Practical Ear Training - 3 Super Useful Tips!!

hey guys brian kelly here from zombie guitar here today's video i'm going to talk about practical ear training so ear training can have a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people but for the purposes of this video i want to give you some directly applicable tips that you can take and apply to your everyday life a lot of this stuff you don't even need to have a guitar in your hand you don't have to have a piano available or anything like that a lot of this stuff you can do just by listening to music so you're probably doing that already and this doesn't only apply to you know whatever your favorite type of music is this literally applies to any type of music commercials on tv um anything that has a music in the commercial on tv your training opportunity uh if you're like me and you have young kids i have a two-year-old and a nine-month-old and your tv has nothing but kid shows on at all times ear training opportunities all day long alright i literally do this stuff every single day we watch blippi we watch coco melon if you don't have a little kid you probably don't know what that stuff is but just tons of songs and i'm sitting there ear training all day long as i listen to this stuff it has just become habit to me and this all comes from the fact that i played in a cover band for about 15 years i gigged like two three four nights a week i would fill in for other guitar players and other bands and stuff like that i i encountered all types of situations um specific situations would be like i would look at a set list and think that i knew the songs but then i'd get on stage and i'd come to find that the song is played in a different key or this the band that i was playing with would play in a different key than what i was familiar with i would think the song was in g and they were like oh no we play that in f so i'd have to transpose on the fly sometimes i would play songs we would get requests and i would i never learned the song i never learned the solo but we would try it and i would just have to kind of figure out the song by ear on the fly and hope it sounded okay that happened a bunch of times solos i would forget solos a lot i would just have to kind of fake my way through solos so all of this stuff was directly applicable to what i did for 15 years straight that's the type of ear training that this video is about practical ear training tip number one differentiating between major chords and minor chords this is so so important because almost everything that you hear on the radio is a combination of major chords and minor chords everything they hear in tv commercial jingles or kids show jingles or something like that major chords minor chords even if the chords are more advanced chords if you want to call them that you know they have knights in there or sevenths in there or whatever at the foundation you have a triad those triads are going to be major triads or minor triads now there is other types of triads there's diminished triads and there's augmented triads as well but those aren't nearly as common as major triads and minor triads especially in the popular music that i'm talking about which is what this video is for so learning to differentiate between a major triad and a minor triad is super super super important if the song is supposed to have a major chord in there but you accidentally play a minor chord it's going to sound very very off it's going to sound very harsh let me give you an example the song don't stop believing by journey consists of an e major chord a b major chord a c sharp minor chord and an a major chord let's just run through that real quick e major b major c sharp minor a major all right so let's say that i accidentally played a b minor chord in place of that b major chord let's hear all that sounds [Music] sounded pretty bad right the difference between a major chord and a minor chord is one single note a major chord has a major third interval in there a minor chord has a minor third interval in there that third interval is is known as what determines the quality of a chord so it's either going to have major quality or minor quality as dictated by the third so this b major chord right here you have uh you have a third it's located right here so here's a b major chord that's the major third a minor third is one half step lower than that so here's a minor third [Music] that one note that is huge that's the thing that makes the difference between a major chord and a minor chord so on the guitar we have different shapes available to us you can play that's the whole purpose of the cage system which i talked about in last week's video so there's always going to be different ways to play a b major chord or a b minor chord on the guitar so some shapes may have more than one instance of where the third is found at in this particular shape that we're using here this is known as the e shape according to the cage system you can also just call it a basic bar chord that's rooted on the low e string there's only one instance of this third it's the triad is a root third and fifth so you have your one you have your five you every one you have your major third you have your five and every one so there's only one instance of the third in this particular shape so that third right there is really adding a lot to this major chord minor chord all right that third makes it sound like this versus this [Music] so you can hear how much of a difference that that third impacts the sound it sounds very very wrong when you play a minor chord when it's supposed to be a major chord that harshness is not going to be so obvious when it's the other way so if it's supposed to be a minor chord but it's accidentally a major chord that you play it's going to sound a little off but it's not going to be quite as harsh so let's try to take that c sharp minor chord and let's try to play a c start major chord instead and hear how that sounds so i played that c sharp major there it didn't sound quite as harsh it didn't sound like ear piercingly bad like it did with the um the previous example but it still didn't sound right