Working a song out by ear, when you are starting

1. First, a way to hear the same two seconds forty times

Everything below depends on one piece of equipment, and it is not your instrument. It is whatever lets you hear the same two seconds over and over, without touching anything between repeats, and preferably slower than it was recorded.

That sounds like a detail. It is the whole job. A chord you cannot name at full speed is often obvious at seventy per cent of the tempo, and a chord you have heard once is a guess while a chord you have heard forty times is a fact.

What to look for in a tool

Roughly in order of how much it matters:

• Two loop points and a repeat that does not stop. Usually labelled A and B. The part that matters is that it repeats without you pressing anything, because the moment you reach for the mouse you lose the thread of what you were listening for.
• Speed change that keeps the pitch. Check this before you commit to anything. In the interface it will be called something like "preserve pitch" or "keep pitch". A speed control that drops the pitch as it slows down, the way a tape machine does, is worse than useless for this job: the notes you are trying to name move while you are trying to name them.
• A waveform you can zoom into, so you can put a loop point on the beat rather than near it, plus a nudge control for moving the points in small steps.
• A separate fine tuning control, in cents. That one is for a problem further down this page.
• It works offline, on whatever device sits nearest the instrument.

If you already own a recording program of any kind, it does all of that and you need nothing else. If you do not, there are players built specifically for practice, on phones and on desktops. Shop against the list above rather than against a brand name.

2. Find the melody first, even to play the chords

This is the step people skip, and then wonder why the chords are taking all afternoon. Find the melody first even if you have no intention of ever playing it.

Three reasons, and they compound.

It tells you the key. Collect the notes of the first eight bars and see which major scale they all fit inside. One sharp and you are in G major or E minor, and you decide between those two by hearing where the phrases come to rest. That one question closes off most of the wrong answers before you have played a single chord.

Its notes are mostly chord notes. Not all of them, but most, and particularly the ones on strong beats and the ones held. If you know the melody note over a bar you know a note of the chord underneath it, and you know it from the top, which is the hardest place to guess from.

It tells you where the bar lines are. You cannot place a chord change if you do not know where the bars are, and it is the melody that makes the phrasing audible.

How to actually do it

• Sing it before you play it. Singing forces you to commit to a pitch. Hunting for it on the instrument lets you hedge, and hedging is what turns twenty minutes into two hours. You do not have to sing well; you have to sing definitely.
• Two bars at a time. Loop them. Sing the phrase back until you can do it with the record stopped.
• Find the first note only. Then move by interval from there: up a tone, down a third. Searching the instrument afresh for every note is a different and much slower skill.
• Write it down as you go, even roughly. Note names on a scrap of paper are enough to stop you re-solving the same bar twice.

3. Then the chords: root, top, colour

Now the harmony. The order below is not arbitrary: it is the order of how audible things are, from the note you can definitely hear to the note you have to deduce.

Step one: the root

The bass is the easiest thing in a mix to hear, and most beginners believe the opposite. It is loud, it is low, it moves slowly, and it usually has that whole region of the spectrum to itself. Nothing is competing with it.

Hum along with the bass first, then go and find the hum on your instrument. Or play a candidate note along with the recording and listen for the beating: two pitches close but not identical wobble against each other, and the wobble stops when you are right. That is a far finer test than asking yourself whether it sounds about right.

Do the roots for a whole section before you go any further, because a bass line walks and the walk tells you things. Roots moving up in fourths, a run like E, A, D, G, C, is a chain of dominants. A root that steps down a semitone into the next chord is very often a dominant approaching it.

Step two: the highest note you can hear

After the bass, the most exposed note of a chord is the one on top. It is what a listener hears as the chord's character, and it is usually the note carrying the colour: a ninth, a seventh, a sixth.

Get that and you have the outside of the chord. Root and top note together already narrow the candidates to a handful.

Step three: the colour

Only now go after the third and the seventh, and test rather than search.

• Major or minor third? Play both against the record. A wrong third is not subtle, it sounds actively wrong, and one repeat settles it.
• Is there a seventh, and is it major or minor? A wrong seventh is much subtler; it tends to sound thin or hollow rather than wrong, and this is where the loop earns its keep. If you need reminding which is the default, part 2 of this series is about exactly that.
• If you cannot hear a third at all, the chord may genuinely not have one: a power chord, a suspension, a two note synth. Writing C5 or Csus4 is more accurate than inventing a third that is not there.

Then let function choose between the candidates

Often two or three chords all fit the notes you have found. What decides is what the chord is doing in the song.

