I want to be able to figure out chord progressions by ear

October 29, 2010 12:56 PM

Brainstorming ear-stretching exercises.

I want to work on figuring out things by ear as much as possible without having to always use my guitar or a keyboard as reference. Most book and CD-based ear training manuals, however, are based on concert music melodies and conventions, and they strike me as dry and dreary.


So I have this idea to sit down and listen to a rock tune and try to jot down an educated guess, whether it be part of the chord progression, or the bass line. Maybe I'd have to listen to the whole song a few times. Then, I could allow myself to pick up my guitar and see what I got right and what I got wrong. Rinse and repeat.


It seems like that could work kind of like flashcards, right? Once I realize what I'm always guessing wrong.


So my question for you out there is--I would love it if you all could brainstorm any ideas to add to this or maybe completely different ideas toward this same goal? Do you think it would work? What have you done?
posted by umbĂș (8 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite

Several things make this a lot easier:

1. Learning relative intervals, so you can tell if one note is (say) a third above another, or a fifth.

2. Learning do-re-mi, which is similar to 1

3. Listening to the bass line with 1 or 2 in mind. If it isn't playing the tonic on the downbeat, it's playing *something*, a third or a fifth or a seventh, so that should narrow it down on the chords that are hard to figure out.

4. Getting used to the standard tricks. The sound of tonic, dominant and subdominant, major and minor. The sound of certain very simple changes like I-iii, I-III, I-VI, I-vi, ii-V-I and so on.

If you have all of that about 80% of all pop music can be written down more or less on first hearing.

On the other hand I have a REALLY REALLY good ear for this stuff and I'm still sometimes completely foxed by things that should be easy. For example, I tried to transcribe this a few weeks ago and I absolutely had to resort to the guitar and keyboard to figure out the change from the intro to the first chord he sings over.
posted by unSane at 1:54 PM on October 29, 2010


(Oh, yeah, and there are a few other ones too, like learning the sound of chords moving over a pedal bass. Try playing a C in the bass on the piano and then playing different chords over it... a very common trick in pop music and one that can make chords a bit baffling if you're working off the bass)
posted by unSane at 1:56 PM on October 29, 2010


1. Learning relative intervals, so you can tell if one note is (say) a third above another, or a fifth.

I'm awful at chord recognition, but as far as intervals go, this is neat: a list of songs arranged by the interval between the first two notes. If an interval matches the beginning of the Star Trek theme, for instance, it's a minor 7th. Handy!
posted by Karlos the Jackal at 5:55 PM on October 29, 2010


I have the opposite problem - I can work out what chords are being played by ear, but I don't know what they're called and stuff like tonics etc are, in my blissful ignorance, things that one drinks with gin. So generally (there are, naturally, exceptions) I can pick up a guitar after hearing something and play it back to you, but I don't think it's a big deal. I don;t realy know how I do it but I suspect it's just that I've been playing for many, many years; most rock and pop songs are basically simple and formulaic and the patterns are therefore fairly predictable; and I have a good ear to start with. I've been around sooooo long I've kind of heard it all!! And reading that back it sounds dreadfully arrogant - not meant that way at all.

I'm not sure umbu why you're so keen to do this though - isn't it just easier to pick up a geetar and work it out? What advantage will it give you? It doesn't make any material difference to me.
posted by MajorDundee at 2:29 AM on October 30, 2010


Major, I remember *not* being able to do this and it used to frustrate me enormously hunting round for chords on the geetar... just as it did recently with the song I linked to above. Being able to do it by ear enormously speeds up the process of transcribing something on an instrument.

I remember once being in a recording studio with a very good engineer who was listening to a song of ours (which he didn't know at all) and started making suggestions like "how about a little organ riff when you come down off the dominant" and it impressed me so much that he was able to analyse a song harmonically like that on the fly that it sent me back to the theory books. In retrospect there wasn't anything special about it at all but it had a big impact on me at the time.
posted by unSane at 5:34 AM on October 30, 2010


In case this is of any use to anyone, a quick guide to the vocabulary and function of the chords. I probably made a few idiotic errors so feel free to correct or comment.

The key chords in the key of C major. Upper case roman numerals mean a major chord, lower case mean minor.
C  - I   - Tonic
Dm - ii  - Supertonic
Em - III - Mediant
F  - IV  - Subdominant - Resolves to I ('amen' cadence)
G  - V   - Dominant - Resolves to I (perfect cadence)
Am - vi  - Submediant - aka Relative minor
B  - VII - Subtonic
Then there are the secondary dominants. These are chords which are the dominant of one of the above chords, and will often resolve to it in a progression. They also often have tones which lie outside the tonic scale so are used for colour. They often include the flattened 7th.

In C major the commonest are:

A7 - VI7 - Dominant of ii -- example progression in C najor is A7 - Dm - G
D7 - II7 - Dominant of V -- example progression in C is D7 - G7 - C
E7 - III7 - Dominant of vi -- example progression in C is E7 - Am - D7 - G7 - C

You can do exactly the same thing in a minor key although it gets a bit more complicated as in pop music the dominant and subdominant can be either major or minor -- the i-IV7 (Cm-F7) change is particularly common.

