How to Easily Learn Songs by Ear

hey guys Brian Kelly from zombie guitar here here in today's video I want to revisit my most popular YouTube video which is how to easily learn songs by ear in this video we're going to do a different song but the process is basically going to be the same the reason I'm revisiting this video is because that is my one and only YouTube video that has ever exceeded 1 million views the production quality on that last video was crap but the content was pretty good now hopefully my production quality has improved over the last four years we're going to do the same thing but it's going to be better so before we get into the lesson I just want to point out three things the first one is that this is going to be about the song Ain't So by Weezer and that song is actually played half step down tuned on the album this guitar is standard tuned so if I try to figure out how to play Say It Ain't So using a standard tune guitar and I look up the chords online or something like that and you play those cords on a standard tuned guitar it's not going to match with the album that's because this is standard tuned but they tune their guitars down by one half step it doesn't matter though I can still figure out any song by ear no matter what tuning my guitar is in all right so we're going to figure out the song by ear on a standard tune guitar and then at the end of the video I'm going to show you how to transpose to a different key so you can play it the same way Weezer played it because it does kind of matter because there's some open strings and stuff that are involved with the actual album version which cannot be played the way that we're going to do it the second thing is we're going to be using guitar Theory Concepts to help us to learn the song by ear for the guitar guitar Theory differs from General music theory in that it's heavily based on shapes and patterns so like this shape right here this is a chord so it's going to have different notes than this chord which is going to be different notes than this chord which is going to be different notes than this chord so you see the shape Remains the Same the entire time but the notes are changing that's guitar Theory and a nutshell I made a whole detailed video about guitar theory if you want to check that one out but the prerequisite to guitar theory is you want to know the notes on your low E string and on the a string if you can't instantly recall the notes not on the other strings that's not a problem you can do so much stuff just by knowing the notes on your low E string and the a string and the third thing is if you like this video stop by check out my website zombie guitar.com that has been my labor of love for the last8 years there's over 4,000 videos on there there's a bunch of written lessons there's a bunch of backing tracks there's all kinds of cool stuff on there it has been my labor of love for as I said eight years I don't plan on stopping anytime soon I work on it every single day I'm constantly uploading new content to it the only thing that's ever going to stop me from continuing to grow zombie guitar is some sort of a natural disaster or if robots take over the world or something like that but if that stuff doesn't happen I'm still going to be working on zombie guitar and I'm still going to be here to answer your questions so thank you very much for checking out my website and my video let's get into it step one determine the key this is the absolute most important step out of the entire process reason being is because once you can successfully determine the key of the song that you're trying to figure out by ear then you don't have to worry about trying to guess out of all of the possible chords and all of the possible notes a key consists of exactly seven notes and exactly seven chords so if you can determine the key of the song then you have a little pool of stuff for which it could be you try to figure out the song using chord one nope that's not it okay try chord two n that's not it either try chord three oh that seems to be the chord next chord it's much much easier once you know what key you're in so the way that I personally like to do this and I find this to be the absolute most fast and efficient way to determine the key of a song that you're trying to figure out is to do what I refer to as the pentatonic test the way that the pentatonic test works is you take this pentatonic box right here I'm sure you've seen this if you've been playing guitar for any number of years you've probably seen this pattern before this is pentatonic position number one pentatonic position number one is the same for any key on the guitar it doesn't matter pentatonic position number one can be played starting out on the open E string like this it could be started out on the first fret like this it could be started on the second [Music] fret and so on once you get up to the 12th fret you're just repeating yourself because playing starting on the 12th fret is exactly the same thing as the open E string everything on the guitar between open and 12 is exactly the same as from 12 and on most guitars run out of Frets before you have a full additional 12 Frets 24 fret guitars they have exactly 12 more Frets but everything is exactly the same so point being if you can successfully find the pentatonic box that locks in with the music that you're listening to and trying to play that is how you know that you have found your key so let me just give you a quick demonstration of what this pentatonic test looks like and sounds [Music] like oh yeah [Music] somebody is hiding it's cring my I somebody's get in the CH yes I just close your eyes oh yeah all so as you can see the pentatonic position number one that locked in with the music was the one that fell right here between Frets 8 and 11 that was what told me my key now I understand that not everyone is going to have the the ability to be able to hear the correct pentatonic box this comes with time this comes with practice the more you do it the better you're going to get at it I started out by playing the same lick over