How To Play By Ear With Chords

hi everybody welcome to Amy Nolte music I have about maybe like 400 videos or something on my channel which is a crazy amount and a little daunting sometimes and people ask me where they ought to start and you know it depends on what their end goal is but usually if they want to play jazz piano I'll tell them to start with my video called jazz piano where to start but lately I've been to some clinics colleges and some jazz camps and and I've come to some realizations that I need to make you aware of that I think will help even if you've never watched my channel before I think that this is a good place to start and I'm gonna make a little series that will give you some more clear-cut direction about what if you want to start playing piano by ear what if you don't know how to figure out the chords that you hear on the radio by ear and then play them yourself in your own way how are you gonna do that even what if you want to be a jazz piano player and play all these hip voicings how are you gonna do that so what I've realized is when when I ask people to start with the jazz piano where to start video that that kind of takes apart chords in the way that we normally think about them which is like one three five like CEG and and it tells you that you should play the thirds and sevens of all of the chords because when we're playing jazz rootless voicings those are the most important notes in the chord but I'll find that I ask people to start figuring out the thirds and sevens of chords and they're very slow at it like maybe if I ask him to come up with a third and seven of a c7 chord maybe they're they're coming up with this the E and the B instead of the E and the B flat and if that happens I have to say to them alright we've got to back up there are some things apparently that you haven't learned yet and we've got to make sure you know them before we progress on this jazz path in this video today I'm going to refer to several of my other videos that I've already referred to one of them but another one that I need to refer to is how to practice major scales because the reason that people can't find the third and seven of chords is because they don't know their major scales major scales are kind of just the baseline fundamental of everything that you'll need to know as you progress go slowly you know maybe one scale a week maybe two scales a week but you need to internalize an a major scale has three sharps an E flat major scale has three flats things like that you need to just be able to know off the top of your head I used to think that if I ever taught lessons I would just do this kind of thing and not even bother with the beginnings of chords like C E and G the one three and five because I thought that maybe it messed me up when I got to college and I learned that to play major chords for jazz I wasn't even gonna play the one or the five I was gonna play the three and the seven and the nine and a thirteen and the sharp eleven and I thought oh my gosh why did I ever learn chords like one three five this has just messed me up forever but in living a little bit longer I've found out that it did not mess me up at all and what it did was give me a leg up on a lot of people who didn't have a basic understanding of chords and how they function so what I did when I was a kid is what I know worked for me and if you wonder if you're ever gonna be able to listen to a song and say what's this key that the song is in or or what key does it go to on the bridge or what does it sound like if there's a 251 if these are things that you wonder if you'll ever be able to hear with your ears you need to back up to this spot that I'm gonna take you right now this spot is what I did when I was a little kid when I was a little kid I had this music teacher who who would play any song that he taught us all the little kids songs wheels on the bus or jingle bells whatever we were singing he just played him in the key of C and he used three chords and it was C and F and G that's all I knew and I knew that he was just playing those three chords because I asked him he said we can play a lot of songs with just C and F and G so every song I wanted to play I tried to play with C and F and G and and it turned out I could play a whole lot of songs and my parents started this say you're playing by ear I think she's playing by ear and I was so we would try jingle bells you know and I would just go I did this kind of thing jingle bells jingle bells jingling and I just chose from those three chords C and F and G and so much of the time it was working and my grandpa I have a video where I talk about my grandma and grandpa but my grandfather would have me sit down with him and we would play chords together to play all the old cowboy songs that he knows I do have a video called country songs 20 country songs with three chords this is the kind of thing that you need to do you need to find songs that you like if they're country songs if they're rock or pop or bluegrass or R&B there's a lot of songs that just have these three chords and if you can choose one and and start to play it you're on the right track I wouldn't say to just play it in the key of C but after you get it in the key of C I would challenge you to start playing it in a different key maybe try the key of G because it just has one sharp or maybe try the key of F because it just has one flat and any of these keys that we're talking about you just need three chords to play these simple songs write a happy birthday is one of them happy birthday to you happy birthday to you happy birthday to a me happy birthday to you just three cards it takes you through the whole song and then you can move it like I said so if you move this song to the key of G everything changes you have to start the melody on a new note it's a D happy birthday to and then your next chord is actually going to be the five of G which is D to you happy birthday and you come back this is what I did as a kid every song that I could you know sometimes I would try to play for my dad to sing a song and he would say I can't sing this song and