How to Easily Learn Songs by Ear

we're World War II World War II World War third world war hey what's going on guys Brian from zombie guitar here here in this video I want to teach you how to quickly learn songs by ear so you can learn just the rhythm you can learn the leads you can learn you can take a song and you can turn it into an acoustic version of the song even if it's not even a guitar song at all basically you can do all that stuff pretty easily and I'm gonna show you how to do all that stuff in the video so a lot of people think this is some kind of amazing skill that only certain people are born with people that don't play music look at me and they're like wow how did you learn that song so quick well you just have to understand some fundamentals all of which I'm going to show you in this video so before I get started I always like to say just check out my website zombie guitar if you like my videos here on YouTube all of my lessons are freely available on my website which is zombie guitar calm and everything's much more organized every lesson comes with the video that is on YouTube but it also comes with a written lesson it also comes with all the diagrams and all the charts and stuff that I use in my videos so every lesson is much more in-depth and detailed and organized when you view it from the site then I have the full access members area where you can access all my courses and my thousands of video backing tracks and whatnot so it's a really cool website I think you'll like it check that out with that said let's get started with the lesson all right so there's five main parts to this process of learning a song by ear these parts aren't in any necessary order but I'm going to just tell you all five first and then we're going to go over each one in detail so they are number one you want to quickly determine the key of the song and you want to use your pentatonic position number one to help you do so it's a very very quick way that you can instantly find the key in a matter of seconds so that's part that's the first thing the second thing is you want to determine what type of chord progression it is so even if it's a song that has a lot of fills a lot of leads even if it's not on guitar there's usually an underlying chord progression that the song is and you just want to be able to figure that out very quickly as well using the circle of fifths to help you do so so that's the second thing the third thing is you want to be able to transpose from you know one key to another key to suit your voice if you're singing or you know if you your band wants to play in a different key or whatever you want to be able to quickly transpose into another key so that's the third thing the fourth thing is you want to quickly be able to determine any out of key chords okay so once you know what key you're in sometimes you're going to notice that there's random chords that aren't part of the key you want to be able to quickly determine what those are as well just the forth thing and then the fifth thing is you want to be able to use the key scale to help you figure out any leads or any solos or any fills or anything like that alright so those are the five parts so let's look at each of those in detail now all right so I'm going to use Guns'n'Roses November rain as my example to teach these concepts and this is a good song example because number one it's played on the piano so you know it's not even a guitar song until the solo kicks in part five of this video is going to be how to you know go about learning the solo by ear but um you know so it's a piano song first of all number two Guns and Roses Tunes everything one half step down from standards so all the guitars are one half step down this guitar is in standard so it's not matched up with the key of what kinds of roses are doing so let's just say I'm just you know some guy that wants to learn how to quickly strum some acoustic chords make up a acoustic version of November rain and then go and play the open mic night tonight and I want to just quickly figure out the chord progression and I'm gonna do so by ear so the first thing I do is I use pentatonic position number one to help me figure out the key very quickly so there's only 12 possible pentatonic position number ones that will work over the song so if I started out you know in the open position here that's one of the possible 12 I could start off on the first to fourth fret that's another possibility I could start on the second to the fifth fret [Music] all right and I would just keep trying each one until I find the one that works once I got up to the twelfth fret here I'm just repeating myself I'm just an octave higher at that point so it's the same thing as playing open so somewhere in between the open pentatonic position number one range and up here there's going to be one that fits perfectly over the you know over the song and that's going to tell me what key I'm in so let me just show you how I do that real quick he's an example [Music] [Music] okay so as you saw there pentatonic position number one worked best when played from the 4th to the 7th fret range so none of these really sounded good then once I got here everything just clicked that was noodling around in the pentatonic scale all the notes worked over all of the chords that told me that that was where my key was I couldn't continue trying all the pentatonic positions but there's really no point because I already found it all right so you can just kind of it just locks in you just know that's the one so once you find the pentatonic position that works you then know which key you are based on where your first finger and where your pinky finger are so my first finger is on the 4th fret here my pinky finger was on the seventh fret here so the 4th fret is the note G sharp the pinky the 7th fret is the note B so wherever your pinky falls that's the major key wherever your 1st finger falls that's the minor key so this pentatonic position tells me that