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Basics of Ear Training Part 2 · The Steve Stine Podcast

• 0:37
  Steve: Hey, this is Steve Stein from Guitar Zoom, and this is the second video in an ear training series, just trying to give you some ideas of things that you can do to better understand how to play using your ear.
• 0:48
  Steve: Okay, whether it be learning songs by ear, maybe it's jamming with other people.
• 0:52
  Steve: So, the first video, what we did is we talked a little bit about some fundamental basic chord theory.
• 0:59
  Steve: So, if you haven't seen that one, start there.
• 1:02
  Steve: That would be a really great place to start.
• 1:03
  Steve: And you can always learn more about that if it's something that's uncomfortable for you or it's new to you.
• 1:08
  Steve: You know, explore that as far as you need to to make it make sense to you.
• 1:12
  Steve: Today, what we're gonna do is we're just gonna talk about the importance of understanding the difference between major and minor, which are the two primary sounds that we tend to hear.
• 1:22
  Steve: So, an easy way to practice this is just to have somebody play a chord if you have them available and try and get used to the sound.
• 1:30
  Steve: And then once you go to learning how to you know listen to songs, you can try and pick those sounds out a little bit.
• 1:35
  Steve: So, today what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you a little bit of a quiz to see what you can do with this.
• 1:39
  Steve: So, let me show you what I mean.
• 1:41
  Steve: Let's say, for instance, I played a G major uh chord here.
• 1:45
  Steve: Here's G major.
• 1:47
  Steve: If I take the middle finger off, I get G minor.
• 1:54
  Steve: Here's major again.
• 1:58
  Steve: And minor.
• 2:02
  Steve: Now, most people describe this.
• 2:06
  Steve: The thing about sound is it's almost like color.
• 2:09
  Steve: It's different for everybody, okay?
• 2:11
  Steve: But most people describe these as major is going to be a little bit more uplifting or happy sounding, a little more triumphant sounding.
• 2:19
  Steve: And mitor tends to be a little bit darker, a little bit sadder sounding, okay, a little more melancholy.
• 2:25
  Steve: Those are general terms that people use.
• 2:27
  Steve: And it it's kind of right.
• 2:29
  Steve: So if we looked at, for instance, D major.
• 2:35
  Steve: And again, don't worry about the shape or the whatever I'm doing with my fingers.
• 2:39
  Steve: Worry about what you're hearing.
• 2:40
  Steve: Now, if we looked at minor, it would be this.
• 2:47
  Steve: So when you're hearing those differences, you might not think of melancholy or happy.
• 2:54
  Steve: There might be something else that jumps up in your brain.
• 2:57
  Steve: And so the important of this, important part of this is that you've got to give yourself time to just learn to hear, not see, but just listen.
• 3:07
  Steve: So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna move over to this camera right over here.
• 3:11
  Steve: Okay.
• 3:12
  Steve: We'll go over to this one.
• 3:13
  Steve: And I'm gonna play a chord.
• 3:15
  Steve: Of course, you can't see it because it's over here.
• 3:17
  Steve: So I'm gonna play something, and I want you to think to yourself whether or not what you're hearing is major, which is happier, or minor, which is sadder.
• 3:27
  Steve: Okay, so it sounds like this.
• 3:40
  Steve: Now, what you're not doing right now is trying to figure out whether it's C or B flat or A flat or D.
• 3:47
  Steve: That's a perfect pitch kind of thing, and that's not what we're talking about.
• 3:52
  Steve: Most people don't have perfect pitch.
• 3:54
  Steve: Most people have what we call relative pitch, which means we can kind of hear whereabouts something is, and we can certainly hear when things collectively work together, like a one, four, five, for instance, which was in my last video.
• 4:08
  Steve: Relative pitch is different.
• 4:09
  Steve: We're not, I'm not asking you to go, oh, it's C sharp, whatever.
• 4:12
  Steve: That's not what I'm saying.
• 4:14
  Steve: What I'm saying is, can you collectively listen to this chord and decide whether it sounds happy or major, or sad or minor?
• 4:22
  Steve: That's what you want to get used to.
• 4:23
  Steve: So let me go back here again.
• 4:25
  Steve: Okay, so here we go.
• 4:30
  Steve: So don't worry about what the chord is, just decide whether or not you think that sounds minor or major.
• 4:41
  Steve: Now, that one is minor.
• 4:44
  Steve: It's a C minor.
• 4:46
  Steve: It's minor.
