Being able to hear a song and just name the chords by listening might seem like a
superpower but it's actually a skill just like any other that can be learned with practice.
Unless you're one of the roughly 1 in 50 people who's actually tone deaf ,in which case sorry.
Today i'm going to share with you 5 tips for beginners for how to develop that skill
as well as show you a new ear training app you can use to practice called Chord
Crush which was developed by Hook Theory who are kindly sponsoring this video.
First of all, if you need to use an instrument to double check what you're hearing that's okay.
It's not cheating to use a guitar or piano or whatever else you have
lying around to help you when you're just starting to develop this skill.
Next, learn to hear the root of the chord.
In most pop and contemporary styles the chords used are called triads.
They're called triads because they have three notes.
For example a C major chord is made up of the pitches C, E and G.
The reason we call this chord C major is because the root or home pitch of the chord is C.
That's the note that feels most stable and resolved.
So the first thing you need to be able to do is hear the root of a chord.
Most of the time the root is on the bottom which means if you can hear
what the lowest note of the chord is you are probably hearing the root.
For example here's level 1-1 from Chord Crush.
Even though each chord has three pitches in it,
I'm only listening to what's on the bottom being played by the bass.
So i can hear that the bottom note of this mystery chord
is the same as the bottom note of this one, so they must be the same chord.
It is possible to have a pitch other than the root in the bass.
These are called inversions and you will eventually learn to hear them,
but when you're starting out just focus on root position chords.
Chord Crush doesn't even introduce inversions until World 3 because you
need a strong foundation in root position first.
Once you can pick out the root of your chord you need to be able to hear the tonic of your key.
Tonic is another way of saying home pitch.
So just like how in a chord the root is the fundamental, most stable pitch,
in a key the tonic is the most stable point that everything else revolves around.
In C major the tonic is C.
In F minor the tonic is F.
In Ab major the tonic is Ab.
When you start a challenge in Chord Crush they give you this little key orientation jingle.
The pitch that it resolves to at the end is your tonic or home,
so you need to keep that in your memory.
Every chord that stays in one key will relate in some way to that tonic, but before you
can hear how those chords relate you need to actually be able to pick out what that tonic is.
The next skill to work on is being able to hear major chords versus minor chords.
You've maybe already heard before that major chords are happy and minor chords are sad.
It's a vast oversimplification but as a general rule of thumb it works.
We saw already how the root of a chord is where the chord gets its
letter name from, like A major if the root is A.
It's the third of the chord, or the middle pitch,
that tells us the chord's quality of major or minor.
If it's major, stepping up a major third sounds like this.
And if it's minor, stepping up a minor third sounds like this.
And here are C major and C minor chords back to back.
Like I said, you can think of the major as sounding happy and the minor as sounding sad.
Most songs will use a mix of major and minor chords,
so you need to be able to hear which is which.
So when we listen to this example we can try to identify when the music is
going back and forth between these happy and sad moments.
So now you're listening for the root of the chord, you know how to hear what the tonic
or home pitch of your key is, you can tell the difference between major and minor chords.
It's time for Roman numerals.
"Look Indy, the Roman numerals!"
So the good news is you don't have to actually know what any random chord is,
like "Oh hey that's Bb!"
O don't have perfect pitch. I can't do that.
When we identify chords we're listening for how they relate to the tonic.
The home chord, like a D major chord in the key of D major is called one.
We use Roman numerals for chord degrees just to
separate them from Arabic numerals which are used for scale degrees.
Different schools have different systems,
but generally uppercase Roman numerals are for major chords and lowercase are for minor chords.
So these are the triads of C major, and starting out with that tonic of C we can count our way up
one through seven, making the major chords uppercase and the minor chords lower.
The only catch is that seven chord which is not major and not minor
but something else completely different called diminished.
Diminished chords are so rare in contemporary styles that honestly for now
just don't worry about them.
You can deal with them later.
But other than that rogue seven diminished chord, we have one major, two minor, three minor,
four major, five major, and six minor.
These six chords make up the vast majority of songs in major keys.
It's kind of strange but eventually you'll just
be able to hear the Roman numeral of a chord, like "Oh hey there's a IV chord."
But when you're learning and practicing, you can
count the distance from the root of your chord and the tonic.
For this I find solfege to be incredibly useful.
Solfege is the system of assigning do-re-me syllables to the steps of a scale.
You don't have to learn solfege but that is
what iIused for ear training at Berklee and it worked for me.
So when we are trying to figure out what a chord is we listen
for the root and compare it to our tonic.
So to start let's listen to that key orientation jingle.
So that last note is C, so that's our tonic.
That will be one. Everything else will relate to that.
So let's listen to the whole example.
Now let's try to figure out just what this second chord is.
So I'm hearing the pitch "ba".
So we're going to count from one until we get to "ba". One two three four.
Four, so the note that we're hearing is an F on the bottom.
The root is the f which would make it the four chord and that would be this guy right here.
Now let's listen to the third chord.
So i'm listening for the bottom note.
The bottom note was "ba" so we're going to look for that from one two three four five six "ba".
There it is, so it's the six
it's and it also sounded like a minor chord so that would be six minor.
And now let's listen for the last chord.
Hopefully you can tell that that's the exact same chord as this one.
If you want to check out Chord Crush for yourself I'll put a link in the
description which you can use to get 20% off your first year of Chord Crush Premium.
Besides the puzzles we were doing here which increase in difficulty as you go,
you can also drill into specific chord progressions, try to outdo yourself with
timed challenges, and practice using real songs with clips from YouTube.
And if you want to be able to hear chord progressions that probably means you want to
understand what makes great music sound so good, in which case you should definitely check out
this video here where I use examples from David Bowie and Radiohead, even the Postal Service,
to show how blending major and minor keys can give you different emotional effects.
I actually used Hook Theory's chord database to find the examples in that video
long before we were ever in touch.
Thanks for watching, I'll see you in the next one!