Lesson 6 — Show Prep Plan for Poseidon

⏱️ Sixty seconds

What changed while you were out

🧑‍🏫Ernie Lee taught Lesson 5 (Aug 16, ~82 min) — composer, USC film scoring, Berkeley double major. Good lesson, entirely deadline-driven, explicitly not poaching. He's coming to the dinner; Poseidon invited him on the spot.
🚀A gig exists now. September 11, Long Beach space dinner, tied to a day of visits to Vast Space, Impulse Space, AstroForge and Astro Labs. His words: "that night is kind of very meaningful."
🎵Two songs: "Golden" (KPop Demon Hunters, Ernie's chart is in C major) and "Blinding Lights" (F minor, four chords). He chose to do both and wants them permanently in his repertoire, not just for the show.
🎤He chose harmony as his role — singer takes the melody, drummer takes time, he plays chords. That is his Lesson 1 goal arriving early and for real.
✈️The calendar is the problem. Taipei Aug 18 – Sep 5, back in LA Sep 5, show Sep 11. Six days on the ground. He has a piano in both cities, so the Taipei stretch is practice time, not dead time — but it is unsupervised.
❓The chords are not fully pinned down. The Golden verse is solid (C · G · D major · Em, with F♯ as the borrowed note). The Golden chorus, the pre-chorus 7th, and three of the four Blinding Lights chords were played but never named on tape. Nothing was guessed on the student page — they're listed as open questions and this lesson is where they close.
🧠The one diagnostic worth acting on: he can hear that something changed but cannot name what changed. He said it himself about major vs minor — "I don't have a firm formula to figure it out." The 3rd is the formula. It's on the Lesson 5 page; make him use it out loud.

💡 Where this lesson happens

If it lands before Sep 5 he's in Taipei — remote, his piano, no studio monitors, no shared instrument. Everything below still works over video except A/B-ing voicings by touch; lean harder on the stems and on him playing back to you.
If it lands after Sep 5 you have him in the room with six days left. In that case the verification block gets ruthless and the band-craft block gets most of the hour.

📊 Starting point

Where he is after Lesson 5

✓ Solid / landed with Ernie

Pulled 3 of 4 bass notes out of an isolated stem on the first listen, cold. The bass-hearing block from Lesson 4 is not as bad as it looked on phone speakers.
Named E minor unprompted and derived the right-hand chords from the bass line himself. Ernie: "Good instinct."
Solved the static-bass puzzle by reasoning: "same bass, but a different variation on the right hand." That is a real analytical listen.
Transferred your chain-of-dominants material across teachers — asked Ernie for "the five to jump to one" transition note, from memory, on a new song.
Absorbed close position and economy of motion fast and applied it unprompted on the second song 40 minutes later.
Played along with an isolated vocal stem at tempo — his stated life goal, in miniature.
Learned song form and named it as his own takeaway: "Today I learned the structure of a song."
Designed his own three-pass stem practice protocol unprompted (play with the bass → be the bass → play against drums only).

△ Gaps found in Lesson 5

Could not hear the F♯ that makes the D major. The central "aha" landed as a told fact, not a heard one — "Yeah, I wasn't able to."
No test for major vs minor. "I kind of only have a very subjective feeling about that." He also reversed the affect labels relative to Ernie's demo. Highest-leverage fix available, and it's yours.
Fast chorus changes broke down repeatedly — the longest drill of the lesson, eight consecutive "Again" on one transition.
Blinding Lights right hand unresolved at the buzzer — "I might need to figure out the right hand" — and he played in the wrong key once while comping.
Zero knowledge of extensions. "I know nothing about seven, nine." He hit a 7th by accident, liked it, and has no framework for it.
No DAW and no multitrack player — a hard blocker on the practice method he was assigned. Unresolved at the end of the lesson.
Passing tones were requested and withheld. He asked for them twice, in his own words; Ernie gated them to protect September. He'll ask you again.
Nothing R&B-specific was taught, despite him restating R&B as the mid-term goal at the end of the lesson.