that c sharp minor there adds that little tiny bit of sadness if that's how you want to describe it that little tiny bit of sadness that's needed you need that c sharp minor chord there sometimes you just need a minor chord you know so when you make a major chord in place of that minor chord that little bit of sadness that adds to the overall feeling of the progression you're kind of just taking that away just learning to differentiate between the two super super important if you like today's video and you want to check out some more of my stuff stop by check out my website zombieguitar.com that is a resource that is designed to help guitar players of all levels beginners intermediates advanced everything in between i also have a patreon page patreon.com forward slash zombie guitar on my patreon page i add several new videos each month about eight videos a month something like that and uh the cost is that of a cup of coffee so for the price of a cup of coffee each month you get like eight new videos something like that not a bad deal stop by check that out i'll post links to all that stuff below let's get into the lesson practical tip number two be able to quickly identify the key and there's a lot of different ways to do this but the way that i've always preferred to do it was just use the simple pentatonic test now i am a strong advocate especially for practical purposes of the 12 key model there is an argument a forever going on argument about 12 keys versus 24 keys all right 12 major keys 12 minor keys according to you know classical theory and sheet music and stuff like that you could even say there's 15 major keys and 15 minor keys it's a lot easier just to think in terms of 12 keys all right i made a video i like to make ranting videos and i made a ranting video about why i believe there's only 12 keys and it's only adding to the confusion if you think in terms of 24 keys it's much easier to think in terms of key signatures all right so if you have a song any song doesn't matter and that song is in a key you can identify the key by using the pentatonic test the pentatonic test is you try every single pentatonic scale between the open fret and the 12th fret because once you get up to the 12th fret everything repeats itself so one of the 12 pentatonic scales is going to connect with the music and it's going to sound perfect and all the other 11 possible answers are not going to sound quite as perfect so you have this possibility you have this possibility you have this possibility you can keep trying pentatonic scales until you get all the way up to the 12th fret and then you're just repeating yourself because once you get up to here [Music] it's exactly the same as this [Music] it's just an octave higher so one of these pentatonic scales between open and 12th fret is going to lock in with the music perfectly so for the example that i'm going to show you i'm going to use salt and some swing i just kind of made up my own little rendition of it [Music] [Music] so [Music] so as you can see from that example i found that this pentatonic box the one that falls between frets 10 and 13 was the one that worked that's the one that connected with the music the best so what that tells me is that the key of the song is the key of either d minor or f major it's a relative major minor pair for every minor key you have a relative major key for every major key you have a relative minor key what that means is the relative major minor keys they share the exact same notes as one another they share the exact same chords as one another it's the exact same key signature so d minor and f major that's a relative major minor pair this pentatonic box that i determined to be the one that fits right here the note that's on the low e string that's the note d that's the minor key name the one that falls in the 13th fret the one that falls under your pinky that's the major key name d minor f major i can then take this information over to the circle of fifths and i can find the f major on the outer circle which of course is going to be right in line with the d minor on the inner circle because it's a major minor pair and that's what the purpose of the outer circle and inner circle on the circle of fifths is i can then look at the six surrounding chords and those six chords are the three major chords and the three minor chords that are found in this particular key signature you have 12 possible key signatures this is the one that this song is in the song is mostly in d minor but then once it gets to the uh i guess you call it the bridge or the pre-chorus or something he's in f major [Music] that part f major c major b flat major it's not really d minor anymore right we're now in f major so the song is in d minor f major it's the same exact key signature the entire time [Music] that's the key of the song i determined that using this pentatonic test a common question that i get regarding this pentatonic test is number one sometimes other pentatonic boxes you have your 12 possible pentatonic boxes sometimes you may find one along the way like somewhere between open and this 10th fret you may find one that sounds pretty good maybe it doesn't sound quite as good as the one between 10 and 13 but it still sounds pretty good so you're not really sure how do you know which one to pick well in that case you could always take it a step further and use the diatonic scale test the pentatonic scale is five notes the diatonic scale is seven notes the pentatonic scale is five of the seven total notes if you're trying to determine the key of a piece of music using a piano you're probably just going to go straight to the diatonic scale the only reason that i use the pentatonic test on the guitar is just because it's an easy shape to remember if you don't know a lot about music theory you don't really know many scales you know this is a very very easy box pattern to remember and apply to this very specific thing that we're trying to do but if you want to use the full diatonic scale that's fine too so here's your pentatonic scale which is d minor pentatonic or f major pentatonic f major pentatonic d minor pentatonic relative