and over and over until I eventually got to this one and I was like yep that's the one that sounds correct once I found the one that sounded correct I then proceeded to Noodle around some more noodling around just means that you're just playing any notes at random it doesn't matter what order you play them at it doesn't matter what speed you play them at you just play any notes at random in the pentatonic box that you think might be the correct one if you start to hear some notes that don't sound too good like some notes are like it didn't sound all that great then probably not the right one by the time I got to here I tested it out I noodled around I didn't hear any sour notes I was like okay that's most likely the right one now if the pentatonic test alone is not convincing enough for you you can always proceed to do the dionic test keep in mind that the pentatonic scale is only five notes it looks like more because it spans across six strings and it has two notes on each string so it looks like more than just five nodes but that's really all it is five nodes nothing more nothing less the dionic scale is seven notes that's all of the notes of the key so when you play just the pentatonic scale you're just omitting two of the seven total notes when you go ahead and you include those other two notes into your box pattern you now have more notes for which you can do this test for if the pentatonic test down here sounded pretty good it was iffy you weren't quite sure go ahead and do the diatonic test go ahead and add those missing notes in here and you're definitely going to hear some Sour Notes if you are in the correct pentatonic box both the pentatonic scale and the dionic scale are going to sound good so the dionic test just gives you further confirmation that yes you have selected the right [Music] box oh [Music] yeah [Music] oh all right so now that I have successfully found the correct pentatonic box how do I take this information and get the key out of it this is where knowing the notes in your low E string comes in handy so here's our pentatonic box right between Frets 8 and 11 so the one that falls underneath your index finger that's going to be the minor name of the key that you're in the one that falls underneath your pinky finger that's going to be the major name of the key that you're in so if I know my notes on my low E string and I know that my correct pentatonic box Falls in between Frets 8 and 11 the note on Fret 8 is C the note on Fret 11 is E flat so this information tells me that the key of this music that we're playing in is the key of C minor or the key of E flat major so with that information I can now turn to the circle of fifths I happen to have the circle of fifths tattooed on my arm right here so it's convenient but if you don't have a tattooed on your arm like I do you could always just use an image that you find on Google or you can just use the the screen right here what I'm going to do is I'm going to find E flat on the Outer Circle the Outer Circle is all the major Keys the inner circle is all the minor Keys now major Keys have relative minors minor Keys have relative Majors what that means is that for every major key there is exactly one minor key that shares all the same stuff the key of E flat major has the exact same seven notes as the key of C minor and vice versa the seven chords that are found in the key of EF flat major are the exact same seven chords that are found in the key of C minor it's the same pool of chords you could call this the key of E flat major you can call this the key of C minor and you'd be right in both instances so the cool thing about the circle of fifths is that once you know your major key and your relative minor key it forms a nice little grouping of six and that's all the chords that are part of your key not all seven chords but six out of the seven in any given key you have three major chords three minor chords and one diminished chord so this circle of fits that I'm using it doesn't display diminished chords on it it just displays major chords on the Outer Circle and then minor chords on the inner circle so this will give you your three major and three minor chords for the key in question which is the key of E flat major or the key of C minor so here's these six chords that I have this is my pool of chords I no longer have to guess out of all of the possible major chords and all of the possible minor chords I have this nice little handful of six chords so I'm going to play along with the song now and let's see how it works oh [Music] yeah oh my [Music] as you could hear by that demo I was pretty close but there was something that was just not quite right and that was that second chord there I wasn't happy with that second chord and that's what I want to talk about next all right so the next thing that we're going to do is identify outside chords so before we get into this section I just wanted to point out that if you guys are liking this uh new video quality this new editing stuff I'm doing this is all a thanks to my friend Chris who is a member of the zombie guitar members Facebook group I already had the camera already had the lights I already had a bit of video editing experience and whatnot I did a 1-hour zoom meeting with this guy and he fixed me right up so if you think the picture quality is much much better that's from his expertise he was just like do this do this change that move the lights like this bada bing bada boom so uh yeah highly recommended hit that guy up if you are in need of uh that type of work so anyway on with the lesson so once you've identified your key which then gives you your six chords your three major and your three minor chords the easiest way to identify out of key chords and this is the way that uh songwriters think too they'll say okay I'm in this key I have these three major these three minor chords I'm just going to make this minor chord into a major chord or vice versa that's the easiest way to start doing things so in this song that we're trying to figure out you notice that the second chord so it didn't quite sound right