⚠️ Read this before you teach any chord from Lesson 5

The lesson recording captures speech, not the notes played. Ernie's spoken chord recap is unusable — it contains an "F sharp" that is almost certainly him naming the note inside D major rather than a chord, plus an audible "Oh, my bad" self-correction mid-list. Do not reconstruct a chart from it. Get the chart Ernie sent over WhatsApp.
Safely established: Golden verse = bass C–G–D–E, the D is major (F♯), fourth chord E minor. Golden pre-chorus = bass E–D–D–C, a 7th on the fourth chord only, quality unstated. Blinding Lights = F minor, four chords, first is Fm. Everything else is unverified.
One named chord in Blinding Lights transcribes as "That's B," which doesn't fit. The public reference chart resolves it as B♭ — see the chord truth table below, which also flags why that chord is more interesting than it looks.

🎼 Three columns: tape · chart · unresolved

The chord truth table

The middle column is public reference chart, not what Ernie taught — it is here to speed up verification, not to replace it. Nothing in it has been put on Poseidon's recap page, and nothing should be taught to him until you've heard it against the record.

Song / section	Established on the tape	Public reference chart	Status
Golden verse	Bass C – G – D – E; the D is major (audible F♯); fourth chord named E minor	C · G · D · Em	✅ Match Teach as is
Golden chorus	Starts on C; the D major recurs inside it. Nothing else named aloud.	Same C · G · D · Em loop	⚠️ Plausible Confirm by ear
Golden pre-chorus	Bass E – D – D – C; chords 2 and 3 share a bass note; a 7th on the fourth chord only, quality never stated	Not separately charted	❌ Open Needs Ernie's chart
Golden which key	Ernie taught it in C major — "It's in C major, so it'll help you."	Published sheet music is in G major	🔀 Your call See below
Blinding Lights the whole song	F minor; four chords; first chord Fm; one garbled "That's B"	Fm · Cm · E♭ · B♭ — two bars each, looped	⚠️ Likely "B" = B♭; verify

📚 Sources — Musicnotes official sheet for "Golden" (licensed publication, the more reliable of the two) · Ultimate Guitar chords for "Golden" · Ultimate Guitar chords for "Blinding Lights". The Ultimate Guitar pages are crowd-sourced and unedited — treat them as a hypothesis, never as an authority.

🔀 The decision only you can make: teach "Golden" in C or in G?

The chords are identical either way. C · G · D · Em is the same four shapes, the same fingerings, the same hands. Nothing Poseidon has practised changes. This is purely a question of what you call it.
In G major the loop is 4-1-5-6, and D major is simply the 5 chord — fully diatonic, F♯ is just the key signature. Clean, correct, and it makes the song ordinary. It also dissolves the "special thing" entirely: there is nothing borrowed, and Ernie's central lesson becomes a misunderstanding.
In C major the loop is 1-5-2-3, and D major is the 2 played major — the five of the five, F♯ borrowed from one step clockwise. This is what Ernie taught, it's what's on Poseidon's recap page, and it plugs straight into your Lesson 4 chain-of-dominants thread.
Recommendation: keep C. He has already done the work in C, the F♯ gave him the single most memorable moment of the lesson, and secondary dominants are a concept he needs anyway. Mention the G-major reading as a second way of seeing the same thing — that's a genuinely useful lesson in itself — but don't relabel his chart three weeks before a show.
⚠️ Fair warning if you do switch: Bm shows up in some charts, and it needs F♯ too. In G it's the 3 chord; in C it's a second borrowed chord.

⚠️ "Blinding Lights" is not in F natural minor — and that's the teachable bit

Three of the four fit. Against F natural minor (F · G · A♭ · B♭ · C · D♭ · E♭): Fm is the 1, Cm is the 5, E♭ is the ♭7. All clean.
B♭ major does not fit. B♭ major is B♭ · D♮ · F, and F natural minor has D♭. That one chord raises the 6th degree.
Raise the 6th of a minor scale and you have Dorian — which he already climbed on your Lesson 4 mode ladder. All four chords sit inside F Dorian (F · G · A♭ · B♭ · C · D♮ · E♭), which is the same seven notes as E♭ major read from F.
So Ernie's "we're in F minor" is right about home and off by one note. Keep his frame for Poseidon — F is unquestionably the tonic — but you now have the exact mirror of "Golden": each song has precisely one chord that steps outside the obvious key. Golden raises the 4th (F→F♯); Blinding Lights raises the 6th (D♭→D♮). That symmetry is a better lesson than either song alone.