this song is either in the key of G sharp minor because your first finger represents where the minor is or this is in the key of B major because your pinky represents where the major is so right there I say ok I know this song is either in B major or G sharp minor they're the same key they're the relative major minor pair of each other I have a few lessons on that I'll link it to those below but um you know that's that's step one I know my key now let's now look at the chord progression with this information okay so once you know what key you're in then you only have a handful of chords from which to use that are part of the key so every possible key there's 12 possible keys there's three major chords per key and three minor chords per key and you can use your circle of fifths to help you figure out what those chords are so we determine that this is either the key of B major or G sharp minor that's a relative major minor pair B major is the major version of G sharp minor G sharp minor is the minor version of B major it's the same key within that key there's three major chords and three minor chords that could be used that are part of the key and your circle of fifths group groups them like so in a grouping of six so you can see B major is on the outer circle in the center you can see G sharp minor is on the inner circle in the center and then the chords surrounding that in the grouping of six are the possible chords that are part of this particular key so when I'm going to figure out the song by ear I only have to try out six chords I don't have to try out all these different chords just just these six alright so let me give you a quick demonstration of me just strumming along and then figuring out what the correct chords are [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so as you saw there all the chords that I was strumming along with playing along with the music I was in this key of either be major or G sharp minor I was pulling from the six possible chords that were found in the grouping of six on the circle of fifths and everything was working and all the chords that I was using were right there and that grouping of six so um let me now move on to part three where I'll show you how to transpose into any other key very quickly okay so once you know what key you're in and then you know how to determine the available chords that are part of that particular key the next thing you want to understand is how to determine the function of each chord within the key so what this will allow you to do is number one you can take the chord progression of the song that you're playing and you can transpose it into another key if you want to in order to suit the voice of the singer and or if you're the singer you know that in order to fit your voice in your particular vocal range or it'll also allow you to simply just listen to a song and instantly recognize the type of chord progression of this so you may listen to a song and say okay that's a one five six four chord progression and then you can basically just pick up your guitar go home figure out the key real quick and just play a one five six four progression and boom you've already figured out that song so let me explain what I mean so you take your circle of fifths we are in the key of B major slash G sharp minor and you assign a Roman numeral to each of these six chords so major chords get an uppercase Roman numeral minor chords get a lowercase Roman numeral so within the grouping of six the center chord and the outer circle is the one chord the inner circle counterclockwise position is the two chord inner circle clockwise position is the three chord outer circle outer circle counterclockwise is the four chord outer circle clockwise position is the five chord inner circle middle position is the six chord all right so using the example from November rain we have something that goes like this [Music] okay so it kind of just keeps looping that around so that is an e to a c-sharp minor to a B major so E is your 4 chord c-sharp minor is your 2 chord and then B major would be your 1 chord so this is a 4 to 1 progression so if you wanted to play a 4 to 1 progression in any other key you could do so so let's let's try playing it and see we'll play it in the key of C major slash a minor all right so let's play a four to one progression [Music] [Music] see how it sounds the same it's just a different key now f is your 4 chord in this key D minor is your 2 chord in this key C major is your 1 chord in this key we can try it in the key of G major / e minor if you want so 4 - 1 would be C major to a minor to G major so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so you see how that works so anytime you hear a chord progression on the radio and even if you don't have your guitar with you you can just kind of try and listen be like okay that sounds like a four chord or that sounds like a two chord that sounds like a one chord and try to get in to get into the habit of hearing how each of these chords function with functions within a key that way you can just recognize the type of chord progression and immediately just know what's going on okay so that's that's very very important so um that's the third thing understanding the chords function within the key okay so the next thing that you want to be able to do is to be able to listen for out of key chords so you know once you figure out your key you can then figure out the three major chords and the three minor chords that are part of that key and you can use your circle of fifths to help you out like we already talked about but then you're gonna start noticing that some other chords are gonna be thrown into the mix so those are what are known as non diatonic chords or out of key chords so those chords are generally not just chosen at random there's usually a method to them and that method is it's called borrowing from parallel keys and I made another lesson explaining this concept borrowing chords from the parallel key but