Suppose you are in F major and you have found three roots: G, then C, then F. Before identifying a single third you can write Gm7, C7, Fmaj7, because in F major the second degree is minor, the fifth is dominant and the first is major, and that particular three chord run is the commonest progression in the repertoire. Then go and check whether the record agrees. Usually it does. When it does not, the disagreement is the interesting part of the song and it earns another few repeats.

That is not cheating. It is using the fact that harmony has habits, which is the whole reason part 2 has a table of scale degrees in it.

When you are stuck

• Move on and come back. The bars on either side constrain the one you cannot hear, sometimes down to a single possibility.
• Play it low and sparse. Root and third only, in the octave below middle C. Two notes are much easier to compare against a record than five.
• Do the whole bass line first for the section, and then come back for the chords with the roots already written.
• Ask what the melody note is over that bar, and which chords of the key contain it. That usually leaves two candidates instead of twelve.
• Move the loop points. Start the loop half a beat earlier. A change you cannot place is very often a change you are looping straight across.
• Stop. Twenty to thirty minutes is about the limit. After that you stop hearing differences and start confirming whatever you already wrote down, which is worse than stopping.

The four traps

A bass note that is not the root

The commonest single cause of a wrong chart. The bass plays the third, or the fifth, or a passing note on beat one. Or it sits on one pedal note for eight bars while the harmony moves above it.

Symptom: the chord you wrote is a real chord and it sounds right in the bass and wrong in the middle.

Test: play your candidate with the bass note you heard at the bottom, then again with the root at the bottom. If the second version sounds like the record and the first sounds like the record plus something odd, you have found an inversion, and it wants a slash. Write C/E, not Em.

The melody helps here, and so does the bass note before and after: a bass note that is passed through on the way somewhere else is not a root.

A chord that changes on the half bar

Very common in soul, gospel, bossa and a great deal of pop. Two chords in a bar, or a chord that arrives on the last eighth of the bar before the one it belongs to, which is called an anticipation and is everywhere.

Symptom: your chord is right at the start of the bar and wrong by the end of it.

Fix: halve the loop. If two bars are confusing, loop one; if one bar is confusing, loop two beats. And count out loud while it plays, because a half bar change is much easier to place once it has a number attached to it.

A recording that is not at concert pitch

Tape machines drifted. Bands tuned to 442, or to whatever the piano in the room was doing. Records were nudged faster in mastering to sound brighter. Digital transfers were made at the wrong speed. Guitars were tuned down a semitone or a whole tone for the singer.

Symptom, and it is unmistakable once you know it: everything you find is consistently a little sharp or a little flat against your instrument, in the same direction, all the way through the song. Or the key comes out as something implausible for the instruments you can hear, a horn section in B major or a guitar band in D flat.

Two fixes, and use both.

• Tune your instrument to the record rather than the record to your instrument. That is what a fine tuning control in cents is for, and it is why it was on the shopping list at the top of this page.
• If the offset is close to a semitone, work out which of the two explanations it is. Guitar bands play in E, A, D and G. If your answer is E flat and what you can hear sounds like an E shape on a guitar, the guitar is down a semitone and the song is in E.

Then write the chart in the sensible key and put a note at the top saying how far off the recording is. Your future self will thank you, and so will anyone you hand it to.

Notes that are sounding but are not in the chord

What you are hearing is not one instrument. A guitar plays three notes, a keyboard four, a horn section five, and the chord is the sum of all of it plus whatever the singer is doing. Some of those notes are melody, some are a countermelody, some are a note held over from the previous bar that has not caught up yet.

So the question is never "what notes are sounding". It is "what harmony are these notes sitting on". If a note refuses to fit anything sensible, check whether it is moving: a note that arrives late and leaves early is decoration, and decoration does not go in the chart.

Last: write it down

An afternoon of ear work that leaves nothing you can read next week was an afternoon of ear training. That is a good thing to have done, and it is not the same thing as learning the song.

Chord Analyser has a chord chart editor in it, and one part of it is worth knowing about for exactly this job: you can enter a chord by playing it on a piano keyboard or placing it on a guitar neck, and the app names it. That is useful at precisely the moment you can hear a chord and cannot say what it is called. The finished chart exports as a PDF. There is a longer post about how that editor works if you want the detail.

It also has a beta feature that listens through the microphone and names a chord you play on a real instrument. Its own disclaimer is the right one to repeat here: it identifies individual chords, and it is not designed to transcribe a piece of music. It will not do this job for you. It will settle an argument about one chord.

Whatever you write it in, keep the chart and the recording together. Stage Player will hold a PDF against a track and turn the pages from markers you place, if that is what you already use on stage; the manual covers how. A music stand and a bulldog clip work too.