How To Analyze Song
this video is sponsored by Skillshare hey welcome to twelve-tone if you're a regular viewer of the channel there's a good chance you first found out about us through our song analysis videos like the ones about comfortably numb' or Africa those videos are a lot of fun to make and they can get pretty complicated but my goal with them isn't just to show off how smart I am or at least that's not my only goal I'm also trying to show how song analysis works or at least how I like to do it because really it's not that hard so today I thought I'd pull back the curtain and talk a bit about my process so you can apply it to whatever songs you want instead of waiting for me to get around to them let's start with the obvious stuff we'll call these step zero the first thing you need is a song to analyze it can be any song you want but you're gonna be listening to it a lot over the course of this journey so I'd recommend picking one you actually enjoy speaking of journeys for this video I'll be looking at don't stop believin the other thing you'll need is an accurate transcription you can't explain what they're doing unless you know what they're doing you can work this out yourself if your ears are good enough but to save time I usually just google it it's worth keeping in mind though that most online transcriptions are wrong so to double-check it I like to play the written notes along with the original track and listen for areas where it doesn't sound right for don't stop believin though this part is fairly simple will stick to the verse which just loops these four chords forever once you're confident in your transcription we can start the actual analysis I like to focus on chords and harmony for a couple reasons first I think they're the most overlooked aspect of composition everyone can tell you how meaningful the lyrics to their favorite songs are and a lot of them can pinpoint cool or important parts of the melodic phrase in the rhythm section even if they don't have the precise words to explain it but unless you have a theory background it's likely you've never really thought about how the chords help tell the story of the song the other reason I focus on harmony is just cuz I think it's more fun than melodic analysis that's a personal preference though melodies are super important too and if you want to focus on them instead that's totally fine either way the first real step is to find the key this is the central point from which the rest of the song grows so if you start with the wrong route you're going to wind up with a completely different and probably not very coherent analysis for example I think the biggest mistake I've published so far is probably from the hurt video where I analyzed the pre-chorus in a instead of Deenie I still think my analysis is valid but is it the best explanation for what's happening probably not and it's all because I got the key wrong now it's true that not all songs actually have a key but I tend to focus on popular music so well there's no guarantee it's a pretty safe bet if you know what you're looking for you can probably find that key just by reading your transcription but I don't tend to trust those there's no replacement for actually listening to the song so put on some headphones and try to figure out which sections feel the most resolved a melody can be a huge help here it's the most prominent part of the song so if something feels like the root there it probably is for instance if we listen to don't stop believin the line midnight train goin anywhere sounds like it ends with a big ol resolution and we can check our transcription and see that those last couple notes are F sharp G sharp and E which means we're probably in the key of E major don't worry if your key doesn't make sense on paper yet the job of a theorist is to describe what we hear will make it make sense later once you have your route we can do some quick Roman numeral analysis this is just taking the chords and marking out where they fall in the keys so when don't stop believing we start on the 1 chord go to the 5 then 6 minor then finally for this lets us abstract away the specific key the song was recorded in and helps tease out the underlying structures of the harmony and if you've taken an intro level Theory course this is probably where you stopped your teacher hands you a progression tells you to analyze it you put in the Roman numerals and bam you're done but here's the thing this is an analysis this is labeling we've got the what nailed down but the point of analysis is to get a to the why in order to actually analyze structure though we need to pick a harmonic model it is we need to decide which set of rules were going to assume the music was written with this isn't meant to be restrictive if our model can't explain something we can just switch to a different one but there's lots of different approaches to music and we've got to start somewhere we've covered lots of different harmonic models in the past and which one you start with is kind of arbitrary but my first instinct is usually functional harmony because for a lot of popular music it works really well we've talked about functional harmony many times before but it's basically just the idea that different chords in a key have different predefined functions or jobs to do we made a whole video on it if you want to know more we can go through all our Roman numerals and assign functions to them so the one chord has tonic function the five chord is dominant the six minor is tonic again and the four chord is sub dominant but at this point we've fallen back into the labeling trap we've put new names on the chords but in order to really get at what's happening we need to ask why those functions are in the order they're in we're looking for connections relationships between chords that help explain their emotional impact fortunately the model we're using can help with that and it tells