Play Guitar by Ear, Episode 7

By Darrin Koltow

Identifying harmonies

We've covered a lot of material in the Playing by Ear saga, focusing mostly on learning how to play melodies by ear. We also touched on rhythm in the last episode. Now it's time to figure out harmonies "by ear," which is more satisfying than a hole-in-one and successfully parallel parking in Manhattan - combined.

I put quotations around the "by ear," because when you figure out harmonies to a melody, you use much more than just your physical ears and your sense of hearing. You use your knowledge of chord progressions, how each note sounds against a particular chord; and what harmonies *you* would create if you were the composer of the tune.

Applying all these related sets of knowledge to figure out chords might be called "Looking at the Big Picture of music," but we can also continue to call it learning chords or harmonies "by ear," and wink at each other as we say this. And quit winking at me; you look silly.

Strategies for identifying harmonies

Let's talk about some of these strategies for getting your "ear" (wink, wink) to pick out harmonies. First, I want to correct a slight untruth, fib, fabrication I unconsciously dished out in the last episode. I implied that you can't pick out the individual notes of a harmony because when you play more than one note at a time, all notes get glommed together into a whole new sound. That's only true some of the time, specifically, when Jupiter is in retrograde and Venus eclipses the giant asteroid that will soon end life as we know it, including those free AOL CDs I keep getting in the mail. Where was I?

Oh, yes: my untruth about picking out the notes of a chord. You *can* often do it. That is, besides hearing the melody of a tune, you can often pick out other notes that are happening beneath it. The most important of those other notes is the bass. When I say "most important," I mean it's (often) the quickest, most direct route to produce the chord name. In other words:

==> *The bass note is often, especially in rock and pop tunes, the root of the chord you're trying to figure out* <==

Okay, cut that sentence out and put it where you can see it, so you realize how easy that makes your work to play chords by ear. Then, go and listen to your favorite pop or rock tune so you can prove this for yourself. If you want a crystal clear example of how the bass note is the chord root, listen to a Creedence Clearwater Revival tune like "Proud Mary."

The way this works is as follows: after you get the melody of the tune, go for the "bass melody," the bass line. Pay special attention to the first and third beats of a measure if a tune is in 4/4 time (or the beats given the most emphasis). If you get a bass note of C, for example, and the part of the song you're working in is in Bb major, assume the chord you're hearing — if *there* is a chord there — is some form of C minor. It might also be a C7, if you're going to F7 after that.

What do you need to know to use this method? You need to know the major scale. And you need to know the chords that are most commonly built on each note of the major scale. For example, in C major, the chords that go with each note are as follows:

C major, D minor, E minor, F major, G7, A minor, B diminished

This pattern of chord types — major, minor, minor, etc. — is easy to memorize. It's the same for all major keys. Here it is using Roman numerals

I major, ii minor, iii minor, IV major, V dominant, vi minor, vii diminished

And you also need to know the key center that you're working in. Keep in mind that key centers often shift in tunes. However, even though a key center may shift, the melody will sometimes stay to just one key. We'll go into determining the key center later on in this series. For now, count on this: the more frequently you learn new melodies by ear, the quicker you will get at identifying a melody's key centers.

If any of this is confusing you, remember this one basic guideline: often, the note being played in the bass will be the root of the chord that's playing.

More strategies for picking out chords

You'll want more strategies than this for figuring out chords, though, because sometimes you can't hear the bass; sometimes there *is* no bass; and sometimes you want to challenge yourself by learning a tune by a group like Rush, whose bass lines are highly inventive and melodic. In these cases, you'll want to stop listening for the bass and start applying other methods to get to the harmony.

One way is to learn chord progressions. *Lot's* of 'em. The site Moneychords.com has excellent articles describing many popular progressions. Included in some of these articles is a list of songs that you can find the progressions in. This is super useful stuff. If you're committed to working out harmonies by ear, give yourself a head start now — before you even have a tune you want to play by ear — and play through each of the progressions on the Moneychords.com site. I bet that while you're playing many of these progressions, your will recognize songs that the progressions are found in.

