Half a Pachelbel

Today was the first day of RA training, and it went quite well in my opinion. I got to meet my coworkers for the next year and start building relationships with them. After the training was over, three of the more musically inclined guys made their way to my room, where we proceeded to jam. We had a drumset, two guitars, and a mandolin going (all of which were my instruments except for one of the guitars). The guy playing the mandolin was new to the instrument but picked it up with surprising speed - the man's got good string sense!

We all doodled around a bit with various melodies and chord progressions, but we locked together on one in particular and had a really awesome groove going. The chords were C, G, Am, and F repeated. In the key of C (which it was,) this is reffered to as a I V vi IV progression. The C chord, being built from the first note in the scale, is symbolized by roman numeral I; the G chord is built from scale degree 5 and is symbolized by roman numeral V, and so on. This can be heard in a great deal of songs, like "Don't Stop Believin" by Journey, "Let it Be" by The Beatles, "Sk8er Boi" by Averile Levinge... you get the idea. People refer to this as the "Pachelbel chords," but this is wrong.

Pachelbel's Canon is I V iv ii IV I IV V. In the key of C, that would be C, G, Am, Dm, F, C, F, G. If we compare the first four chords of Pachelbel's canon to the other progression, you see that they're the same except for the last chord. However, this is somewhat forgivable because a Dm and an F chord are the same except for one note (D minor is D,F,A; F is F,A,C). The real issue comes in when you realize that "Don't Stop Believin'" and the other songs have four chords, but pachelbel has - count 'em - eight! That's right, what many musicians think of as the "Pachelbel progression" doesn't even have the right number of chords! For a song that uses legit Pachelbel, listen to "Graduation" by Vitamin C. That doesn't really count though, because she (they?) actually has Pachelbel's original piece playing in the background. It's a very nice tribute, but you can see how that's not quite what we're going for.

Luckily for you, you've read this blog and you know the truth. Therefore, the next time one of your musician friends tries to impress you by saying "You hear that? That's Pachelbel!" You can turn around and say to them "Oh yeah? Then where's the other half?"