us what sorts of behaviors to expect from each different function but we still need to examine why those behaviors are the ones that best tell our story like don't stop believin ends with a four chord going back to the one chord which you might recognize is something called a play goal cadence but one question we might want to ask is why use a play Haydn's here well a common answer is that play go Cadence's provide a weaker sense of rest than traditional five to one Cadence's so they're often used to get a quick resolution without really disrupting the momentum of the piece that's what functional harmony says anyway but is that what's happening in this specific case only your ears can tell you that listen to the song seriously the more you listen the better your analysis will be but yeah that's what's happening here actually I'd like to take a moment to emphasize something in the end these chords exist in service to a story so understanding what they're doing depends on understanding what that story is and the best source for that is usually the lyrics you don't have to do a full lyrical analysis or anything but you should at least know the general story because your listeners certainly will and it colors their experience or the other aspects of the music like when I did the message in a bottle analysis the idea that the verse never actually plays the one chord makes a whole lot more sense once you know the song is about a castaway who can't find his way home anyway what do we do if our model can't explain something well that's where it helps to have more than one model the more different ways you have to think about harmony the more tools you'll have in your analytical toolbox and the more likely it is you'll find a useful explanation this brings us to the central lesson of this whole video context is everything we said don't stop believin was an E major but what happens if they suddenly play a G major triad I can think of about four or five different explanations for that chord but really we don't have enough information yet to know which one is correct fortunately each interpretation comes with its own predictions for how the chord behaves so we can look at what's going on around it to see which one is the most likely or if we can't get it from that we can again just go listen to the song and as for how to learn these new models well I made a whole video about non-functional techniques so you can go watch that to get started but the real trick is to just practice analyzing it's a skill and you have to train it so take songs break them apart and see what you can come up with for each chord ask what is this doing in the key and what is it doing with the chords around it if something doesn't make sense just take your best guess and move on you can always come back to it later if you're really confused try looking at how the individual notes move between the chords that's usually a pretty good indicator of their harmonic relationship over time you'll start to pick up patterns and noticing patterns and songs is basically what music theory is you can also ask for help there's lots of theorists out there and we love talking about analytical models it's what makes us so much fun at parties analytical contexts can even change the labels we put on things like let's go back to one of our first analysis videos stairway to heaven the chords in the intro are mostly easy to identify but the second one's a bit tricky check it out the notes here from bottom to top our G sharp C E and B so what is it well the court that most comfortably contains all four of those notes is C augmented major 7 but in context I don't think it's behaving like an Augmented chord in cases like this I like to ask myself which course does this kinda look like and which of those would make the most sense here I wound up ignoring the C and calling it E major but some commenters argued it was better viewed as a minor major 7 just voiced without an A honestly both of those seem like reasonable answers which brings me to my final point music theory isn't Sudoku there can be more than one right answer analysis isn't just trying to score all the points by putting the right labels on the things it's about exploring and explaining the fundamentally subjective experience of listening to a piece of music when I analyze a song I may say things you disagree with and that's great that means you're thinking about the music at a deep enough level to know when something I say feels wrong to you and I'm always interested in hearing alternate theories about the songs I analyze but just because one of us is right doesn't mean the other one's wrong that's not how music works if you're interested in learning more ways to think about music I'd recommend this video sponsor Skillshare Skillshare is an online learning platform with over 20,000 lessons in just about everything I've recently been watching through a course about writing music for TV ads which is a whole different world from the kinds of composition I'm used to there's all sorts of challenges I'd never even thought of and I've been enjoying learning how the people who do that work solve them the course is called introduction to music composition for TV commercials if you want to check it out skill sir also has plenty of other courses both Musical and not and they're offering to free months of premium membership to the first 500 twelve-tone viewers to click the link in the description it's totally risk-free and if you want to keep going premium plans start at less than 9 bucks a month so why not give it a try and hey thanks for watching and thanks to our patreon patrons for supporting us and making these videos possible if you want to help out and get some sweet perks like sneak peeks of upcoming episodes linked to our patreon on screen now you can also join our mailing list to find out about new episodes like share comment subscribe and above all keep on rockin