so I thought it must be too high let's try a different key and I would try one of these other keys and then that would work for my dad so I saw that but then I paid more attention to my music teachers hands and I realized that when he switched from C to F he wasn't doing a great big jump what he was doing was taking the notes from C ceg noticing if there were any in common between the chords C and the chord F or C major and F major and there is the C note is the same so when you can and I have a video about this to call it some in my rock piano series how to play rock piano you you move the chord as closely as you can to the chord that came before it so instead of doing a jump you take the F in the a note of that second chord and you just move your fingers to it so that you have a very nice we call it voice leading between C and F and then you can do the same thing for G you can move from F to G just by raising everything a little bit and when we play this inversion of G we call it the second inversion and it's because in a regular G chord we've got G B D now what we've done is inverted it twice first we put the G on the top second we put the G next we put the B on the top which is what we have when we move from this C and root position to the closest G chord we've got a G and second inversion if you don't understand your inversions that's super important because we don't want your hand jumping like this it just doesn't sound as smooth to go happy birthday as it does to go happy birthday - that's a little smoother there's another choice - you can go ahead people and move it down to first inversion these are things that need to come naturally to you as you try to play songs with three chords so all the songs that you can think of whether you know they tend to be just easy songs but I mean songs like Hey Jude will work though and in my Rock piano series I also tell you how to take these chords and break them up to play arpeggios and little patterns that will make you start to sound you know less like my teacher when I was in the second grade and more like somebody who plays piano for a rock band so instead of going hey you can start to break up these notes into patterns and make it sound more fluid and beautiful hey [Music] again it's in the rock piano series there are all kinds of ways to break up notes in chords to make them sound more interesting all kinds of ways sky's the limit I remember somebody asked me if I could play I've been working on the railroad when I was a kid and I said sure I'm sure I've got this and then we started trying I I've been working on the rear seat of F I've been working on the railroad just and then I tried yes that doesn't sound quite right just to past that time and I know that there was another cord that would sound better than that G chord like the G chord could pass but my ears were starting to develop and I realized that there was some other chord that would sound better so I remember asking my music teacher is there another chord right here and turns out he did no more than three chords he said yeah it's called d7 so he taught me d7 oh my gosh D and F sharp and a and C all right let me try you know I've been working on the railroad just you sure it's got a black note that seems nuts to me try it just yes the time oh my gosh it works so I've learned another chord at this point d7 we call it you know the dominant two or you can call it the five of five it's got a function and I didn't even know what it was called other than d7 and I didn't know its function other than that it was the missing chord I needed to make that song sound right now my mom taught me another chord because when I was maybe just five or six years old I already made this chord a minor from heart and soul dadada the melody just happens in it for the whole song you know the chords never change and it just always goes with the melody and the chords and are always this right it just was the C and the a minor and the F and the G over and over and over again but I didn't know a minor didn't know what it was called but I knew a minor and I remember my mom telling me something really cool one day she said you can okay now that you've got these chords aim you can change one of them if you want to to have a different sound she didn't know what it was called she didn't know why it worked somebody had taught her at some point that if she wanted to she could substitute out the F chord for a D minor chord so instead of having this one she would have this my mom didn't even know it but she taught me my first two five one that D minor chord in the key of C is the minor two and you can substitute it for F sometimes and it sounds really nice so when I figured out that F wasn't the be-all end-all for chord I did start subbing out sometimes for D minor and that was huge for me to realize so that if I wanted daddy minor maybe F this time but it's a different sound right here comes again so big for me to realize that there were just there were just more chords and it's what I started to do was to try to play all the songs that I heard on the radio and in the late 80s it was probably a lot of Whitney Houston for a Cyndi Lauper or I don't know you know whoever was on the radio so so I would try to play all of the songs that I could play and see if my three or four or five chords that I knew would work but sometimes they didn't work so what I did was I asked my mom to take me to the library and I got some easy piano books that had chords in them so I could see that if I was gonna play Whitney Houston you know I believe the chili tried to stay on G but I read it's a C augmented chord and then an a minor chord but with a C on the bottom teach them well those things came as Epiphanius to me when I read them in you know the little piano like pop of the 80s book or whatever I was reading when I couldn't figure out the chords I looked for them and then I tried to understand them and then I played them as much as I could and I try to memorize them and as I did this I'll tell you what things sunk in and now when I hear a song that starts on a one chord but needs to go to the augment