to a G Major scale, I guessed and soon confirmed that the key is G Major. Then, I wrote solfege syllables* (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti) for the song, resulting in the following masterpiece:

* For those who are not familiar with solfege, do (labeled with 1) would be G in the key of G Major!

Tada!

Next, I utilized the solfege to determine the chords. For instance, for the first few lyrics, I see primarily dos (1) and mis (3), so I guessed the I chord (G chord); I, then, see a la (6), which is the root of a vi (em chord). Now, this was the beginning of my mistakes, which I’ll talk about later… Anyway, I repeated this process for the entire verse, thus deciding on an I-vi-IV-V chord progression. Onwards to the chorus, I did the same thing—trying out chords that included the melody—and ended up with a rather boring I-IV-I-V chord progression. The process felt even simpler and smoother than I’d imagined. And I was pretty confident.

SCRATCH THAT!!!

When I consulted my advisor, she informed me that the chord progression for the verse is actually I-IV-vi-IV-I, while the chord progression for the chorus is instead I-IV-vi-IV/V. She also analyzed the bridge, which turned out to be vi-VI-vi-IV-I.

My ideas were all off! Well, except for the fact that I also started with the I chord. How exciting. The V chord, which I thought was a regular guest of Long Live, only appears 4 times—once at the end of each chorus (which repeats 3 times) and once at the tag.

Where did I go wrong? Well, my error lied in my method: if I chose chords that contained the melody, then I would have endless options (so how do I decide which to choose?). I’ve considered this problem before, but I thought all would be well if I just tried the chords and picked the best-sounding one. But actually, no.

My advisor suggested I try figuring out the baseline first since it provides the root of the chord. When I asked her how she does that, her response was, “It’ll come with practice.” Well, that’s exactly what I’m going to be doing for the next few weeks!

Having gained inspiration from this, I decided to try again. This time with Justin Bieber’s Ghost and this time finding the baseline first!!! About the process…it’s hard to describe. It was quite literally just listening very very very carefully to the background music (which, in this song, gives some helpful hints on the progression of the baseline) and…trial and error!

I found Bm-D-A for the verse and Bm-D-G-A for the chorus. The web indicated Bm-G-D-A for the verse and Bm-G-D-A for the chorus. Hmmm…missed the G chord for the verse and swapped the G and D chords for the chorus, but overall, not bad!

Well, that’s it for this week! I’m hoping next week will go a bit more smoothly, but who knows? See you in the next one.

Sources:

Piano Tutorials with Chris Ebute. “#40: How to Determine Chord Progressions in Songs.” YouTube, 30 Oct. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXzbJxMCSTw.

‌“Ghost – Justin Bieber Piano Chords & Lyrics – Bitesize Piano.” Bitesizepiano.co.uk, 14 Oct. 2021, www.bitesizepiano.co.uk/ghost-justin-bieber-piano-chords-lyrics/.