I keep getting asked this question so many times. How do we figure out the chords of a song? Can music theory help us in doing this?
Of course, music theory can help ‘shorten’ the time taken to figure out chords (by using diatonic concepts, once you know the scale of the song etc.), but the fact still remains that we first need to identify the scale or the individual melody notes. And the only way to do that is by developing the ear.
Ear training or the aural skill is perhaps the single biggest ability that any musician needs to work on, to be good in the art (unless of course, if you’re Ludwig van Beethoven, but then he started losing his hearing after 25 so maybe bad example, but you get the point!!!!)
No matter how much music theory you know, the starting point will always involve using your ears and for that, the importance of training this vital organ cannot be undermined.
Ear training is basically defined as the ability to do the following 3 things
1. Being able to listen
2. Being able to comprehend what you just listened to, and
3. Being able to reproduce the same on an instrument – can be a guitar, keyboard or even your own voice as vocals are an instrument too
Now there are 2 levels that a musician can reach with a sufficiently trained ear
1. Perfect pitch/ Absolute pitch - This is when the individual has the ability to recognize the pitch of any note. So basically, they can tune their guitar to a standard EADGBE tuning without any external help. Imagine!
Also when I say identify any note, I don’t just mean a single note. I have come across gifted people who can identify 4 note chords with just one listen and spell out all the 4 notes. A pretty fascinating skill to have, but maybe not all that essential to be a good musician.
Which brings us to the 2nd level of a trained ear that most of us mortals can strive to achieve
2. Relative pitch – This is when the individual has the ability to recognize the pitch of any note provided he/she can compare it to a reference note. So you tell them what an ‘E’ sounds like, and they can then tune their guitars to the standard EADGBE tuning using that as a base
Once again, you don’t need to be develop perfect pitch to be a good musician. But can you survive without developing relative pitch? The answer is a big NO.
But fear not! That’s precisely why I am here. To guide you folks and help you in bringing some much needed ear training in your musical journey. Here’s what you need to do.
1. Make a plan to consciously work on ear training and stick to it – The most important step if you were to ask me. Perhaps one of the two most unsexy practice modules for any aspiring musician, the other one was this and I wrote a nice article on that
2. Which brings us to point #2. Versus spending a lot of time on each ear training session, a better approach would be to devote more regular sessions of a short duration each. So don’t do one weekly ear training session lasting 2 hours but 6 sessions of 20 minutes each day. You don’t want to start hating the already unsexy module with a long-ass session, right?
3. Start with something simple – Try to sing/ hum a simple melody, your favourite song for instance. And by singing/ humming, I mean in the same scale as the original. Songs in the beginning just help us stay motivated versus practicing scales etc.
4. Practice intervals – In case you don’t know what an interval is, check this article out. The goal here would be to calculate the exact interval when you hear any 2 notes which would need a lot of practice. Usually song association helps a lot in this as I had explained in that article
5. Finally you can start practicing scales and chord progressions
And soon enough, you will see (or rather hear in this case) the difference. You will begin to not only understand music better, but also appreciate those little things that composers had painstakingly introduced in their music but ignored by untrained ears.
And that is beautiful moment. I often like to give the example of this Bollywood song called “Tere Sang Yaara” from the movie Rustom. The chorus has a |G C Am G| progression the first time around but has a change from the first G to a Bm which brings such a fantastic flavor to the same melody. Check this video out, for more details.
I had this idea some months back to make my audience (all guitarists) start practicing ear training in a fun way. Since we guitar players all aspire to play lead guitar, and I was anyways planning to do lots of videos on licks/ guitar riffs, I figured why not marry the 2 ideas and do a weekly video called “Lick of the week”. Only this time, it won’t be a video but an audio that would get released every Tuesday with the solution revealed on Friday. To cater to all levels of trained ears, I would play the lick thrice – Normal speed, slower speed and really slow speed. Not only would the listener get to practice training the ear but by the end of it, would also have a ready lick that could be used in solos. Neat huh! Check this video for more info.
So there you have it. Importance of ear training and some cool tips to get you started in the journey to be a Son of a Pitch!