• 4:47
  Steve: Let me play another chord for you, okay?
• 4:58
  Steve: Now, what do you think about that one?
• 4:59
  Steve: Does that sound major or minor to you?
• 5:06
  Steve: Now, this time what I'm going to do is I'm gonna convert this to the other one.
• 5:11
  Steve: Okay, so I'm gonna stay where I am and I'm gonna convert it to the other one.
• 5:14
  Steve: So here's what I gave you.
• 5:18
  Steve: What is that?
• 5:19
  Steve: Here's the other one.
• 5:23
  Steve: Now that you're hearing that, does that help you to decide what this was?
• 5:31
  Steve: You hear them back to back.
• 5:34
  Steve: So at that point, what I'm playing is F sharp major, and the other one would have been F sharp minor.
• 5:46
  Steve: So even if you don't have someone that can help you with this, what you can do is just practice playing a chord and listening, really listening.
• 5:55
  Steve: Again, you're not learning a song or studying a scale, you're just learning to hear the difference between major and minor.
• 6:02
  Steve: So when somebody plays a chord progression for you, let's say I did this.
• 6:50
  Steve: What key do you think this in this is in?
• 6:53
  Steve: What are the common chords?
• 6:55
  Steve: You can figure that out.
• 6:56
  Steve: The second thing is you're using the ear to decide how many different sounds, how many different chords am I hearing in that progression?
• 7:07
  Steve: What people do wrong often when they're trying to figure out something by ear is they're trying to figure out each one in real time.
• 7:13
  Steve: And the goal is when you listen to something, is figure out what feels like home, which one of those chords I just played feels like the main chord.
• 7:23
  Steve: And then you try and figure out what that chord is.
• 7:27
  Steve: And of course, in order to do that, is it major, is it minor?
• 7:31
  Steve: What are you hearing?
• 7:32
  Steve: Once you figure out what that main chord is, because of your theory knowledge, your fundamental theory knowledge, you can say, okay, well, what other chords do I expect to hear or see in this song?
• 7:43
  Steve: And then you start figuring that out.
• 7:45
  Steve: But while you're doing that, you're listening and thinking, well, which ones sound major to me and which ones sound minor?
• 7:51
  Steve: So how many chords am I hearing?
• 7:52
  Steve: How many different sounds?
• 7:54
  Steve: How many colors am I hearing?
• 7:56
  Steve: Which ones of those colors are major or minor?
• 7:59
  Steve: And then I have to plot it onto the guitar by figuring out, well, what is the main chord that I'm hearing here and where is that on the guitar?
• 8:09
  Steve: Right?
• 8:09
  Steve: Now I'm not gonna give you something really, really difficult.
• 8:11
  Steve: I'm not gonna give you the key of E flat, right?
• 8:14
  Steve: You know I'm gonna give you something pretty basic.
• 8:16
  Steve: So you can go to your guitar and start trying to make a connection between what you hear is the primary chord and what I'm playing.
• 8:25
  Steve: So you listen and then you stop the video or the song or whatever, and you try and find it.
• 8:30
  Steve: And then you do it again, you do it again.
• 8:32
  Steve: Once you figure out where that is, then you start trying to figure out what the other ones would be around it.
• 8:38
  Steve: That's the trick to ear training, is you're really doing two things at the same time.
• 8:42
  Steve: Three things.
• 8:43
  Steve: You're assembling however many chords you think they are, there are in this song to the key, and you're deciding how many majors or minors you're hearing.
• 8:54
  Steve: So let me show you what I did.
• 8:56
  Steve: I played G, then I went to D, which would be a one to a five, then I went to an A minor, which would be the two, then to C.
• 9:11
  Steve: So it takes a while, and that's why when you're trying to do ear training, you don't want songs that have a lot of different chords, or in a key that's uncomfortable for you.
• 9:21
  Steve: You don't even know the chords to that key.
• 9:22
  Steve: That's not going to do you any good.
• 9:24
  Steve: The less chords there are, the better.
• 9:26
  Steve: The less chord changes there are, there might be four chords in there.
• 9:29
  Steve: Maybe it's like, you know, again, knocking on Heaven's Door where there's only four chords and it's an eight-measure sequence.
• 9:37
  Steve: It goes G, D, A minor, A minor, G, D, C, C.
• 9:40
  Steve: And it never changes.
• 9:42
  Steve: When it goes to the chorus, it's not like it does something different.