major minor pair you can go ahead and you can add in the additional two diatonic notes so this would be your d minor scale or your d natural minor scale this would also be your f major scale [Music] so if you want to use this full diatonic box pattern to do this test with that's fine too using the full diatonic scale using the full seven note scale it's a bit harder of a pattern to remember especially if you're new at this stuff but if you if you you know if you use the wrong one like let's say that you think that the right answer is right here between frets five and eight and then you go and you add in the diatonic notes [Music] you go and add in your diatonic notes there's going to be more chance of clashing with the underlying rhythm when you go ahead and you get the correct one you find the correct answer which is between 10 and 13 you can go ahead and you can add your diatonic notes in there and it's still going to sound good [Music] do [Music] [Music] all right so having the ability to quickly determine the key in this method i did this all the time all right 15 years of playing gigs five nights a week there were times where i'm like oh no i don't know what key we're in i had to quickly figure it out do my quick little pentatonic test oh there we are boom i know the key so super super useful that's tip number two practical ear training tip number three and this is my favorite one of all this is the one that i do every single day of my life i can't even i can't shut my brain off to not do this this is also the one that's going to take the most practice but if you do it i promise you it's going to help you immensely so this is figuring out chord progressions by ear now when i say figuring out the chord progressions i don't mean that you actually have to figure out that's a c major chord that's a d minor chord you don't have to figure out the actual chord all you need to do is figure out if it's a one chord two three four five or six chord that's it as i said once you determine the key there's twelve possible key signatures that the song could potentially be in assuming that the song is only written in one single key which most songs are unless you're a jazz musician or something like that where the key is constantly changing but for the average joe musician out there the average cover band musician like myself you have a 1 in 12 chance of getting the key right you figure out the key there's three major chords in that key there's three minor chords in that key all right so just hearing is that a one five six four progression is that a six four one five progression is that a six five four progression is it a six two one progression whatever there's six chords all right there's actually seven chords in any given key but we're gonna get to that in a minute so this is a one five six four progression all right so the journey song that we've already talked about one five six four [Music] using your circle of fifths within the grouping of six the positioning of the one five six and four are always going to remain constant one's always going to be outer circle center position five is always going to be outer circle clockwise position six is always going to be inner circle center position that's a relative minor of the one chord and then four is always going to be outer circle counterclockwise position so listen to this progression [Music] that's in the key of e let's play it in a different key let's try to play it in the key of say g major [Music] let's try playing in the key of a major [Music] all right it sounds exactly the same but different if that makes sense being able to identify that this is the one chord this is the five chord this is the sixth chord this is the four chord super super important all right this is how you can figure songs out by ear so uh one five six four progressions they come in all different forms it doesn't always have to be in that exact order a lot of times you're gonna hear it like a six four one five progression so an example is hello by adele i don't know if this is the exact key that the song is in but i'm gonna play it in a minor so let's play hello by adele six four one five [Music] all right so that's like a sadder version of the one five six four progression you're just kind of rearranging the chords now it's six four one five instead of one five six four maybe i got the key wrong maybe it's not in the key of a minor maybe it's in the key of b minor same progression six four one five [Music] maybe that one's not right let me try it in e [Music] so that was an e minor that was actually uh the zombie by the cranberries zombie guitar anyway so you know just find just have like some references that you can always revert back to be like hey that kind of sounds like zombie by the cranberries or whatever also very common is where they'll just use the six four and the five chords so this would be kind of like the minor version of whatever key you happen to be playing in since the lack of the one chord the one chord is no longer present so there's a bunch of examples of this standing on stairway to heaven six five four [Music] all right so there's like a bunch of references for you right there that all involve the one the five the six and the four chord like i said any given key signature has six chords in there okay i know there's seven don't yell at me guys there's seven i know but there's six there's three major chords there's three minor chords so we've already covered four of those chords so you have references that you can always think of for a one five six four progression get yourself a reference that you can think of that's a six four one five progression you know um get yourself a reference that you can think of uh for you know like the stairway to heaven solo for a six five four progression using this information that way when you hear these jingles and stuff on the tv or on in kids shows and stuff like that you can be like oh yeah that sounds like a five chord that's a four chord that's a one chord very very powerful ear training so we're left with just two more chords we're left with the ii chord and we're left with the three chord so