If you were to learn each of the progressions on the Moneychords.com site, and then go even further and transpose the progressions to at least two or three other keys, your ear would be able to pick out the chord progressions to new songs *much* more rapidly than it previously could. If you think that learning all these progressions is a lot of work, you'll think otherwise when you start playing them and seeing how much fun it is.

Let's look at another strategy for identifying chords "by ear." (wink)

Harmonic intervals

Do you remember a few lessons ago when we learned about melodic intervals? You know: an interval is the difference in pitch between two notes. Learning how to recognize this difference by ear, between one note and the note that comes before it, is essential to playing *melodies* by ear. Now that we're talking about identifying harmonies and chords by ear, we have work to do with intervals here as well.

A *harmonic* interval is just like a melodic interval: it's the difference in pitch between two notes. It's different from a melodic interval because the two notes are played at the same time now. You can think of a harmonic interval as a chord with only two notes.

So, how do harmonic intervals help us pick out chords by ear? What are chords made of? You can think of them as notes but you can also think of them as intervals. For example, for an F major chord, there's the interval between the root and the fifth, the interval between the root and the third, and the interval between the third and the fifth. One chord, three intervals. It's dark and we're wearing sunglasses. Sorry — wrong movie.

If you then think of any chord as a just a collection of intervals, and you're interested in identifying chords by ear, guess what your next step is going to be? You got it: identifying intervals by ear. Highly cool skill to have. Right up there with cooking in the dark. And what's even cooler is that there are only 12 intervals you'll want to train yourself to identify. Not fifty, not a zillion, like the number of chords you see in some of those chords books that make watching bread rise look exciting. Only 12.

Once you can identify all the intervals by ear, picking out full chords by ear — no matter what kind of crazy extensions they may have — will be easier. I'm not saying it'll be a piece of cake to pick out any chord by ear, but you *will* have more confidence and be more accurate in your chord identification abilities.

Ideas for interval training

Now the $1.98 question: how do you train yourself to identify any interval by ear? There are lots of ways. Recall again the ear trainer from a few episodes ago: good-ear.com. Totally free, highly useful and engaging.

Also, tune up your guitar, and record each interval on a tape. Then, pause a few seconds and say the interval's name. Play back the tape at some random point, listen to the intervals being played, and guess them before the answer is given. Once you can predict the answer because you've memorized the order of the questions, make a new tape.

Okay, enough about harmonic intervals. Let's look at other methods for figuring out chords "by ear" (oink, oink).

Using theory to figure out chords

Don't forget about good old music theory to help you figure out chords. *Anything* you understand about how music works is going to help you put chords that sound good to melodies. Let's go through a few fundamental guidelines that will help us figure out what chords we're hearing — or will at least give us chords that will work and sound good in place of the ones you hear in a recording.

- Guideline or observation one: chords work together with melody notes to make that note sound good, to "dress it up." In fact, *all* notes - melody notes, bass notes, and notes made by drums - are part of the overall harmony.

- Melody notes on the *strong beats* of a bar of music have a tendency to fall on the 1st, 3rd, and 5th, of the underlying harmony — especially the 3rd. The possibility that a melody note will be the chord's 9th, 4th or other degrees is *relatively* small — though exceptions are frequent.

- Most of the time, a tune stays within a key center, though can make brief visits to other key centers — which you'll be able to hear.

- A key center's vii chord and iii chords do show up occasionally, but not nearly as often as the other five chords in a key center: I, ii, IV, V7 and vi

- I call this one "triangulation." The more individual, different notes you can hear, the easier it is to figure out possible chords. For example, if you hear that there's a C in the bass, the top note sung by the singer is an E, and there's a saxophone playing a G somewhere in the middle, it's a good bet you're hearing some kind of C major chord.

- How does the chord make you *feel?* Uneasy, anxious, content, or something else? Chords have "qualities," which we can represent as feelings or states of mind. The major, minor, diminished and augmented triads — the simplest kinds of chords — all have their own, unique feelings.

And I'm feeling now that it's time to end this episode of Playing by Ear (yuk, yuk, wink, wink). In the next episode I believe we may harmonize a Christmas melody, or we may just bake cookies, or maybe rebuild a carburetor. We'll see what strikes our fancy.

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