the rest of the chord sounded [Music] okay all right so it's that second chords I'm just going to try making it major oh [Music] yeah [Music] oh so when it comes to making the switch changing one of the minor chords into a major or vice versa the two most common chords that you're going to see this done to if you look at your circle of fifths and you look at the grouping of six the chord that's in the Inner Circle clockwise position that chord is very often made into a major chord so that's the first place I usually look the other one is if you take the Outer Circle counterclockwise position chord that chord is often made into a minor chord so the first one of these is actually what's being done in this song here but just for the sake of demonstrating I just want to show you what it sounds like when you take that other chord Outer Circle counterclockwise position and make that minor you've heard this before definitely so check this out so here we [Applause] [Music] [Applause] go I'm sure you you've heard that [Music] before that's actually called a minor ple old Cadence just to be a nerd about it but um yeah that's that's a very common thing to do as well that's not done in the song that chord has not been made minor but the other one has been done so since we're talking about taking minor chords and turning them into major chords and vice versa it would help if you know how to play major and minor chords all up and down the entire neck of the guitar as I said the cool thing about the guitar is everything's movable you can know a chord shape and you can move it up and down the entire neck of the guitar maintaining the same shape but it's going to change the actual notes and the actual chord based on where you play it on the fretboard so in order to be able to do this you need to know four shapes there's going to be two major chord shapes and two minor chord shapes that's all there's going to be a major chord and a minor chord rooted on the a string and there's going to be a major chord and minor chord rooted on the low E string so the shapes that are rooted on the a string look like this this is what a minor chord shape looks like and this is what a major chord shape rooted on the a string looks like and then you have your low E string chords so this is what a minor chord shape rooted on the low E string looks like and this is what a major chord shape rooted on the low E string looks like so with those four shapes you can play any major chord any minor chord anywhere on the entire neck of the guitar all you need to know is the notes on your low E string on your a string so if you noticed in that demo I played twice around I played it like this one [Music] time the second time around I went like [Music] this so it's a slightly different sound versus but it's still an E flat major chord that's the important thing the reason I did that is because major chords rooted on the a string are a bit difficult for some people people tend to like shapes that look like this where you have your index finger your third and fourth finger kind of playing like a power chord I don't mean to flip you off here and then your second finger is kind of playing another note so minor chord shapes rooted on the a string have that shape major chords rooted on the low E string also have that shape major chords rooted on the a string have this shape and this is a little tricky for some people cuz it's not always easy to get the note on the high E string you have to kind of move your hand a little bit flip off the camera a little bit you know it's not easy so if you can't play this shape right here you could just play a major chord but rooted on the E string instead and then if you hit the high E string as [Music] well all right so it's the same chord it's just an easier way to play it that's it one last thing regarding outside chords if you have your grouping of six which gives you your inkey chords and you've tried flipping the major and minor quality and none of them seem to be doing the trick you can always look to neighboring groupings of six so we have our initial grouping of six right here the neighboring grouping of six right here is a very common place for people to borrow chords from they call it borrowed chords or you could look in the other direction that grouping of six as well you can borrow chords from there very very common so if absolutely nothing is working you can't find it within your grouping of six try the neighboring grouping of six in either direction so these neighboring groupings of six are referred to as parallel keys so if we are calling this initial key that we're in we're calling this the key of C minor the neighbor in grouping of six in the clockwise Direction that's the key of C major those are the chords from the key of C major C minor C major parallel major minor pair you can also go in the other direction you can say okay this initial key is the key of E flat major so if you go in the other direction those would be the chords of E flat minor and actually those two outside chords that I demonstrated in the very beginning the two most commonly borrowed chords those two chords are borrowed from neighboring groupings of six if you take this G minor chord and you make it into a G major chord you could say that G major chord was borrowed from the key of C major or if you take that a flat major chord and you turn it into a minor chord you could say that that was borrowed from the parallel key of E flat minor you just have to change the flats to Sharps that's why music theory is a little confusing the sharps and flat things it uh tends to confuse people sometimes but really it's that's where it is they're coming from these neighboring groupings of six so that's where you're going to find most of your outside courts all right so now we're going to talk about the fills the solos and all of the little embellishments that take place so we've already done the bulk of the work by determining the key the key helps us out with everything including this stuff it's not to say that this stuff is necessar really easy it's just that if you know