Yes, I am this stupid 😲

[Chas007]

This is an update on a thread I posted a few weeks back. In my old post I was saying that I was working on the song Bad Moon Rising and I couldn't get the words of the song to match with the guitar part. I thought it was me trying to sing, which I can't do by the way, while keeping the strumming pattern going.

Well, today quite by accident I did it! This is the stupid part. One of the pdfs I have for the song has the words, with the chords listed above them. D, A, G, D. I was playing two bars of D then the A and G made up a bar.

And as you guys/gals know that last D is for two bars, not just one. 🤯.
So now with the two bars of D at the end of the verse and the one bar of D at the beginning of the verse the words fit. Ta Da!

The crazy thing is, I had correctly worked out the chords per bar for the song in another file, but I wasn't looking at it.

It still didn't help my singing, but at least the words fit the guitar pattern now. 🤣

Thanks to everyone that replied to my thread and tried to help me. In the famous words of Mr. Ron White, "You can't fix stupid".

[Mr. Jelly]

This is a common problem with musical information that is not musical notation. It points out the need to listen and experiment when learning new material with limited information. There is allot of music information that is incorrect in one way or another.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Chas007

"You can't fix stupid".

No, but stupid can fix itself. Well done!

[b1j]

Chas, congratulations on your breakthrough. Isn’t music fun? Moments like this keep us coming back. Play on.

[Robin, Wales]

Chas, that’s a great breakthrough!

You’ll find that as your experience increases you will start to “hear” when the chord changes should be on songs, so you can get away with very limited written information from which to work out a new song – especially if you sort of know the tune anyway. It is really one of those skills that just creeps up on you over time. Music tends to revolve around rhythmical and tonal patterns, and the more you play and sing with your guitar the easier spotting those patterns will become.

Take a song like Jolene by Dolly Parton. It only has 3 chords – Am, C and G – and the changes come on the emphasized syllables:

JoLene, JoLene, JoLene, JoLene. I’m Begging of you please don’t take my Man.

Am, C, G, Am, G, Am

And that pattern is repeated for the verses.

If you sort of know the song “Jolene” from listening to the record, then the info above (plus the lyric sheet) is really all you need to know in order to play it.

[rmp]

Chord charts require you know when the changes are supposed to happen.

Like said above, which syllable of the word the change is on. So you almost have to edit those charts, because they may not be right.


Listening many times to the song you are working will give you that information

Think of the chart as a reminder of what the next chords and verse lines are.

The goal you should be looking for is to not be 100% dependent on the chart.

Learn the tune, use the chart till you don't have to.

That will also help you sing more freely because you're feelin it, and not readin it
make sense?

[Chas007]

Originally Posted by rmp

make sense?

Yes it does, thank you.
Thanks to everyone.
That was like looking for my glasses and finding out I had them on. 🤣

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Chas007

That was like looking for my glasses and finding out I had them on. 🤣

I know that feeling. I have two pairs, and sometimes find myself putting one pair on when I'm already wearing the others...

[TBman]

Even if you can't read music its always better to at least get the "piano" music (as we called it) for a song that has the lyrics on the page under the notation and chord diagrams. Back when I was a kid I did the sing along thing and I always avoided printed music that just had chord names instead of chord diagrams too, but that's just me.

[rmp]

Originally Posted by Chas007

Yes it does, thank you.
Thanks to everyone.
That was like looking for my glasses and finding out I had them on. 🤣

kind of like looking for your cell phone

while you're talking to someone..

.. on your cell phone

-- yes, I have done this!

[b1j]

Originally Posted by Robin, Wales

Chas, that’s a great breakthrough!

You’ll find that as your experience increases you will start to “hear” when the chord changes should be on songs, so you can get away with very limited written information from which to work out a new song – especially if you sort of know the tune anyway. It is really one of those skills that just creeps up on you over time. Music tends to revolve around rhythmical and tonal patterns, and the more you play and sing with your guitar the easier spotting those patterns will become.

Take a song like Jolene by Dolly Parton. It only has 3 chords – Am, C and G – and the changes come on the emphasized syllables:

JoLene, JoLene, JoLene, JoLene. I’m Begging of you please don’t take my Man.

Am, C, G, Am, G, Am

And that pattern is repeated for the verses.

If you sort of know the song “Jolene” from listening to the record, then the info above (plus the lyric sheet) is really all you need to know in order to play it.

This is solid advice, Robin.

When I was working out how I wanted the vocal phrasing to be for a song I wrote this year, there was, of course, no recording to learn from. Once I got it down, line by line, and began to rehearse it, I used your method with the lyric page, only I highlighted the entire syllable of each word that falls on a downbeat.

Clever are we.