again just get yourself a couple references so that you always know what a two chord sounds like an example would be a knocking on heaven's door so um that's in the key of g [Music] [Music] so i started out with a one five four and then went one five two so you hear that minor chord and uh let's say that you're not sure if that's a two chord you're like is that a two quarters that a six quarters out of three chord i know it's a minor chord i'm not exactly sure which chord it is if you're unsure you can always just kind of sing the do re me fasolati doe scale just to kind of confirm you can kind of be like do re do re re ray boom confirmed that that is a two chord so without even listening just kind of having this understanding of one five and four what those sound like and then you hear this minor chord thrown in there just do re okay boom two all right so there's your reference you can use that same that same type of reference for anything you hear if you're ever uncertain to identify the two chord so then you're just left with the three chord so the three chord i saw in another youtube video that uh the three chord is uh typically considered to be the saddest minor chord in any given key and i actually kind of agree with that because out of the three minor chords they all have their they all have their whole element of sadness there but something about that three chord is just it's a bit sadder than all the rest but even if you can't identify the fact that it's sadder than the other potential chords you can always the way i always do it is i always think i know what the four chord sounds like so if i know what the four chord sounds like in relation to the one chord the three chord always sounds like it's like right before that and it wants to move to the four chord all right so an example uh and this is the same example that's used in that video that i was talking about about the three chord being the saddest minor chord they use hey hey there delilah um it's like this [Music] so one two three now your minor three chord is always going to be found in your circle of fifths grouping of six inner circle clockwise position that's going to be the positioning of where your three chord is found this particular song hey there delilah is in the key of d major which has a relative minor of b minor that's one of the 12 possible key signatures so d major is your one chord f sharp minor would be your three chord so if you know what your four chord sounds like that three chords like right before it so let's play the four chord after it [Music] [Music] now i know that's not the song that's not the actual chord progression that's played in the song but if i'm unsure of what that f-sharp minor what the function of that f sharp minor is in this particular song i can always think to myself what does the iv chord sound like i can run through some references in my mind and i can and i can think to myself oh yep that that chord sounds like the one that comes right before the iv chord boom confirmation that that is in fact the three chord all right so let's now address the seventh chord in a key so any given key signature has seven chords in it three are major three are minor and then one is going to be a diminished type of chord so that is the chord people always ask well why isn't the seventh chord there on the circle of fifths and that's because the circle of fifth that i use the outer circle displays the major chords the inner circle displays the minor chords there's no diminished chords on the circle of fifths that i use so the grouping of six is only going to have six chords in it the seventh chord just isn't there and in you know in the music that you hear on the radio and stuff like that the music that you hear in commercials the music that you hear on kid shows and stuff like that typically that seventh chord is not really going to be you're not really going to be hearing that half diminished chord thrown into these songs what you are going to hear is you're going to hear the v chord in place of that so one very common example and i i know every single person that has ever played guitar and looked up chords and lyrics on the internet before you've come over you've seen this specific example [Music] so surely you've seen that before all that a slash chord is is you're taking a d chord and then you're just the f sharp is the bass note the f sharp is the lowest note of the chord instead of the note d if d was the bass note of the d chord then it would just be called a d chord but a d over f sharp means that you're playing a d chord but the lowest note the bass note of the chord is an f sharp so why do they do that why do you see that all the time they're just trying to keep the bass line consistent [Music] so according to the scale according to your g major scale since this would be in the key of g major this is a one this would be the seven and this would be the six [Music] so your representation of the seven chord is simply just being replaced by the five chord that's it so one five six i apologize if i have ruined music for you forever because i literally cannot listen to music without thinking about this stuff i cannot listen to a song without trying to identify one two five six whatever i am constantly doing this stuff constantly constantly constantly i don't know i just can't listen to music like a like a normal person can anymore this is how i listen to music so if i've ruined the music for you forever my bad but this is very very helpful this has helped me in so many ways just these three tips that i gave here in this video i consider this to be very very practical things that you can do for ear training so hope you guys like this video again if you want to check out some more of my stuff zombieguitar.com patreon.com forward slash zombie guitar i really appreciate it thanks a lot see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Brian Kelly

Views: 24,551

Keywords: guitar, zombie guitar, guitar lessons, diatonic, pentatonic, scales, diatonic scale, scale patterns, ear training

Id: akTEIwTTR7I

Length: 28min 7sec (1687 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2022