# How to play (almost) all pop songs *Written 25 August 2026.* *The text below is a summary of my opening lecture of **Hagnýtur undirleikur í tónmenntakennslu** (Practical accompaniment in music teaching), a course I teach with dr Helga Rut Gudmundsdottir and Ólafur Schram at the School of Education, University of Iceland.* ![[pop-songs-01.png]] The first slide carries a promise: *How to play (almost) all pop songs without practicing much*. Who wouldn't like to know that, right? The asterisk is often read as a joke about laziness or lack of skill. Well, it is not. In fact, it is quite the opposite. It is the whole argument of the course compressed into four words, and it says something more uncomfortable than the title: that often the reason people struggle with accompanying a song (which includes teachers trying to support group singing in the classroom with a guitar or piano performance) is not that they have practised too little. It is that they have been practising the wrong thing.[^1] ## Sometimes the skill is selection, not execution Accompaniment in a classroom is not performance. The job is *to make the singing easier* for everyone else—to hold the *pulse*, keep the group in *key*, and give it a floor to stand on. > [!note] Accompaniment > is not background music; it is the art of supporting. It is therefore judged by what the soloist, or the group, manages to do, not by what the accompanist manages to play. Once you accept that, the question at the start of every arrangement changes. It stops being *can I play this* and becomes *what do I actually need to play to make this work*. Those are different skills. You can indeed be a highly proficient player on your instrument, and a terrible accompanist; and you can, believe me, offer truly great accompaniment, having only basic playing technique. ![[pop-songs-02.png]] **Not much theory, and none of it for its own sake.** The circle of fifths is here because it answers a practical question—which key will this group actually sing in, and what chords come with it. Twelve major keys around the outside, their relative minors inside, and the number of sharps or flats each one carries. ![[pop-songs-03.png]] It is also good to know where to find the sounds on the guitar fretboard. Quite often, playing just the root notes will suffice. But where are they...? **Then the anatomy of a chord: root, third, fifth.** *The third makes a chord major or minor.* (Move it a semitone and major becomes minor; everything else stays where it is).[^2] It is not unusual, that students who have played guitar for years know the shapes of chords without even knowing which finger is holding the "mood" of the chord. **And the basic 12 and 8 bar structure.** ![[pop-songs-04.png]] The point of walking backwards through that history is not the history itself. It is that the number of harmonic patterns in circulation is (kind of... relatively...) small, they are inherited from one another, and once you can *hear and recognise* a few of them by ear, breaking down songs becomes essentially easier. ## Listen for the function of the chord ![[pop-songs-05.png]] In practice, the ear-training question is not "what chord is that". It is "*what is that chord doing*"—where it sits relative to "home", and where it wants to go next. Read the chain left to right and each chord falls a fifth into the next, which is why the sequence feels like it is "going somewhere" rather than just changing. This might sound complicated or even discouraging to someone who has little experience with music theory, but I would argue that in fact function is easier to hear than pitch, and it is what you need when you are working out a song in (the ten minutes ;)) before a lesson. ## Nine steps, and one of them is the hard one (guess which!) ![[pop-songs-06.png]] **Take them seriously. I do.** Literally, almost every time I am preparing a new song to introduce in the classroom. More often now—also in band rehearsals. Some of these nine steps are housekeeping. Print the lyrics. Find a key the group can sing in rather than the key of the recording. Sort the capo out (if you want to use it). The eighth is the one the course is about: **select what matters most in the accompaniment and play only that**, even when—*especially* when—you could play more. Restraint is the constraint. Finally, practise *being able to stop and rejoin at any point without the performance stopping*. It matters more than it looks. A classroom accompanist who cannot drop out to handle an unexpected situation, and then come right back in, is not much use to the group, however well they play. If you know—you know.[^3] ## Four ingredients ![[pop-songs-07.png]] This might be an oversimplification, but it is a useful one. (Almost) every song arrangement is made of four things: rhythm, melody, bass, harmony. Choosing an arrangement means deciding which of the four you will carry and which you will leave to the group. It also means understanding which needs most support in which part of the song. Maybe you need to start by playing a short phrase from the melody to help the group get in tune? And right after, maybe the rhythm is what needs most support? ### Rhythm This one I feel strongly about. ![[pop-songs-08.png]] Rhythm is embodied. It is not enough to 'understand it'. We need to feel it. If you cannot sing the song while walking, clapping or dancing—you will likely struggle as an accompanist. This is the cheapest diagnostic in the course. Take it. It often exposes the gap between having learned a song and having acquired confidence in it. ### Warmup At this point the list of four quietly grows a fifth item. ![[pop-songs-09.png]] A warmup is not a throat-clearing before the real work. A good one *is built out of the material that is coming next*, so that by the time the song arrives the group has already played its rhythm without knowing that is what they were doing. ### Melody ![[pop-songs-10.png]] Learn the melodic fragments that are hard to sing, and leave the rest to the voices. A tricky descending run, a leap the group keeps missing—play those. ### Bass ![[pop-songs-11.png]] *Root notes,* every chord, always. A bass line is the foundation of the song. It is the ground the other notes are oriented against. Simple is better here, and most of the time simple is also all that is needed. ### Harmony ![[pop-songs-12.png]] *Simplify.* Don't ask, just do it. (By the way, do you know what power chords are? Have you tried open tunings?) *Be aware of the notes you are playing.* Don't stick to the chord shapes you have learned. Most of the time, they are too much. Even worse: they are not what the song needs. Don't turn every song into a guitar ballad just because you play a guitar. *Imagine that you have a limited number of notes to use in your lifetime*—do not spend them all in the first class. Leave some for later. You might need them. And, to be more serious—you will see that in most cases "less truly means more" (which does not mean it does not require some work). (I hope this one gets a laugh. At the same time, I am serious!) ## Four chords Which brings the lecture to the joke everybody already knows, in the version the *Axis of Awesome* made famous: one loop, dozens of songs.[^4] ![[pop-songs-13.png]] I–V–vi–IV, in the three keys a classroom guitar handles best. In C that is C–G–Am–F; in E, E–B–C♯m–A; in A, A–E–F♯m–D. On guitar, mastering three keys is plenty: if you can move between them, you can put almost any song within reach of a group's voices. Add a capo, and you are the queen of the fretboard! ![[pop-songs-14.png]] Play the loop and hum something over it. How many fitting melodies do you know? Unlike what one might think, this is not a 'trick' though, nor an exposure of implicit plagiarism, or vague composition technique in pop music. That a great many songs share four chords tells you almost nothing about those songs, because the chords are the part they hold in common and everything that distinguishes them lives somewhere else—in the rhythm, the melody, the register, the words, who is singing and how... Those are all important parts of songwriting and interpretation. So the promise on the title slide holds, and the asterisk was doing honest work. You really *can* play many pop songs without practising much, and do it in a fun and engaging way, once playing them stops meaning playing everything in them and becomes *playing what is important*. --- [^1]: That provides a different angle for looking at where the lack of musical confidence and the conviction of being [[The unmusical self|not musical]] might come from... [^2]: If you are a jazz player, you probably think of the 7th right at this point. Good call! But for another post. [^3]: Ever played guitar while trying to prevent a kid from jumping on the table at the same time? I have ;) [^4]: The Axis of Awesome. (n.d.). *4 chords* [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