• 9:44
  Steve: It does exactly the same thing.
• 9:46
  Steve: So finding songs that structurally have minimal amounts of changes is a good way to practice your ear training too.
• 9:54
  Steve: You know, if you're trying to find something that it's all over the place, it makes it even more difficult to figure out.
• 9:59
  Steve: So think about these first steps.
• 10:02
  Steve: Learn some basic theory, which you don't really need your guitar for.
• 10:05
  Steve: You need to do some studying, some comprehension.
• 10:09
  Steve: The second thing is grab your guitar and start playing some major and minor.
• 10:13
  Steve: And again, compare apples to apples to begin with.
• 10:15
  Steve: Play a C major chord and then a C minor chord back and forth, back and forth, over and over and over, or an E major to an E minor.
• 10:24
  Steve: And get used to the sound of major and minor.
• 10:28
  Steve: Because the clothes that it wears, whether it's E or D or G or B, it's irrelevant.
• 10:35
  Steve: What you want to do is you want to get through there and decide whether or not it's major or minor.
• 10:40
  Steve: Then you can come back out and decide what clothes is it wearing?
• 10:44
  Steve: Is it a G or is it a D or is it an A?
• 10:47
  Steve: Where is it?
• 10:49
  Steve: And what happens is the more you do this, the more you get used to hearing these common chord progressions.
• 10:54
  Steve: This is where relative ear training comes in.
• 10:57
  Steve: Okay, is relative pitch, we call it.
• 11:00
  Steve: Is once we hear them, we can go, oh, that's a 1, 4, 5, 2, or a 1, 4, 5, 6, or a 1524, whatever it might be.
• 11:09
  Steve: We start hearing this thing, but what we maybe don't know is if it's in the key of G or if it's in the key of A.
• 11:16
  Steve: Well, that's an easy solution you know, the solution to that's easy.
• 11:19
  Steve: We just go to the guitar, we start playing it and going, does that does that work?
• 11:23
  Steve: Right?
• 11:23
  Steve: It's the figuring out part that's hard.
• 11:26
  Steve: And so even when you try and do this with easier songs, you don't have to do the whole song.
• 11:31
  Steve: Just start with a couple of chord sounds.
• 11:34
  Steve: Okay.
• 11:34
  Steve: I always call them blocks.
• 11:35
  Steve: Start with a small block, something that you can comprehend.
• 11:38
  Steve: Hey, I just heard two chord changes.
• 11:41
  Steve: I just heard three chord changes, I just heard four chord changes.
• 11:46
  Steve: Okay.
• 11:47
  Steve: Again, if you hear seven chord changes, it might not be the best song for you, but something very simple.
• 11:53
  Steve: Okay.
• 11:53
  Steve: And then does it repeat that over and over and over?
• 11:56
  Steve: Well, if it does, then you can keep listening to it because it's the same thing over and over and over.
• 12:00
  Steve: And all of a sudden, if it changes, you go, whoop, I'm gonna shut it off right there.
• 12:03
  Steve: I'm gonna go back and start working on this.
• 12:05
  Steve: So you start trying to formulate which ones are major, which ones are minor.
• 12:09
  Steve: How many sounds am I hearing?
• 12:10
  Steve: Are there four, right?
• 12:11
  Steve: Are there three?
• 12:12
  Steve: Which ones are major, which ones are minor?
• 12:15
  Steve: And you start figuring that out.
• 12:18
  Steve: And you know, because of your theory, what you expect to see, one, four, five, two, three, six.
• 12:23
  Steve: So then you have to start deciding, well, what what clothing is it wearing?
• 12:26
  Steve: Is it is that one chore G or A or D?
• 12:30
  Steve: What is it?
• 12:31
  Steve: So it does take time, and it certainly helps to have somebody that can help you with this stuff.
• 12:35
  Steve: You know, we have the Guitar Zoom Academy.
• 12:37
  Steve: You can always head over to guitarzoom.com and check this out and see if it's something that, you know, works for you.
• 12:41
  Steve: Jump on a call with one of us and we can talk about the academy, see if it's a good fit for you, and we could learn how to do all this kind of stuff and whatever it is you want to learn how to do.
• 12:49
  Steve: But it's not as hard as it seems.
• 12:51
  Steve: It just sometimes takes some organization and some guidance to understand how to start opening your brain up to being able to do this.
• 12:58
  Steve: So anyway, take care, stay positive, keep practicing, and I'll talk to you soon.