How To Figure Out The KEY Of A Song by EAR On Guitar | GUITAR EAR TRAINING

knowing how to work out the key of a song by ear is an essential skill as a guitarist or musician in general this comes in particularly useful when you're in a jam band scenario and want to join in without needing to stop the session to ask both the key and the chords being used or if you simply want to begin transcribing songs or solos yourself without the need for tabs or sheet music luckily enough this process is incredibly easy and can be achieved with zero music theory a small amount of practice and only one string so i'll start by explaining the method and then i'll show you this in use over some musical examples so i can show you what to listen out for and what you can then do with this once you've figured out the key let's focus on the only part of the fretboard that you will need for this lesson this being the low e string up to the 12th fret each one of these 12 notes represent a possible key center now while the track is playing you will need to slowly climb up the notes of this string carefully listening for the note that could be the key center for the song and to do this you'll need to know what to listen out for so here are four quick tips to help you out you'll know when you've arrived at the key when the note you're playing sounds pretty good over the whole progression but most importantly ask yourself if the song you're playing over suddenly stopped and all that was left was the note you're playing would it sound resolved i.e complete if so then you're probably on the correct note and therefore have identified the key the next thing to listen out for is an overall pull towards the key center this will be much more obvious the faster you climb through the notes to give a clear example i'll simply let you hear one note representing the key while i climb up to and eventually hit the same note and see if you can hear the overall pull towards this note [Music] and now let's repeat this same exercise but using an actual song although harder to hear the same overall pull towards the key center still exists [Music] as you search for the key you will naturally land on notes that do sound good against the track you're playing over but this doesn't necessarily mean that these notes are the key you have more than likely just landed on a note that belongs to the key and or fits over a particular chord in the progression quite nicely so more often than not if you continue to play this note while the chords change it will sound more stable over some and less over others but never quite fits as an overall key center [Music] notes that don't belong to the key will really stand out as they will be very dissonant and generally won't sound good so your ear will naturally skip past these pretty quickly however there is one note that you should take notice of and this is the note that falls directly before the actual keynote as this is so close to the key center you will feel quite a strong pull to the next note being the key of the song [Music] in this case the track was in the key of d however this leaves us with one more question is the key major or minor the easiest way to check is to simply play the minor pentatonic scale starting from the key note and if everything sounds okay then you're probably in a minor key however if something sounds slightly off then check using the major pentatonic scale instead now here is an example of all of this being put to use on an actual song [Music] all these steps i've used so far to identify the key of a song by ear can be made almost instantaneous if you practice enough and learn to tune your ear into what the key center sounds like however if you would like me to make a video that explains figuring out the chords in a song after finding the key then leave a like and comment below thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Samjamguitar

Views: 1,957,251

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Id: 8Ldj9PLhI1I

Length: 4min 59sec (299 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 17 2022