Solving The Puzzle
This is the third and final part in our series of articles on figuring out songs by ear. Let’s put all the pieces together and and take out the guesswork.
Walking On A Wire is in the key of G (and no, I did not plan it this way…) and is structured in a verse, verse, middle eight, verse format. The verses of the song are fairly simple to figure out, but I’d like to point out a nifty technique employed in the introduction. After about a measure and three quarters of strumming the opening G chord, Mr. Thompson quickly goes to a D7 immediately followed by a D7sus add 9. It’s a lot simpler than it sounds. After striking the D7 on the downstroke, you simply pull off your middle and ring fingers, going from:
You hit the second chord on the upstroke (try to make both the down and upstroke with one motion), letting the resulting chord ring. That sounds really nice, doesn’t it? Believe me, many of the little flourishes guitarists use are fairly simple, it’s just a matter of learning them.
Anyway, here’s how the verses look:
And now for the BRIDGE (and I’m going to write it all out so that you can follow along with what I show you):
The first line starts out with a D, which is simple enough and then shifts to the fifth of D, which is A. So far there’s nothing too out of the ordinary. But then the bass line moves up from A to C# (and it’s real easy to pick out – Thompson’s guitar doubles the bass line throughout the bridge). The C# is a minor chord, and again this chord dips down to its fifth, which in this case is G#. You can then hear the guitar and bass move up a third again, but this time it is a minor third, so you end up on B minor. This then moves up a whole step to a C# major which is used as launching point to F#m (C# being the fifth of F#).
The fourth and fifth lines mirror the first two lines but then in the sixth line, Thompson goes back to C#m in order to start his descent back to the key of G. We follow the bass down from C#m to B to A and then he goes to two minor fifths (Em and Bm) before firmly establishing the D, Am, D which in turn will lead back to the G which starts the third verse.
Okay, I know that we’ve covered a lot of ground here and there’s a lot to digest. The main points I want to stress are:
- With practice, you can do this. Believe it or not, hearing some chord changes will become second nature over time.
- This takes time. You are not going to just sit down and say, “G, D7, etc.” Be prepared to spend time and energy.
- It’s much more of a puzzle than a mystery. Armed with what you already know, you can take a lot of the guesswork out of learning a song by ear. Always try to replace sheer guesses with educated guesses.
- There will always be something that you may NEVER figure out.
Well, that about wraps up this series of columns. As always, I hope it’s been fun as well as informative. Please feel free to book mark this page for easy reference or to email me (dhodgeguitar@aol.com) with questions, comments and ideas of what you’d like to see covered here at Guitar Noise.
