Guitar Noise

Jealous Guy

Okay, we’ve done a relatively new song, so we should do an older one to balance it out. John Lennon’s Jealous Guy is one of my brother’s favorite songs, so I decided to learn it as a surprise for him. It’s also done in a verse/chorus format and the tape I made turned out to be in the key of G.

Verses:

If you’ve been practicing listening to your majors and their relative minors, you’ll recognize the first chord transition very easily. G to E minor. The bass then goes down one full step for the next chord. It must be D. The next chord change doesn’t occur until the end of the second line. Listening to the bass, I figure it to be E minor again. The next chord is definitely a major chord and it sounds, to me, like a seventh. Since the bass ascends a fourth, it must be A or A7 (I checked it out later in a book and found it to be Em add 6 which is, essentially, very much the same thing as A7). This then resolves nicely to D before rising one step to E minor again and then down to C.

Chorus:

Here again, my practice in listening to progressions is paying off. The first line is the classic I - VII - IV which in the key of G translates into G, F and C. The second line starts out the same way, but the third chord is decidedly different. It sounds like a major chord even though it throws a cog into things like a minor chord might. Playing the melody at this point (”… made you cry…”), I find the notes are D, E and F. Hanging on to the F, I think of the major chords of which F is a part. F major (where F is the root) I’ve already ruled out. F is the fifth in a Bb major chord, so I give that a try and it works like a charm.

The final line has a descending bass line, which I know as another classic progression (which we’ll learn soon), from G to C and then we end on G once more.

So here is what we’ve been able to figure out:

Walking On A Wire

This Richard Thompson song, from the album Shoot Out The Lights, might not be familiar to many of you. I’m bringing it up simply because of the hell I went through figuring out the middle eight or bridge of the song and the sheer ecstasy it causes me when I play it. It’s a great example of how a songwriter can expand and exploit the boundaries of a key and still sound true to formula. No guitarist who wants to learn about the art of writing could hope for a better teacher. And if you ever get the chance to hear it and can follow along with these notes, I think you’ll be able to put away all your fears of learning how to decipher songs on you own.