Finding chords

[Silly Moustache]

There is an old Irish joke - a traveller sees a farmer by a gate and asks him - "which is the best wat to Dublin?"
The farmer sucks on his pipe and says. "Well, If I was going to Dublin, I wouldn't' start from here".

My point is that you are struggling to understand chord progressions and melody lines from a points somewhere in the middle without, seemingly, knowing where you started or your destination.

I understand this - because that's how I started.

In fairness to you and all who have tried to help here, I think that yur best way forward is to sit down face to face with someone who can teach you, not only the guitar but the basis of music.
I'm not talking about classicla theory, learning notation or all that stuff - necessarily - just about scales, about major, minor and 7th chord constructions, commonly used chord progressions and (what was a revelation to me) "harmonising the scale".

Find a local guitar teacher.

[mr. beaumont]

I'd like to help, I do need more information, as your question is not clear.

It sounds a bit as if you're talking about transposing? That is, changing the key of the tune entirely...so the chords all change, the melody notes change, but the pattern of the melody, the rise and falls, the timing, stay the same?

So you're finding the new note you'd want to start on, or have as part of the melody, but you can't figure out where the chords have moved to?

Am I in the ballpark here?

[Chriske]

Thanks, but these two tools I've downloaded(and posted higher up) do solve my problems.

[SunnyDee]

Sounds like you solved your own problem. I think it's great that you are asking the questions. I taught myself guitar and music theory just in the last couple of years, so I know there are lots of questions to ask! And sometimes people who understand this stuff already don't realize how mysterious it is to those that don't, so as an educator and a latecomer to music theory, I can't resist at least trying to answer simply, as maybe it will help someone else, so at the risk of being too simple...

It does sound like you are talking about "transposing" the song to a different "key."

But it's not clear if you (or some other beginner reading this later) realize that, if you can't sing something the way it's written, so you want to change one of the notes or chords, what you actually want to do, most of the time, is change all the notes or chords, otherwise you'd be singing/playing off key. There are times people just change the melody, but they would usually choose a more sing-able note that's still in the chord and just play the same chord.

So, if you see a D, but it's too low to sing, and you want to sing a D#, up a half step, then, most of the time, you want to change ALL the notes up a half step. Which is the same as transposing the key, and the same thing the capo does, if you put it up just one fret.

You don't have to use a capo, of course, you can just play the chords that are in the different key, but then you change all the shapes and sometimes the voicing of the song, which is also fine if that's what you want, but a little harder for a beginner.

You describe sometimes the song sounding way off. It made me think of my own experience with this and maybe this will make it clearer. For example, there's a song written in Am. I can sing the song pretty well, but it sounds awful if I try to play Am while singing it. I capo up and down for a while trying to find the key I'm singing, but it's hard for me to do that by ear and it still sounds... not good. So I check using Melodyne to see what key I'm singing in and it's Fm. No reasonable amount of capoing is going to take an Am shape to an Fm sound in standard tuning.

I can do a few things. I can play the shapes for the key of Em and capo up to Fm. Or, if I want to keep the same shapes as the Am, I can play my baritone guitar for which the Am shape sounds an Em, and capo up to Fm (this is why I bought the baritone - it's easier for me to sing with). Or, I can simply play the shapes associated with Fm in standard tuning. But no matter how I do it, I'm changing the sound of all the chords in the song from the ones in the key of Am: Am Bdim Cmaj Dmaj Em Fm Gmaj to the ones in the key of Fm: Fm Gdim Abmaj Bbmaj Cm Dbm Ebmaj. This is useful for seeing which chords and notes go together: http://scottdavies.net/chords_and_scales/music.html

It's also not clear that you realize that these chords come in predictable sets, most of the time. (I keep saying most of the time only because there are many varieties of music that don't follow the "rules" of most rock/pop/folk/etc of the western world).

Understanding those predictable sets comes from understanding the fundamentals of music theory. Some basic theory will also help you understand the chord embellishments and variations you see like Dmaj7 and D6 and such. I took an online course in it to figure it out, but there are lots of ways to learn. It's definitely worth knowing in my opinion, and it helped me tons.

[Chriske]

After some more practice I manage to solve the problems from my original post.
From time to time I have to transpose to be able to sing a song, and I also change single chords as I see fit.
Many of you guys will frown I know, but most important is, my son and I have lots of fun. He also does frown from time to time saying that I'm not doing things what is supposed to be done. He had some professional help and he think I'm a bit weird doing the things I do my way. My son tries always to play in the spirit of his teacher. As he did learned it a few years back, he's 'stuck' with the musical 'laws'. But hey, that's my opinion.
Point is, we do have fun playing together. Many times we have to compromise to be able to play together...
What's more, I even can find the proper cords for a entire song that I can sing, of which no chords are available on the net. And after a few days of struggling with my guitar, playing such a song to my son he's pretty impressed. He knows how these songs should sound like because I used to sing these (local) songs(without a guitar) when he was little.