Today I practiced my guitar for 20 minutes, a generous amount of time these days (if you are parent you’ll understand). During this practice session, I worked ear training: I looped the song The Funeral (Band of Horses) on my iPhone and played along, plucking the individuals notes in chord progression on my Traveler’s acoustic guitar.

During the practice session, I was able to nail down all the notes from the first two chords (triads) and was also able to determine that song was written in the key of G# (thanks music theory). However, I am a bit confused because the 2 of a major key, normally a minor chord, was played as a major. Is this swap of minor and major chord an example of modal mixture?
Ultimately, I was unable to play the entire chord progression by ear and ended up finding a guitar tutorial1; uploaded on YouTube. Despite that, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made over the last two years of working on my music craftsmanship.
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I’m Matt Chung. I’m a software engineer, seasoned technology leader, and father currently based in Seattle and London. I love to share what I know. I write about topic developing scalable & fail-safe software running in the AWS cloud, digital organization as a mechanism for unlocking your creativity, and maximizing our full potentials with personal development habits.
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