You’ve probably heard of “3-chord songs” before. These songs tend to be catchy and popular and only feature a few select chords – usually the same ones repeating themselves over and over.

Have you seen these books in music shops: “How to play 3 chord guitar” or “1000 songs with 3 chords”? It might sound like exaggeration but there really are a huge number of songs which rely on just 3 chords. You might be surprised just how much variety is possible despite this simple musical basis.

The good news? These songs are great for beginner musicians and are also the perfect tool to train your ears and learn how to recognize certain chords. Ear training exercises are great, of course, but nothing beats the capacity of recognizing chords in actual pieces and songs you hear.

Popular 3-chord songs

Let’s start by looking at some of the most well-known 3 chord songs:

• Ring of Fire (Johnny Cash)
• Sweet Home Alabama (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
• Leaving on a Jet Plane (John Denver)
• Shook me All Night Long (AC/DC)
• All Shook Up (Elvis Presley)
• Love is a Rose (Neil Young)
• Donna (Richie Valens)
• Amazing Grace (Daniel Thomas)

You can also explore The Beatles’ early releases, though some of these push the 3-chord concept a little bit further by adding a few extra chords.

As you can see, Click to read the rest…

We’ve been keeping our eyes and ears open for interesting ear training links for you! Here’s what we found recently. As always, let us know if you have any to add!

Jump to:

• The most famous opening chord ever?
• Four levels of musical awareness
• 5 minutes to a better mix
• Free university course: Listening to Music
• What musical clichés do you know?

The most famous opening chord ever?

What’s the most famous opening chord of any song? One which would surely make the shortlist is the jangly guitar strum which opens The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night”:

Site author Brad put us onto this great video explaining the sound of that oh-so-famous opening chord:

Four levels of musical awareness

In a segment from his bass masterclass, Anthony Wellington talks about the four levels of musical awareness which you progress through as you learn:
Click to read the rest…

In this, the concluding part of our series on the genius Les Paul, we are going to be looking at his contribution to the world of effects. For a modern guitarist, effects pedals are an integral part of their sound. There are a dizzying array of boxes available to feed the contemporary guitar slinger’s G.A.S. (“Gear Aquision Syndrome”), but in Les Paul’s day an amplifier was a pretty far out concept, let alone tone-bending stomp boxes! As usual Les broke out his tool kit and did some inventing…

We’re going to see how Les moved from capturing sounds to creating new ones, with Delay Effects, Vari-Speed, Special Vocal Effects – and a distinctive playing style to boot.

Les Paul’s Delay Effects

The effects most commonly associated with Les Paul are ‘delay’ or ‘echo’ effects. Many Les Paul recordings feature some kind of echo on the main guitar.

In the previous part we talked about Les’ involvement in the development of tape recording. Tape recorders have:

• a record head, which copies the sound onto the tape, and
• a play head which plays the sound back again

Les realised that if you position the play head after the record head and feed the signal coming from the play head back into the record head it creates a repeat or echo on the tape.

At first it might be confusing to understand why this works, but it’s much easier to get your head around it if you consider an example:

(For more on tape delay, see Hearing Effects: Echo… (echo… echo…))

The most common type of delay you will hear on Les’ records is a short delay often referred to as a “slapback”. This slapback delay has become synonymous with the rockabilly guitar sound.

Les Paul & Mary Ford – How High The Moon

How High The Moon (in 26 parts!)

Soon guitarists wanted to produce these amazing sounds when playing live, and Click to read the rest…