A lot of progressions use fragments of the 'circle of fifths', which is just a bunch of dominants stacking up like dominoes, for example:

A7 - D7 - G7 - C7 - F7 - Bb7 and so on. Or with some minors thrown in:

A7 - Dm - G7 - Cm - F7 - Bbm etc

Once you hear this it will stick out like a sore thumb to you.

Another very common trick is to modulate into the relative minor. So a song which begins in C will have little section in Am before returning to C.

Bridges often modulate temporarily into a new key For example in DON'T FOOL ME which I just posted, the bridge just modulates the main progression from D into C. In YOU AND SAN FRANCISCO it modulates from D into F. And so on... and you can bet it gets back into the home key (the tonic) by getting back to the dominant first.

So figuring out what key it's in, what keys (if any) it temporarily modulates into, and so on, all really help.

One final trick is to listen out for major - minor changes (eg E - G#m - A - Am). These crop up massively in the Beatles and I probably over-use them as well, but they are very easy to hear once you know the sound.

Sometimes you get a chord which is genuinely impossible to work out. For example the mighty mystery opening chord of HARD DAY'S NIGHT. These often turn out to have either weird tunings or several instruments playing simultaneously.

I can tell you the hardest chord I've ever worked out. It's the chord Alex Chilton plays on THE BALLAD OF EL GOODO at the end of the 'at my side is God' line. It was a red letter day when I nailed that one. And no cheating by looking at tabs!
posted by unSane at 6:21 AM on October 30, 2010 [4 favorites]


I'd say pretty much the same stuff that unSane said in that first comment.

The only way to not have to reach for the guitar or keyboard is to familiarize yourself, one little building block at a time, with how this stuff sounds. You have to get better at hearing and guessing, of saying "oh, that little bit there, that feels like a move from the I to the iii" (or from G to Bm if you want to skip the theory framing), and getting comfortable with that kind of on-the-fly analysis.

The nice thing is that a lot of the hardware for this sort of thing actually exists in our brains, so barring some outlier problem with your aural processing abilities at a physiological level it is more a matter of practice than anything. These mappings between a specific sort of change in audio stimulus and the idea of a chordal transition are a matter of focusing on and labeling things are brains already know how to do in a naive sense.

So I think the "flash card" idea is the right one, though the details I don't know how you'd approach. Listening to music while reading a chord chart along with it is one thing you could definitely try. Be attentive to which changes you can nail and which ones you're iffy on and which ones just totally baffle you. The bafflers you should probably just set aside and come back to periodically; the iffy stuff is what you should focus on.

And those flash cards are all about the move from one chord to another. Doesn't matter, at the root, what the first chord or the second chord literally are: C to Em and F# to A#m may have very different notes in them but they feel the same. That tonic-to-mediant I-to-iii move, in theory terms, just feels the way it does. To me it feels like O Superman, or Affording Good Beheadings. I love Karlos' list of songs link up thread; something that did something similar for memorable chordal sequences in songs would be neat as well.

I'm a huge believer in learning basic music theory if only for the way it makes it easier to think about tonality and chordal movement independent of a specific key. When you can think of a song as "I to IV to vi to ii7 to V", you no longer have to transpose a chord at a time—you can just think "okay, it's in F, so it's F to Bb to Dm to Gm7 to C". And you can communicate these ideas to other people similarly conversant with much less friction or confusion.

I spent years of my childhood playing the piano pretty much only in the key of C or Am, because that was easier than learning the black keys; guitar changed a lot of that for me because suddenly there were a lot of keys that I could play several chords in, and the hard bits changed from key to key, and so I ended up slowly getting comfortable with transposition to just whatever worked and nailing down the harder chord forms incrementally. And I got comfortable with this theory-driven key-independent way of thinking about song structure as the relative movement from one chord to another by some interval.

And so when I came back to keyboard in the last few years I've been a lot more comfortable forcing myself to play in just any key whatsoever. I still get lost a bit sometimes physically in the lots-of-accidentals territory, but now that I think of songs independent of the key the physical clumsy-fingers thing is the only real roadblock. (This was handy when I was in a band with a guy who would change his mind about capo position every practice, and that experience really helped push my playing in lots of keys. Sure it's just a slip of the capo up one fret for him; for me it's the difference between blissful C and horrid C#.)

Anyway, I think it's doable. It feels like something that Just Happened for me, but in truth it happened over a period of years and I didn't so much notice at the time or have at least forgotten my annoyance in retrospect, and I think that's because I was just busy having fun and/or taking myself seriously with the music itself. All this skillbuilding happened when I was mostly distracted by dorking around. Which is convenient for me, but doesn't help you directly, but the key thing there is that finding some way to incorporate this learning into what you already enjoy doing musically would be ideal. Less like homework.

stuff like tonics etc are, in my blissful ignorance, things that one drinks with gin.

Major, there are far worse things to do in ignorance.
posted by cortex at 1:10 PM on November 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


I know this is sort of an old thread, but a simple answer to this: learn every song you ever play in every key. Always.
posted by koeselitz at 10:31 AM on November 23, 2010


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