just to demonstrate real quick let's take the key of C major for example so you have C major or a minor whatever you want to call this C major would be the major version of this key a minor is the minor version of this key these are three major three minor chords for that key you can look to the key of C minor okay so if C majors the the key were in the parallel minor key would be C minor so you have these six chords that you could possibly use within your chord progression you could also look at your original key C major such a minor you could look at it and say that okay we're in the key of a minor and then I want to look at the parallel key which would be the key of a major so again you have these chords to pull from so you have all these extra available chords that can be used within your chord progressions non diatonic chords that will work within the particular key signature that you're working in now more often than not when a chord is borrowed from a parallel key it's pretty much gonna be a major chord in most of the time so if you're in the key of C major a minor that's your that's the key you're working in you want to borrow something from the key of C minor the parallel key of C minor you have these three chords to borrow from okay not to say that you can't borrow the minor chords from that parallel key but usually it's just the major chords that are borrowed same thing if you own the other direction if you want to borrow from the parallel key of a major you know the major chords would be the chords that are most likely to be used all right so that's just a little explanation about how you can go about borrowing chords from parallel keys but just even simplify things a little bit more you can there's two very very commonly used non diatonic chords that work really really well within a key and they are number one you can take the minor three chord which when you're in the inner circle clockwise position that's the minor three chord you can often make that major so whether in the key of a minor or you're in the key of C major it doesn't really matter just that chord right there which is diatonic would be the E minor chord you can make that an E major chord and it's gonna sound great so let me show you what that would sound like [Music] okay so right there I put an E major chord in the key of C major so you could look at that E major chord is borrowed from a parallel key or you can just kind of just think okay I took the minor 3/4 made that major that's a common that's a common substitution that you're gonna come across and it's that's gonna sound good you're gonna hear that all the time so that three chord made major very very yeah common the other one is the four chord which is a major chord a lot of times you're going to hear a major four chord followed by a minor four chord and then it's going to move to the one chord so again if you're in the key of C major F major is your four chord so you're going to hear something like this [Music] okay so you're going to hear that a lot I just used the key of C here just to kind of demonstrate this example November rain doesn't really have any non diatonic chords at least none that jumped out at me I didn't really learn the entire song start to finish but I'm pretty sure November range just 100% everything's in key but you know when you do start to learn these songs and you start to learn your in key chords and stuff and you start hearing the chord that's not part of the key but still sounds good now you have some places to look look to your parallel keys and then look at that three chord made major look at that four chord made minor and that should get you started alright so I part five is going to be about learning how to figure out solos by ear okay so now we're on part five of this lesson now we're looking at how to figure out solos and fills and leads and all that kind of stuff by ear so this is definitely the hardest part of the whole thing figuring out the chord progression is relatively simple in comparison but as long as you know what key you're in that's a very very good starting point because when you're trying to figure out a solo by ear you know the key so the person that's doing the solo they're playing in the key the solo is gonna sound good because it's in key all right there may be an out of key note here and there if an out of key chord is being used you know they may target chord tones of that particular out of key chord but for the most part you have a roadmap of notes from which to choose from and those are going to be the the scale so going back to the example of November rain we had determined that this is the key of B major so if it's in the key of B major what scale you're gonna use the B major scale - B major scale is going to be the scale that you use to play over you know the all of the chords all the chords are part of the key of B major the B major scale is going to be the soloing framework that you use to solo over all the chords okay so you know I have lots of lessons that teach you how to play and key up and down the fretboard the lead guitar fundamentals course which is part of the website part of my website that goes really into depth is how to play and key up and down the fretboard but just to simplify things just to you know for the purposes of this lesson you can just pick one simple position and you can figure out most of the solo right in that position okay so you see here on the screen this is a fretboard diagram of the B major scale spanned up and down the entire fretboard now this may look overwhelming to you if you don't you know if you don't know the various different patterns you don't know how to play in key up and down the fretboard as I said there's lots of stuff on my website that goes very very in-depth as to how to do that all the patterns all the positions all that stuff but just for the purposes of this lesson let's just focus on one simple area so keep in mind the red dot indicate your note B that's your scale root