in one chord I know it because I learned it you know from Whitney Houston when I was 11 or something and just a little bit at a time taking the songs that I knew and loved and wished I could play that's how I learned to play by ear people ask me how can you just play the songs that get requested and it's just from practice and it started out with jingle bells and then it went to I've been working on the railroad and then it went to the greatest love of all and then you know just it went to whatever song I was excited about next I remember being excited about the song dust in the wind by Kansas I and I remember getting the book from the library I found the sheet music to dust in the wind but I didn't really care about reading it like it was written you know with all the notes I cared about those chords because I knew that I could make those chords into whatever I wanted and at the beginning I'm sure it didn't sound great you know I close my so I'm not sure what I did but as I listened to the song and heard the guitar picking I figured out how to break up those chords to sound like guitar [Music] and the more I messed around the more I started to be able to sound like the recording that was big to me I have another video that's kind of like this when I am when I made the realization that people were trying to take jazz solos and be good at soloing in the jazz idiom but they couldn't pick out the melody two simple songs maybe like Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer they couldn't just go and just pick it out they would stumble you know just stumble on it and that's no fault of their own because nobody teaches you to do this this is the crazy thing nobody teaches this you learn how to play you know you learn how to play all the beautiful classical piano and you know whatever your simplified version of ode to joy' and everything but nobody ever says this is the one chord check it out right here this is a five seven chord back to the one chord now we're gonna go to the four chord now the five right like nobody ever tells you that and they never say this is called a C chord this is called the g7 chord and if they do they give it to you in a stinking workbook and they expect you to just fill it out and that's your homework for the week they don't ever talk about why it sounds good why they never talk about why they only talk about what and that's if you were lucky enough to have a teacher that even addressed music theory at all but nobody teaches you to figure out melodies and nobody teaches you to figure out chords I just think it's wrong and backwards so if you are finding that you've got trouble with these things or that you can't do them you got a you've just got a backup and you've got to learn how to do this so key of C one chord 4 chord five chord I'm not gonna make you any kind of worksheet about this I do you know I make the bulk of my money from YouTube off of selling worksheets to to some of my videos but dude there's not a worksheet for this this is your ears and you know give it to you maybe I have a little leg up on you because these babies are kind of ginormous but it doesn't make a difference what made the difference was when I was in the second grade asking my music teacher you know to help me learn the chords to whatever silly song we were learning that week and I was just fortunate enough that I had an inquisitive mind and I wanted to be able to do those things and so I asked those questions I don't know why it's that way but I'm so glad that it is and I don't want you to miss that step I'll make more videos like this and I'll take you through what I think the next steps are but for today you learn your major scales alright just one of the time if you if you don't know how to play a C major scale learn how to play it then I'd like you to play some inversions so I'd like you to take the C major chord and invert it all the way up and down the piano like that for your first week the only inversions I need you to do are for C and F and G so you get those C inversions going on you get those it's inversions going on you get the G inversions going on and pretty soon you recognize those shapes of those inversions and when it's time to change chords you can do it in a way that is beautiful with nice voice leading instead of having your hand jump all around the piano so we've got major scales we've got inversions and then I just want you to think of all the easy songs that you can and try to play one chord 4 chord five chord with those songs as many as you can try to do like five easy easy songs whatever they are that if you don't know which songs to try you can go to my video about 20 country songs with three chords and that'll give you 20 of them even you know even though they're country and some of you might not like that there's a bunch of them go to early rock and roll there are so many you know good golly Miss Molly right all these Little Richard songs and those are usually just three chords find find songs that you're excited about that you want to play and just start trying them and change chords when you feel like it's time to change chords and if it doesn't sound right to go to the F chord do it again and try the G chord trial and error are going to train your ears and then you'll be able to listen to you know whatever song you hear on the radio uh sure or Adele or whoever and and you'll start to say oh they went to the four chord right there oh this feels like a five chord and this is how you'll know all right thanks for watching everybody I'll see you next time on Amy Nolte music don't forget to pick up my new album and my gosh if you want a keep calm and freaking swing t-shirt they're on my website

Channel: Aimee Nolte Music

Views: 73,051

Rating: 4.9555416 out of 5

Keywords: aimee nolte, how to play piano, how to play by ear, chords, how to play with chords, how to play piano with chords, how to play chords by ear, playing by ear, music theory, jazz, pop, rock, country, soul, neo soul, bluegrass, guitar, piano

Id: rrIwKiZNFVM

Length: 20min 11sec (1211 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2019