Hello all. When I try to ear out chords for songs that I like, sometimes it goes well, and sometimes it's totally frustrating. When I'm looking for the chord for a bar of melody, I start with the I IV V VIm possibilities, and if none work, I try every chord I can think of, but for some songs I just can seem to get anywhere through trial and error.

(A prime example is Dougie Maclean's Solid Ground - if anyone knows chords please take pity on me - I've made several stalwart attempts at earing it out and there are sections I just can't get).

I don't think that the problem is me giving up too easily. It might be the problem is that I don't know enough chords to try out - but I'm not looking for perfect chords necessarily, just what is minimally acceptable, and I assume that in most (all?) cases where obscure chords are ideal that you can still get by with cowboy chords?

So if anyone has any general tips on earing out song chords, I'd like to hear them. But my specific question is this:

Since music (or harmony anyway) is basically a math game, is it not possible to calculate logically what the chord to harmonize a piece of melody must be, just through a knowledge of theory, and some scrap paper to calculate on?

It seems to me that it SHOULD be possible to look at a piece of music you don't know and say "This bar has the notes W, X, Y, and Z, so the chord must be X major".

I suppose it might be a question not of what notes appear in the unit of melody but what notes are in accented positions. Or it might be a question of what the chords of the preceding or following bars are.

Is it possible that two identical bars of music can be harmonized with different chords because they fall in different parts of the song? Or be harmonized with different chords because they appear in songs of two different keys?

This might be a complicated question. Or maybe there's some simple rule of thumb that everyone knows but me. So I toss it out here...

Marion