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Free Bird - Lynyrd Skynyrd (G maj? - where's the F come from?)


missis sumner
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Yes, I've been asked to learn this. 🙄

 

I quite like the song though, and well, the bass line is very, um, interesting! 😄

 

 

So listening to it, I've just started to get the intro and verse down as G F# E E, F C D D.  The song sounds very much like it's in G major to me, so where's that F come from?  Is it just a borrowed note from another scale?  It's very prominent - at the start of every second line of the verse.

 

Assuming I'm not wrong, can someone with a lot more theory knowledge shed a little light on it for me, please?

 

TIA

 

 

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12 hours ago, jrixn1 said:

You're in the key of G, and this F chord is the bVII, functioning as the secondary subdominant, or the IV of the IV.  One way to think of the F-C is as a IV-I in the temporary tonal centre of C.

I wish I understood all that... I was ok up to bVII. 😆

 

Thanks for your reply though.  It's got enough pointers for me to go digging.

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In short the song moves temporarily from the key of G to the key of C (the subdominant is the 4th degree of the scale, so G,A,B,C = 4 steps). The subdominant of this new key is F (C,D,E,F). Because it is effectively a 4th step of a key built on one of steps of the original key, it’s called “secondary”. Hence the term secondary subdominant. So F is described as the secondary subdominant of G.

 

Dominant is the name given to a chord built on the 5th degree. As above, if we do the same we can build a secondary dominant. Start in the key of G, move to D, then build another dominant (5 steps up) = A. So in G major, A major is considered a secondary dominant.


One other point: the second chord is in fact a D chord with an F# in the bass. This is usually called an inversion in the classical world, or a slash chord in pop/rock/jazz (because it’s usually written D/F#).

 

Hope this helps?

 

 

Edited by FDC484950
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  • 2 weeks later...

Not every note on a piece of paper is loyal to the key signature as tunes move temporarily to different keys as a tune modulates. If the key signature changed every time, the chart would be confusing. Think of a Blues in F. For a start, it is not in F because F is the dominant 7 chord. That aside, on the 5th bar, it goes to Bb which has a flat of Ab which is not in F. A piece being 'in C' broadly means 'mostly'. 😄

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  • 1 month later...
On 20/08/2021 at 18:29, missis sumner said:

Yes, I've been asked to learn this. 🙄

 

I quite like the song though, and well, the bass line is very, um, interesting! 😄

 

 

So listening to it, I've just started to get the intro and verse down as G F# E E, F C D D.  The song sounds very much like it's in G major to me, so where's that F come from?  Is it just a borrowed note from another scale?  It's very prominent - at the start of every second line of the verse.

 

Assuming I'm not wrong, can someone with a lot more theory knowledge shed a little light on it for me, please?

 

TIA

 

 

@jrix 's explanation is technically correct but another (simpler IMO) way to understand it is as a borrowed chord from the G mixolydian mode. 

 

Borrowing chords from different modes is very common e.g. Summer of 69 is in D major but the middle 8 switches to borrowed chords from D Aeolian  (AKA D minor).

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