the rest of the black dots are the remaining notes that are part of the B major scale this B major scale spans many octaves many different positions okay so let's just simplify it let's just stick right to this fourth to seventh fret region which is where we started out in part one of this lesson so fourth to seventh is that pentatonic position number one so that this right here if you want to add in your remaining scale notes the remaining diatonic notes that are not part of the pentatonic scale but are still part of the B major scale you would have this all right so we're just right here so that's our roadmap so we've heard the November rain solo number one before I'm not here to teach you how to play that solo in this lesson I do teach that in another lesson but just for this lesson I want you to know how to do this for yourself the object is for you to learn how to do this by ear so we're just gonna figure out the notes that Slash's playing I'm not gonna add his swag I'm not gonna you know we'll get to the swag part later but let's just figure out the notes for now so something like this [Music] Oh [Music] all right so what I did there was a very very cheesy very choppy very non swagged up version of the beginning of that solo all right I was just playing the notes I wasn't doing any bends I wasn't adding the slash swag to it I was just playing the notes I wanted to show you that everything could be found as part of the B major scale and not only you know just confined to this area these little four fret area and just on the upper three strings for that matter so everything that was done right there was just using those notes major scale between the fourth and seventh fret played on just the G B and E string okay so after you know how to play the solo after you know the notes of the solo you figure that part out [Music] all right so just kind of cheesy like that now add the swag to it you know the notes so instead of starting on this note here you can kind of hear that slash is bending to it [Music] all right see how he's gonna add the bends yeah at the slides the notes are still the same you're still playing within the same framework of notes he was adding the swag to it now so figure out the notes first at the swag second okay and then after he's done with this area here after he's done with a little fourth to seventh fret area he then jumps up to what I refer to as the a string whole box it's the second most commonly used position by most guitar players when they solo so this will be the home box pentatonic position number one the a string home box is where you locate your root note with your pinkie for a major key this is B major so locate your note B on the a string so here's your note B 14th fret so this is the second area that he's [Music] all right so he does something like [Music] it is so after does that little lead-in to this next area then you know the next part of the solo takes place all in this little a string whole box area alright so F G's this I was all right there in that little a string home box then he jumps up to here and again this is pentatonic position number one again but just in the higher octave now we started out in this area now our up here in this higher octave so that's the note B right there obviously the note B is part of the B major scale and then it just uses a little scale run running down the e string [Music] [Music] it's all part of the major scale you see how this is working I'm not teaching you how to play the solo I'm not I'm not holding your hand I'm not giving you the tabs for it I want you to know how to do this by yourself and you do this by yourself by understanding simple fundamentals this is the key of B major here's your 1 pattern to play in when he's done there he then jumps up to this pattern okay then he hits that high note then he comes back down and he does a little slash Run which I don't remember exactly how it goes I would have to refresh myself using my own lesson that I taught on this song about a year ago he does something something like that I don't remember exactly what it is but still it's all part of the scale [Music] all right so as long as you know the key as long as you know a couple patterns a couple basic moveable patterns on the guitar you can figure out solos pretty easily because you have your roadmap all right so that last part there was arguably the hardest part of all it's very hard to just teach someone how to figure out solos by ear but like I said if you can understand the fundamentals of music if you can understand how to determine what key you're in and then you you can just have a couple basic points of reference on the fretboard you have your home box otherwise known as pentatonic position number one you have your a string home box it's just my name for it otherwise known as pentatonic position number four then he jumps up to the home box again up in the higher register otherwise known as pentatonic position number one you know if you can find your reference points and you memorize those patterns you have your roadmap of notes from which to choose from that'll help you a lot in figuring out which notes are used in the solo once you figure out the notes that are used in the solo go ahead and add the you know add the bends at the slides at the vibrato add the slash swag to it and get the solo sounding exactly right but having that roadmap and four notes is fundamental to making this stuff come very quickly like that but anyway so that's gonna be it again check out my website zombie guitar check out the free members area check out the full Matt access members area lots of cool stuff I think you really liked it thanks for watching I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Brian Kelly

Views: 775,263

Rating: 4.9509611 out of 5

Keywords: guitar, guitar lesson, music theory, fundamentals, diatonic chords, circle of fifths

Id: e1a74c-9m6M

Length: 30min 3sec (1803 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 10 2019