I have a terrible confession to make - I have yet to learn a whole song. Back in the days when I started learning to play guitar, my first teacher (Colette somethingortheother) taught me the chords to lots of songs including "Stand By Me", "Hotel California", etc. But I never learned the theory behind those chords, chord progressions or anything like that.

So that's about the closest I came to learning any song -> playing the chords from a chord-sheet. Hardly exciting.

Meir (my 2nd guitar teacher whom I practically worship and owe my new-found love of the guitar to) has taught me the chord formulas, how to learn a song by ear, scale formulas and how to figure basically ANYTHING out using the major scale.

However, with all that behind me, when I pick up a guitar, I tend to 1) waffle using just 1 scale over a whole song and 2) never play a full song. Which limits, quite severely, what I can do on the guitar.

In my latest lesson with Meir (over 1-2 months ago), he encouraged me to learn the chords to a song so I could figure out a melody + solo based on that so that it "fits" better.

Yesterday I decided to apply some of the things Meir has taught me to learning one of the "songs" on my Korg. I know it's in D-major (through experimentation) so I've had PLENTY fun improvising over it but I don't really know the chord progression or anything else like that and I could feel that I was going nowhere slowly, so here's what I did.

How to Figure out a Song

1. Figure out the bass notes of each chord. The easiest way to do this is to play the song and then try and match what you're hearing with notes on your low E string. (Something Meir taught me). I've struggled with this technique quite a bit - until yesterday. If you turn the TONE knob of your guitar WAY down, your guitar will sound similar to a bass guitar. (Another trick I learned from Meir). Applying this to figuring out what bass notes are being played in a song makes it MUCH easier for the untrained ear as the sound you get on your guitar will more closely match what you hear in your headphones.

The Korg also helps with this as it has some presets that can be used with a bass guitar. I just turn my tone knob down and use these on my guitar. LOTS of fun and effective.

This was the most important part of the whole process. This little "trick", I believe, has catapulted me forward very quickly and I can see myself using it to learn a LOT of new songs in the future but, for now, I just want to complete this current song ?

Of course, it helps that the Korg just plays bass and percussion so you don't have any rhythm, vocals or lead guitar to confuse you. Still, it should be easier now - so give that a shot and see how far you can get.

2. Now that I know the bass notes to the intro and opening verse - I figured it might be fun to figure out what actual chord progression was being used. All I did here was try and play a major chord version of each note. So for D, I played D major. It sounded good. For G, I played G major. It sounded good. For B, I played B major. It sounded kak. I then tried B minor. It sounded good. I nearly fell off my chair. For A, I played A major. It sounded good. Now I knew the intro chords. Let me remind you, at this point, that I've never successfully worked out the bass to a song, the chords to a song or the key of a song without basically figuring out the first/last note and then trying major and minor scales over it.

Basically, I used to be into quick fixes but now I knew a more precise, guaranteed way of learning a song.

Now, with the D, G, A and Bm (and later on, the Gb), I *know*, based on the major scale, that this song is in D major. I *know* it. No guess work. WOW - awesome feeling ?

3. The third part, and the part I looked forward to the most, was playing a different scale over each chord. I just basically alternated between Major and Minor scales for the Major and Minor chords, making sure that I used common notes in each to join them. The result? A melody that worked quite well over the chords - without any guess work. That's probably my biggest surprise -> I did this ALL without guessing my way through it. THAT's an amazing feeling. And it has inspired me to do a LOT more with this.

Now I want to mess around with slightly different chords. Add in a maj7 where there used to be a maj, and so on. Just to give it a bit more flavour. I also can record my own rhythm guitar over the progression which means I can give it a very different feel than what it has now (which is rather boring).

I also want to apply some modal theory to this. Maybe try B Dorian over the Bmin chord and A Mixolydian over the A major chord. Once I get comfortable with that, I may move on to less-pop-sounding scales and do Phrygian over Bmin and Lydian over A major. It'll probably sound messy in the beginning but, eventually, I know this will lead me to my ultimate goal: writing and playing my own AWESOME music ?

I'm so excited! Hope this helps some other poor, struggling soul out there who has hit a brick wall! Don't give up dude, we've all been there and it IS surmountable!