chord progression? AIR Kelly Watch The Stars... 5-4-1?

[iconic]

It must be ears but chord progressions......I'm hopeless at understanding them. My interpretation always seems at odds with others? This songs structure sounds familiar to me, I feel I've heard it a hundred times before?

OK, this was my thinking from the start...stay with it...

To me the root is an A with key signature of A major with chords being Bm-D-A, so chord progression would be 2-4-1....googling this progression shows me that may not be the case....if I google songs with 2-4-1 chord progression I get no results!

Then I found some sheet music for the song, chords are B-D-A, key signature of A major.....no Bm afterall.

http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/mtd.asp?ppn=MN0075275

Reading the music also tells me the B is only for the bass and that this chord is really an E with the bass playing a B over it (or under!)....interestingly (to me) my ears only pick up on the bass notes, a fews years ago this wouldn't of been the case.

so now I have a 5-4-1 chord progression....and googling this also gives me jack too....

I getting myself tied up here can anyone help explain whats going on...in simple terms only please

PS Sound drummer

https://youtu.be/FVgMPdT3Hms

[iconic]

..thats odd....selected 'share' option on youtube..copy and pasted to my thread and comes up with a link?

[Bilbo]

I cannot access the video (in work) but from reading the post, it sounds like the mistake you are making is to consider the role of the chord to be necessarily defined by the bass note you are hearing. Whilst that is normally true, there are occasions when the bass note is changed to re-orientate the voicing. Most slash chords are actually a major, minor or dominant with the third or fifth in the bass. The chords that are used are defined not by the root notes but by the way in which they are used. The same three notes that make a voicing can be any number of chords depending on how they are used as opposed to what chord they 'spell'.

For example; CEG is a major triad in a C chord. They are, however, also the 3rd, 5th and 7th of a Am7 chord, or the 5th, 7th and 9th of an F# half diminished and so on. The chord will be defined not by the notes alone but by the chord before it and the one after. I suspect, but cannot be sure, that your bass notes in the Air tunes are not root movement and so your chords are skewed. Often, the actual movement is simpler than you think and probably amounts to a diatonic sequence redefined by some unusual note choices in the bass.

[scalpy]

Just note it's an Em chord in the notated version. Makes this tune mixolydian, which can cause a meltdown if trying to work stuff early in your transcribing career! not sure where you are with theory but if you don't know that's a major scale with the 7th flattened by a semitone.

[iconic]

cheers guys,

bugger I missed that, yes it's an Em so a mixolydian if in A