If you’ve ever tried figuring out how to play your favorite songs WITHOUT a tab or chord chart, you know how hard and frustrating it can be. Developing your musical ear makes learning your favorite songs SO much easier.
In this series, Nate Savage & Chelsea Amber are going to go through the essential steps to help you figure out songs by ear. The 8 steps are:
#1 – Active Listening
#2 – Matching Pitch
#3 – Identify Root Notes
#4 – Decipher Major & Minor Chords
#5 – Song Form
#6 – Identifying Chord Progression
#7 – Finding the Key
#8 – Practicing
This lesson covers the first step: active listening. By the end of the video, you’ll know what active listening is, and how simple it is to put to practice. The better you get at active listening, the easier you’ll find learning your favorite songs!
Keep in mind: some have been gifted a more developed musical ear, so this will come more naturally to them, while others may need to work a little harder at developing it. Either way, it’s something that anyone who has the ability to hear can do! And, like everything, it takes practice.
To help with your active listening – close your eyes…. that will cut out any visual distractions
why would you start with someone telling you the key? when you learn by ear you’ll need to determine the key yourself. one way to do this is to play pentatonic scale over the song and find one that ‘fits’. i found this to be effective