what key you're in it becomes much much much easier no matter what you are going to have to use your ear it doesn't matter if you're using tabs or if you're actually reading sheet music unless you're like an amazing site reader or something like that that can just look at a piece of music that you've never heard before and play it exactly as it's written unless you have that type of ability you're going to have to rely on your ear all right I've been doing this for 30 years I've learned thousands of songs I used to use tabs all the time I don't use tabs anymore I just do everything by ear now but even when I'm using tabs I am constantly just play Rewind play Rewind hundreds of times maybe thousands of times I don't know it as many times as it takes to get it I'm just going to show you a little clip right here of me trying to figure out the one fill in the song there's actually more than one fill and a solo in this song I'm just going to talk about one single fill so I just want you to watch How I actually look when I'm trying to figure out something by ear this is what it looks like [Music] now that said if you know what key you're in you can really simplify your life I'm talking about majorly simplifying your life reason being is because on the guitar all you need to do is memorize three patterns and you can play across the entire neck of the guitar in any key you memorize these three patterns one single time for one single key and you can do the exact same thing in any key we're in the key of C minor or E flat major there's seven notes that make up this key our objective is to map out those seven notes across the entire fretboard because all the fills all the solos all the vocal melody lines all of the vocal Harmony lines the Baseline all of that stuff is using these seven notes so the objective of these three patterns is to Simply map out these seven in key notes for the key that we're playing in now to locate this first pattern you're going to take take your index finger and put it on the minor scale route on the low E string or you can take your pinky finger and put it on the major scale route on the low E string our minor scale route is C our major scale rout is E flat so on the low E string we have a c right here on the eighth fret and we have an E flat right here on the 11th fret this is going to be pattern number one now you could also play pattern number one up here if you happen to have a 24 fret guitar because up here on the 20th fret you have a c and then up here on the 23rd fret you have an E flat so I can play pattern number one up up here but not everyone is going to have 24 Frets so you may not be able to get pattern number one in the higher octave but that's no problem right here is pattern number one just worry about that one let's look for pattern number two now pattern number two again minor scale roote major scale roote but it's going to be on the a string this time so here's a c right here third fret here's a E flat right here sixth fret so this is going to be how you identify your pattern number two the same thing can be found up here because here's a c right here 15th fret and then here's an E flat right here 18th fret so here's your pattern number two up here as well so as you can see we're already starting to almost cover the entire fretboard now we just need one more pattern and the way you identify this pattern is you take your index finger you put it on the major scale root on the low E string right there E flat and then you just play this pattern right here and that completes the fretboard so once I mapped out my fretboard then I can go ahead and I can listen to the song and I can just listen okay does that sound like it's in like the low register of the guitar does it sound like it's kind of in the middle register or does it sound like it's in the high register so just listening to it it sounded like it was like somewhere in the middle right here you know so you know I have my three patterns like is it this pattern is it this pattern maybe it's kind of like a mix of the two it's just but I have my notes I have I have a road map to identify so when I was listening to this I heard him do this like it sounded like he was playing one note on each string and that's exactly what it was doing the actual lick is something like this [Music] something like that so this first part it just sounded like he was playing a chord there it sounded like he was just playing one note per string so then I just looked at what chord was actually occurring in the Rhythm Section during that part so through repetitive listening to it over and over and over you can hear that the little fi that he plays starts on the fourth chord of the progression so the progression is so right when it gets to that chord that's when the solo kicks in so that's that E flat major chord so I'm like okay if that's an E flat major chord and it sounds like he's playing in the middle register of the guitar not high not low but around here let me try just playing this oh there we go it matched up perfectly with the song okay so that's what he's doing he's playing this chord think like a guitar player all guitar players more or less think similarly you know so he's thinking okay we're on this chord I'm going to play the notes of that chord right there using a basic major bar chord shape rooted on the a string so and then I heard the high note so I'm like oh where's that high note at no that's not it oh there it is okay you know just kind of step by step by step just rewind try again rewind try again rewind try again and then for the rest of it even though it took a little bit of time to get the actual phrasing down so I could play it exactly as I just played on the track I still had my road map so I wasn't guessing all the notes I still like had my patterns in mind so I knew like which Frets were not part of the key and which Frets were part of the key just because I've mapped out the key across the neck so identify the key that you're in map out the entire fretboard by using those three patterns that I showed you and then you're going to be a lot