How to Analyze a Bossa Nova Guitar Song in B Flat Major

Video Transcript

"RYAN LARSON: So now that we have our scale down, we can go through our tune and analyze it. And we do this just by numbering the chords that come out through 1 through 7, your seven notes in the scale. So just by marking the notes down, we can go through and reference the scale and find where these notes fall. So the first thing we're going to do is write our B flat major scale at the top here, so we have B flat C, D, E flat, F, G, A. You want to number it 1 through 7: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. So those are our major chords out of the scale. So now, we can go through D. That's a 3. So we have a 3 here. D flat is in between 3 and 2, so we have a flat 3. C is a 2 and B is a sharp 1, right? Because we're in B flat so B is up a notch. And then we have a repeat sign, and then we go here. We got F. That's a 5. B flat is a 1 E flat is a 4, and A flat is a flat 7. D is a 3. D flat is a flat 3. C is a 2. Sharp 1 to 1 and then we're on our last measure, the seven measures. We have a 4, a flat 7, a flat 3 then a 2 and the sharp 1 and that brings us back to the top of tune. So by going through and numbering all this down, now we can play our scale and we have D, 1, 2, 3. So there's our D and we're going to play our D minor root, our D minor chord, then our D flat 7 to C to the B. So just by finding these different notes in the scale, we can reference. Again 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and a sharp is found a fret above. So here's your sharp 1, right, 1, sharp 1, 2 and a flat is found a fret below, 2, flat 2, 1, 3, flat 3, 2. So by utilizing this one scale that we've learned on these--just these bottom three strings, we can go through a whole tune and play some bossa nova, which we'll do in just a minute."