Community Song Analysis 01 | Hey Jude

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Also, if you're new here, you may need to study Music Theory for Guitar and Music Theory Monday a bit before you're able to participate in these community song analysis challenges.

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to the first Community Song Analysis! 

This week, we're taking a look at The Beatles' Hey Jude

Here are the questions I'd like you to answer about this song:

1. What key is this song in? Is it Major or Minor (or modal or something else?)
2. What is the chord progression? (use Roman Numerals to describe it)
3. If there are chords outside the key, can we explain what is going on? (eg. modal stuff, secondary dominants, etc)

These are the essential questions. IF you want more questions to answer about this song, let me know!

Keep in mind: You DO NOT have to do this by ear. Feel free to look up the chords and research anything you like. If you want to do it by ear, awesome - but that is not a requirement. This is more about looking at the chords and figuring out their roman numeral relationship.

Let's get the conversation going on the community forum. 

Why are we doing this?

Song Analysis is an incredibly useful skill to have in your musician toolbox. Here are a few benefits of studying the intimate details of how a song works:
1. Helps you create more interesting and specific lead/rhythm parts for a song
2. Helps you understand how the melody interacts with the chords
3. Gives you specific ideas for writing your own music/parts
4. Helps you communicate better in a band setting
5. Gives context for music theory concepts.

This is the first one ever so it's probably going to be messy and chaotic to some extent. For this one, feel free to be as specific or vague as you like. You can write out the chords with their numerals attached or if you're feeling adventurous you could write out how many measures of each chord in measure brackets, like I've done in previous song analysis videos.

I'm sure as we do a few more, I'll get a better sense of how I want you to organize the information. I may even make some kind of blank sheet for you to fill out with information about the song. But I kind of just want to see what happens first and go from there!

Check out the Lesson Archive for more Music Theory lessons.