🎯 The plan · ~60 minutes

Lesson 6 — get the show playable

① Verify — nothing else works until this does~20 min

Pin down both songs, at the piano, against the records

📄Start by asking for Ernie's chord charts and stems. If he has them, this block is a confirmation. If he doesn't, this block is a transcription session and it still comes first.
🌟Golden, verse — confirm and lock. C · G · D major · Em, close position, bass in the left hand. Make him say "F♯" out loud every time the D comes round.
❓Golden, chorus — this is the real unknown. All that survives on tape is that it starts on C and the D major recurs inside it. Decode it with him rather than for him: solo the bass, name the roots, then add the quality from the keys stem. That is the lesson, not a detour from it.
7️⃣The pre-chorus 7th. Bass E–D–D–C, 7th on the fourth chord only. Establish whether it's a dominant 7th or a major 7th — they are not interchangeable and he can't tell yet. Use it as the first extension he actually understands rather than stumbles into.
🌙Blinding Lights — get the other three chords. Only Fm is confirmed on tape. Do the same bass-first pass Ernie used, then check it against the reference loop in the chord truth table. Don't hand him "must be diatonic to F minor" as a cross-check — the reference chart's fourth chord breaks that rule on purpose, and the break is the interesting part.
🔁Free continuity win: "Children" from Lesson 4 is also in F minor. Same key, same four flats. Say it out loud — it makes the second song feel like territory he already owns.

② Craft — the part nobody has taught him~12 min

Playing with a singer and a drummer

🥁Lock to the drummer, not to yourself. He has never played with a rhythm section. The single most useful instruction: when you and the drummer disagree, the drummer is right. Demo it — play with him and deliberately drift, make him find you.
🎤Leave the vocal alone. Ernie's whole-notes-under-the-singer point is correct and worth reinforcing physically: register matters as much as rhythm. Get his right hand out of the singer's range and keep the busy playing for the intro.
🎬Count it off. He has never counted a band in. Four beats, at the tempo you actually want, out loud. Make him do it for both songs until it's boring.
🏁Intros and endings are decisions, not accidents. Decide both, now, for both songs, and write them on the chart: how it starts, who cues it, how it ends, and what the last chord is. This is the most common way an under-rehearsed set falls apart.
👂This is his stated life goal. "Sit down, hear a singer, follow them anywhere." Name that connection explicitly — Sept 11 is the first real instance of the thing he came to you for.

③ Groove — where his own goal lives~10 min

Put the sixteenth grid inside "Golden"

🥁Ernie handed you the thesis: "the rhythmic things that you play really defines whether it becomes R&B." That is exactly your 1-e-&-a grid, and nobody has yet joined the two.
🎶Same homework, new chords. His Lesson 4 deliverable was rhythm inside 6-5-4-1. Swap in C · G · D · Em and it becomes gig practice instead of an exercise — same skill, immediate payoff, and it stops the show prep from erasing the curriculum.
🎹Two versions of every song section. Whole notes for under the vocal; the pushed sixteenth pattern for the intro. He should be able to switch between them on your call.
⚠️Guard the downside. If the rhythm destabilises the chords, the chords win. Blocky and in time beats groovy and lost on Sept 11 — and tell him that's a temporary ruling, not a verdict on his playing.

④ Recovery — the skill that actually saves the gig~8 min

What to do when he gets lost on stage

🧭Teach him where "1" is. The song form he learned from Ernie is the map: if he knows he's in the chorus, he knows which four chords are legal. Getting lost is only fatal if you don't know what section you're in.
🛟The recovery move: drop out, listen, come back in on the 1. Silence for two bars is invisible to an audience. Wrong chords for two bars are not. Drill it — interrupt him mid-song and make him rejoin.
🎯Give him a bail-out note. The root of the key held in the left hand is almost never wrong. C for Golden, F for Blinding Lights.
📄The chart on the stand is allowed — Ernie already gave him that permission and he played more freely with it in front of him. Reinforce it, and make sure the chart is big, legible and marked with the form.
🔂Agree on loop points. If the singer vamps or the ending goes long, he needs to know which four bars to repeat. Decide them in the lesson and write them on the chart.

