Now, the good news. Almost all pop, country, rock, and blues music stays in one key throughout. Additionally, most of the music in these styles are written in the key of Cmajor, Dmajor, Gmajor, Amajor, Eminor, or Aminor. Why, you ask? Because the chords in these keys are easier to play on guitar, so songwriters tend to stick with them. Who wants to write a song in Dbmajor, and play a bunch of Db, Gb, and Ab chords when you could instead write the song in Dmajor and play D, G, and A?

Explaining the chords in the following chart goes way beyond the scope of this article. Instead, attempt to do the following:

• find out which key the song you're trying to figure out is in
• Reference the below chart for that key, and see what chords are available (the key is highlighted in black - all chords beside it are the chords available in that key).
• Experiment with the available chords in that key, until you find the correct one

I can hear many of you asking "but.. how do I figure out what key the song is in?" Several ways... you could look at a couple chords in the song you know, look in the chart below, and see which key has those chords in it. Another simpler, very inaccurate method of guessing which key a song is in, is to assume the first chord in the song is the correct key. So, if the first chord in the song is an Eminor, you would guess that the song is in Eminor. While there is absolutely no theoretical reason for this to be true, most pop/rock music is rather simple, so it tends to be true more often than not.

So there you have it... a good basis for learning to figure out songs on your own. It will be a slow going process at first, but if you try a little each day, I think you'll find that within a few weeks, you'll have learned a whole lot. For those interested in learning more about music theory, I can't recommend the excellent Mark Levine's excellent Jazz Theory Book highly enough. The book begins at a rudimentary level, and provides as much music theory as most people would care to know.