Herb Alpert 'Rise'–sounds like F minor?

[Michael Bishop]

Hi Johnny,
I was listening to Herb Alpert’s famous song ‘Rise’ he played on Trumpet. I was testing the song against my wife’s organ, and it sounds like the song is in F minor? I love this song, would make a gorgeous Soprano/Tenor Duet–playing the Soprano for the Trumpet lines and add some Improvising with Tenor where appropriate throughout the song 🙂

[john]

sounds like a good idea you got there Michael.

and yes you got the key, F minor.
it does get a bit involved with the chord progression as it goes into it (hitting other key centers)
but it eventually sits on on the F minor and you could easily solo over that one chord like he kinda got into it near the end.

[Michael Bishop]

Oh cool! I heard the right key then, alright 🙂 Yeah, I heard a few of those key centers too and it made me question what I was hearing a little bit–some tricky stuff there, like a Harmonic or Melodic minor? I’ve been working hard on ear training during my downtime, talk about a challenge to do! It’s I’m really ‘jealous’ of players who can hear what someone is playing and know what scale they’re playing in.

If it’s worth your time financially, could you think about doing some kind of a course/videos on ear training?

I’ve been doing what I can to work on it, haven’t really found a good course on it. Anytime I did anything with the Blues Society, I had to ask the guys what key we were going to play in. I never had any problems playing blues solos when they told me what key was, but the challenge was knowing what the key was without having to ask anyone. The guitar players were really cool about it and they’re great friends, so I didn’t feel too embarrassed to ask LOL But ear training was the one thing they encouraged me to work on. They said if I ever wanted to do any serious playing with a blues band/paid gigs, ear training was something I couldn’t get around.

[john]

yes ear training is on my list of lesson vids at least for the Premium Members.
as for getting to know what the chords are you’ll learn a lot from my Major Scale Improvisation Course.
it teaches what all the chords are of a given key (scale) once you learn these the mystery about what chords are being played in a song start to disappear.

[Author]

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