For those of you who tune in to the

, you know we generally showcase an existing song in the Rocksmith DLC library in addition to the current week's offerings. Each Wednesday, well announce the BackTrack here and offer a few notes about the featured song. Were also hoping this gives your brain the chance to do some pre-processing as you actively listen to the song in advance, so that your fingers arent starting from scratch when they get to those tricky sections.

This weeks BackTrack Spotlight comes to us from notetracker

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Australian rock band Silverchair leapt into the world spotlight in 1994 with their debut album Frogstomp, which features this weeks BackTrack, Tomorrow. Lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter Daniel Johns was only 15 years old at the time. The band remained active until 2007, with their ambitious final album featuring more modern production techniques and full orchestral accompaniment.

Their earlier work continues to be their most popular, though, featuring a stripped down sound and a rawness characteristic of the grunge music that dominated air play at the time of their first release. This song takes an accessible approach to harmony that gives us a perfect opportunity to discuss how Roman numerals are used by musicians to talk about chord changes in an accessible and universal way.

Major and minor scales are made up of a sequence of seven notes, or scale degrees. For instance, a C major scale is made up of the notes (named after the first seven letters of the alphabet):

C, D, E, F, G, A, B

We can build chords off of any of these notes. Then we can arrange those chords in different orders to get different chord progressions. Since this works no matter what key youre in and no matter what scale youre using, it can be helpful to talk about the chords based on where it appears in the scale rather than what actual notes it uses. For this purpose, we often use Roman numerals:

I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi, vii

We use uppercase to refer to major chords and lowercase to refer to minor or chords.

Tomorrow is in the key of A, so A is the I chord, B is the ii chord, C is iii, D is IV, E is V, and so on. I,IV, and V are used in various combinations to make up thousands and thousands of different songs. "Tomorrow" uses another tried and true chord progression  the verses use a repeating I/bVII/IV progression (A/G/D).We say bVII because normally the vii chord would be built on a G#.

This progression was very popular in the 60s and 70s and is featured in countless songs. "Sweet Home Alabama" and "More Than a Feeling" are just two examples plucked from the Rocksmith catalog. "Sweet Home Alabama" is in D major (D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#) and uses the chord progression D/C/G. Using D as our base, we can see that the progression is in fact I/bVII/IV, the same one used in "Tomorrow."