closer to figuring out what is going on than you know if you were just randomly guessing if you don't know anything about this key information if you don't know anything about these patterns you just have this giant Matrix of notes and you're like how am I ever going to figure this out this is crazy impossible it's much easier when you know the key so last but not least is transposing to other keys this is a very useful skill to have and it's very very easy to do if you're a guitar player because everything on the guitar is movable so if you know your chords for key one and you want to play it in a different key which would be key 2 you just take all of those shapes that you play played and you just move it up the fretboard or down the fretboard a little bit if you have a solo or a lead or a fill or anything and you play it here well you just play the exact same thing the same pattern the same lick the same phrasing everything but you just move it up to the new key or you move it down to the new key whatever the new key happens to be so our C progression was a minor chord rooted on the a string which was played right here on the third fret it then moved to a major chord rooted on the low E string on the third fret then a major chord rooted on the low E string fourth fret and then a major chord rooted on the a string sixth fret so that's our progression right there so let's say that we just want to move this up a half step instead of playing in the key of C minor we want to play in the key of C sharp minor all you have to do is just move everything up by one fret so this is now going to be our first chord and then everything's the same you can also use the circle of fifths and see that the positioning within the grouping of six remains constant for both keys we start with the Inner Circle Center position cord we then move to the Inner Circle clockwise cord made major we then move to the Outer Circle counterclockwise position then we end on the Outer Circle Center position it's the exact same as we just played we're just in a new key now so what actually happens in this song is instead of playing the E up here like this the final chord they just play an E like this so if you think about it that open E major chord is just like one of these guys that we already played right here it's just that we don't need to bar with our first finger because the open strings are already doing that for us you know you could also do the same thing up here on the 12th fret you could also play an E major chord right here on the seventh fret of the a string there's a bunch of different ways to do the same thing so the actual chord progression is [Music] so they just play the last chord all the way down there in the open Cowboy chord position we just couldn't do that before because we were playing we were trying to match up with the album and we were in order to do that on a standard tune guitar we had to shift everything down by a fret and there's no E flat open chord so we had to compensate by instead playing it up here but now that we're playing it the way that Weezer actually plays it but our guitar is still in standard tuning so it's going to be a key higher than than Weezer but now that we're playing it the way they are now we can get this final chord in like that and also now that we're playing it the way that weer plays you can also do that's actually what they do they hit this chord and then lift up like that if you tried to do that in the key that we started out trying to figure out like it doesn't sound right that's why Weezer plays it like [Music] this oh what was that little fill oh there we go I know my position number one pentatonic one for the key that we and we're now in the key of C sharp minor or E major because we transpose to a new key there's my pentatonic position number one there's the C sharp right on the low E string there's the E on the low E string so there's my pentatonic position number one you know guitar players we all do the same stuff and then regarding mapping out the entire fretboard for the key that you're in right now on the key of C minor E major so minor scale root is C major scale root is e so let's find pattern number one minor goes on C sh major goes on E so there's pentatonic position number one you can also find it up here so minor major you might not have a 24 fret guitar so don't worry about that let's find pattern number two so we have to find C sh on the a string with our index or E on the a string with our pinky so there's CP right there there's e right there so here's our second pattern there's a c right there there's an e right there there's that second pattern again third pattern take your index finger put it on the major scale route our major scale root is now e there's an e right there and then here's our pattern and then also now that we're in this new key this pattern right here is also found in full down here here's your open E so that's going to be the start of this [Music] pattern and then that whole fill part that we figured out already we just shift everything up one fret so instead of playing this fill starting right here using this chord shape starting on the sixth fret of the a string we we just move it up a fret because we've moved everything else up by one fret so we're starting right here and then you put your pinky [Music] there all right so transposing on the guitar is very very easy mapping out the key on a guitar is difficult but you only have to do it one single time if you map out the key one single time then you're good then you can just move these patterns around you can move your chord shapes around to accommodate for the key that you're playing in so that is how to learn songs by ear that is my Approach thank you guys for watching if you have any questions or comments feel free to ask and uh if you want to check out my website zombie guitar.com I'd really appreciate it see you next [Music] time

Channel: Brian Kelly

Views: 41,744

Keywords: Guitar, zombie guitar, song analysis

Id: mqS9uJPums0

Length: 30min 56sec (1856 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2024