Divine revelation of truth or just "Let it be" ?

 

Funny thing is that I recently finally got around to Elton John and his albums in full (not just what I hear/heard accidentially on radio) and immediately linked the intro of "Don't stop believing" to Elton when discussed in the program.

 

I seem to remember another program where Lous Armstrong described "Let it be" as a psalm. Which psalm/psalms would that be?

 

Or is "Let it be" just as generic and a pattern for a majority of hits following it as the program wants it to be?

 

 

 

I was listening to the album The Captian & the Kid by Elton John last night and couldn't help singing let it be on top of it and the theory appears to be valid. I ended up getting annoyed by it and I wish I had continued being ignorant on this idea! I even heard Harrison's (post let it be) slide guitar on the album....and Paul's distinct bass lines.

 

I'm not a music conservatory literate but this hymn-like song - in Beatles context - seems to go back to Hey Jude.

 

What do you think?

 

 

In basic terms each chord made of three or more notes from a scale based upon the root note of the chord, (so if the first chord "I" is an E[major] the scale is E-major); a chord progression is formed by taking subsequent chords that have a harmonic relationship to the preceding chord. With the basic three-chord trick (I-IV-V) the progression uses every note in the ("I" chord) scale so will fit with any melody written in that key, for example

 

the scale of E-major = E,F#,G#,A,B,C#,D#

 

A major chord is created by taking the first, third and fifth note of that scale and playing them together.

 

E is the 1st note in the E-major scale so the I chord is E =  [ E,F#,G#,A,B,C#,D#] <- 1,3,5 in the scale of E-major

A is the 4th note in the E-major scale so the IV chord is A =  [A,B,C#,D,E,F#,G#]  <- 1,3,5 in the scale of A-major

B is the 5th note in the E-major scale so the V chord is B =  [B,C#,D#,E,F#,G#,A#] <- 1,3,5 in the scale of B-major

 

putting those chords on the E-major scale looks like this:

I (E)   = [E,F#,G#,A,B,C#,D#,E,F#]

V (B)  = [E,F#,G#,A,B,C#,D#,F#]  <- I've shown the F# coming from the next octave up here.

 

Note that chords A[maj] and B[maj] both share a note with the E[maj] chord (E and B respectively)

 

 

What this means is the song's melody can be written using any of the notes of the E-major scale and still be harmonious with the three chosen chords - essentially if you stick to those three chords you cannot mess it up no matter what you do.

 

The basic four-chord progression [ I - V - vi - IV] introduces a minor chord "vi" (lowercase denotes a minor chord)

C# is the 6th note in the scale so the vi chord is C#[minor] = [C#,D#,E,F#,G#,A,B,C#] <- 1,3,5 in the scale of C#-minor

 

Which in E-major scale  = [E,F#,G#,A,B,C#,D#,E,F#,G#] 

 

...so you can see that still uses notes from the E-major scale (and shares two notes with the E[maj] chord), if the progression had used a VI major chord then the three notes would have been C#, F, G#, and here the "F" note is not in the E-major scale so would be "wrong" if we are playing a melody in E-major.

 

/edit: note that the C#-minor scale uses all the same notes as the E-major scale, because of this C#-minor is called a relative key of E-major

 

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+

 

Contrary to popular belief, Prog (and Jazz) doesn't throw all that out the window and ignore this basic format. In the above example you can use an VI major chord in the progression, you just need to find a trick to deal with the "F" note to resolve the dissonance.

 

 

He once told me (sometime in the 1960s) that if I wanted to learn to play I should start by playing hymns because they were simple and easy to pick-up, his rationale was they had to be simple so untrained people could sing them in church. He'd also noticed that you could sing the words to one hymn to the tune of another.and this was something they shared with folk music, [again - simple tunes that anyone could sing]. It was obvious to him that Lennon and McCartney had learnt music this way because of what he could pick-up "by ear" in their songs (hymns and folk music), another truism he said at the time was "pop and rock'n'roll was just folk music played on modern instruments".

 

Later in life, once I'd learnt a small amount of music theory, I could understand from theory all those things he'd observed "by ear".

 

 /eidt PS: This link between folk music and hymns can be heard in Steeleye Span's Fighting For Strangers - an old folk song sang to the tune of the hymn "To Be A Pilgrim"

 

 

 

There is a long-running BBC radio programme called I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue (known as ISIHAC) that features a section of popular songs sung to different tunes - Tiny Hawks singing "Girlfriend In A Coma" to the tune of "Tiptoe Through The Tulips" is something to be heard to be believed.