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Amazing Grace

Traditional

By Mayank Sanganeria

In F major, this piece is 17 chord changes across 17 bars under the notes on the page — a beginner-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 7 of 97 in the library, ranked easiest to hardest. Reduced to block chords, that's a progression you can learn in a sitting; the piece you're reading is that progression wearing figuration.

Practice this piece → Practice chords → Learn it section by section → Hear the harmony → Sight-read something new →

What's inside the harmony

Reducing the piece to block chords and labeling every change turns up harmonic phenomena that are easy to miss reading the figuration straight — each one below is also its own corpus-wide census.

• Chord inversions 4× bar 7: ii (Bb) (first inversion, bass B-2) · bar 9: iii (C) (first inversion, bass C3) · bar 11: I (A) (first inversion, bass A2)

Free scores

• Blocked-chord reduction (MusicXML) — the harmony skeleton the player performs
• The piece as written (compressed MusicXML)