⑤ Taipei — the plan he takes with him~10 min

What he drills, alone, until September 5

💻Solve the playback problem first — it's blocking everything else. He has no DAW and no multitrack player, so the stems are currently useless to him. Ernie owes him a recommendation; don't wait on it. Any simple multitrack app will do, or bounce him four separate audio files he can play against.
🎧Endorse his own protocol — play with the bass, then be the bass, then play against the drums alone. He designed it unprompted; naming it back to him as "your method" is worth more than a better one you invent.
🐢Daily, slow, both songs, hands together. Ernie's rule stands: record tempo is motivation, not practice.
🎥Ask for a video midway through Taipei. Two and a half weeks unsupervised is how wrong fingerings become permanent. One clip of each song around Aug 27 costs him nothing and lets you correct before he lands.
🗓️Sep 5–11 is the only rehearsal window. Whatever isn't playable when he lands has to be cut, so tell him now what "playable" means: the chords, in time, in the right order, without stopping.

📋 Open items

Things only you can move

🎤 Cast the singer

Still not booked, and it's the longest pole. Ernie's warning was flat: "Golden is not a very easy vocal." Poseidon's fallback is his own sister, who apparently knows the song. Whoever it is needs to be at a rehearsal, not just at the dinner.

Greg

🔑 Confirm the performance key

Ernie's chart is in C major, which suits Poseidon's hands. Whether it suits the singer is unknown until the singer exists. There's also a garbled exchange early in the Lesson 5 tape about transposing something up, with your name attached — worth a memory check.

Greg + singer

❓ Marco

Named twice in the first twenty seconds of Lesson 5 and never again — "I'm going to hit him up. I think he's on tour with Mohini." Instrument and role never stated on tape — find out who Poseidon thinks is covering drums before assuming that chair is filled.

Greg

📅 Book an actual rehearsal

Between Sep 5 and Sep 11, with the singer and the drummer in the same room. Poseidon has never played with a band. A first rehearsal on the night of the dinner is the one genuinely avoidable failure mode here.

Greg

📦 Chase Ernie for the assets

He promised the separated "Golden" stems, chord charts for both songs, and a simple multitrack player recommendation. The stems are the backbone of the assigned practice method — without them, the Taipei plan degrades to playing along with the finished record.

Greg → Ernie

🎛️ Decide the arrangement

Full form or a shortened version? Which sections, how many choruses, who solos, how it ends. With six days of rehearsal, a trimmed arrangement played confidently beats the full record played nervously. Make the cut before he lands, not after.

Greg

🅿️ Deliberately postponed

The curriculum threads, parked until after September 11

None of this is dropped — it's paused, on purpose, because a real performance in front of his family outranks a ladder. Pick it back up on September 12 and tell him that's the plan so it doesn't feel abandoned.

♯ Sharp-side keys — D, A, E; never visited 🔀 G♭ = F♯ enharmonics — flagged in L3, three lessons overdue 🌑 The diminished ladder — he has asked twice 🎚️ The mode ladder — landed in L4, not revisited since 🗺️ De-anchoring from C — still counts up from C to find a 6 ➗ Slash chords — found a C/G by ear in L3, never formalised 🎹 Extensions on purpose — 7 · 9 · 11 · 13, systematically 🚶 Passing tones & walking bass — he asked; Ernie gated it 🎼 "Let It Be" in 12 keys — standing since L2 🎯 6-5-4-1 through five keys — L4 homework, ungraded 🎵 Left-hand triads — owed since the L3 plan

🎯 The two that shouldn't wait

The major/minor test. Cheap, thirty seconds, and it fixes the exact thing that stopped him hearing the F♯: major 3rd is four half-steps, minor 3rd is three. Fold it into the verification block rather than treating it as theory.
Passing tones, in one narrow dose. He asked for them twice in his own words and left without them. A single walk-up into the 1 of each song would satisfy the curiosity, sound like the record, and cost nothing — provided the block chords are already solid.

The curriculum is parked. This one is show prep.

What changed while you were out

Where he is after Lesson 5

✓ Solid / landed with Ernie

△ Gaps found in Lesson 5

The chord truth table

Lesson 6 — get the show playable

Pin down both songs, at the piano, against the records

Playing with a singer and a drummer

Put the sixteenth grid inside "Golden"

What to do when he gets lost on stage

What he drills, alone, until September 5

Things only you can move

🎤 Cast the singer

🔑 Confirm the performance key

❓ Marco

📅 Book an actual rehearsal

📦 Chase Ernie for the assets

🎛️ Decide the arrangement

The curriculum threads, parked until after September 11

Lesson notes

🎹 Greg's notes

🎓 Poseidon's notes