 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel's School of Music. In this lesson, I'm going to help you train your harmonic ear, specifically your harmonic ear, the ear which figures out chords and progressions and connections between a chunk of notes played together in one shot and then you need to kind of analyze it and figure it out, right? Now there are a lot of apps out there which which claim to train your ear and some of them are quite good. I use a couple as well to practice, but the way I have generally developed my so-called ear, I don't know if it's actually my ear or my mind because we all hear the same thing, come to think of it. It's just that some of us know what we heard. So a good way to, I guess, the way I ended up training my ear growing up is with my voice. I ended up using my voice to figure out a lot of things away from the piano. So I rarely used my piano. I was always imagining things and to imagine and bring it out when you're away from an instrument, you have to sing. You have to use your voice and to my luck, I started my musical journey as a singer in a choir and that got me to at least be able to pitch a note correctly and then it got into things like harmony where I wouldn't get confused or I was trained not to get confused when there are a bunch of singers singing different parts. So I've developed five harmonic ear training strategies using just our voice and the piano. The piano will help the voice or the voice will help the piano, one of the two and while you learn this, I encourage you to also get a keyboard out, get a book out if you wish and learn along with me, stick around till the very end, watch all these concepts thoroughly and you can also rewatch it later if you wish and before we get cracking, it'll be really nice for you to support the channel by giving the video a like. There's a thumbs up somewhere there, please click that and also there's a subscribe button and also consider hitting the bell icon for regular notifications as we are a very busy channel you could say on YouTube. So the first thing you need to train your ear is take a chord like let's say C major, play the triad in your right hand and play the root of the chord or the name of the chord in the left hand which is C and try to sing only the root of the chord which is C C Now you may think this is kind of easy but it gets a bit interesting and or challenging as you start changing the roots to maybe a new chord. So you have the chord charts written in in front of you let's say so C what is that now? Now the soprano or the topmost note in this production is doing which is A but the bass is going F back to C okay what about this one it's giving you some time to figure that out now the note sticking on top is 2F but the note which is the root the all important root is okay so you need to take a chord progression which you are very familiar let's say a 1564 very common chords right so play them four times once you're used to it on the piano of course I'm on the C major scale by the way scale I don't use very often but still sing C the first root G the second root A the third root okay sing it in a key which suits you like C G F up to you now to make this process I understand it's going to be tricky at at first but to make this process more free flowing at the same time getting the right results which is not so easy to do you can get your first note which is C C now if you know the intervals try to find a fifth from C and you know G is a fifth from C so in the initial stages you could tell yourself okay C I want to go to G which is the fifth so how do I do that C D E F G so I can kind of use this ladder instead of like jumping to G so to speak C D E F G and then it kind of matches right so it's not that a method you want to use all through your journey you can perhaps start with this if your brain or your ear is not aware so well of the bass register or if your right hand is confusing you with the melody or the top notes of the chord so C paraba G parabada C back to C so that can like ladder up to the chord and ladder down using stepwise motion you can even do C B A G that's the next chord so harmonic ear training is to figure out the chord some somehow and by listening to the bass or by knowing what the bass note is it's an instant sure shot way of even knowing the chord so imagine this in an actual song you're listening to a song and you ended up hearing the root and you heard it so well in your head that you are able to sing it what is that note well you could initially use a few apps to actually help you or guide you as to what note you just sung la an app will perhaps a tuning app like a guitar tuner any free app which you have on your phone will probably tell you that that is a C not because you have perfect pitch or anything like that you don't need to the chord is there you're just singing what you just heard which is like singing a melody so you're singing the C the app tells you to see and thus it is C major because you're in the scale of C major and it won't be a C minor which will be in some other scale so this is about the bass line try to develop challenges for yourself to guide your ear towards the bass register because the bass register you hear that C you know what the chord is it's the C chord so if you can do a C flat B flat F your chord progressions will will happen you don't even need a piano if you can sing that and be like especially if you're now a lot of the Indian classical trained musicians who I encounter have an issue with this process in general because the bass note tends to always be fixed that's your saw your part you don't have chord changes traditionally in Indian classical music right you don't have it in classical song so it may be tricky for your ear so if you can consider that the low register the bass is the melody for you to transcribe with your respective swaras they're all going to be scale degrees sa being one pa being five dha being six ma being four so sa well you try at one and you e which is the three or the gum the six five and you one three minor gets a bit challenging with the melody don't get confused by now you may think no that's not the chord that's not the bass of the chord to so you have to skip chords the bass of chords will skip because it's you don't want a chord progression to be, you don't want it to be linear, the chords are going to jump because chord progressions don't work in stepwise motion, you know that's melody generally, okay. So that's one way to train your harmonic here, hunt for the bass, it's gonna be very very tricky because you have another more catchy subject of interest if you will which is the melody. So in hunting for the bass you need to figure out a way to kind of think of the melody or regard the melody as almost irrelevant at the time of figuring out the bass because I don't think you can process more than one thing at a time with your ear or even with your eyes or pretty much any sense organ, right which is why I like to when I'm eating food I just like to enjoy the food and not bother about anything else, right as we all do. So moving on to another great way to improve your harmonic here with singing and the piano, very organic approach would be the inversions you may already know. So here's what you can do to challenge yourself on that front, train yourself with inversions, let's say you take the G minor chord. I took a major earlier so I'm gonna take a minor now. So this is our good old G minor. Now remember you can play this in different inversions. You can go G, B flat, D, B flat, D, G, D, G, B flat. Now my intention is that you don't initially you don't need to figure out all these three notes. At least try to now hear the catchiest of the notes by promoting them through inversions. So G, B flat, D. Now what's on top? If you just hear this and don't sing, just a good way to figure out this stuff is don't give yourself the answer immediately, give it a gap, wait a bit, see the note will come to you, give it some time. You need to have a lot of patience with your training so if you can even kind of just shake your body a bit, move your head, do a few, like a lot of things about ear training are going to render you as a rather crazy person and you should not care about that. If you do it in a very official way, you're not gonna train your ear very well, theory may be so but ear training is something you have to, you have to try something which works for you. It can be unorthodox, it can be weird, it can be silly but at the end of the day, ear training is a very good reality check to know how good you are with music because the quickest way to get something onto your fingers or inside your head is through this, through our ears. Music is ultimately going to go through the ears and then the brain will do its thing. So this is the quickest possible way on earth to figure things out. So whatever method works for you, sometimes I like to like play the chord, just move my head a bit, close my eyes and try to get used to what the thing is and then it's, you relate to the topmost note which is, you don't have to care that it's D, you know it's D, you can see that the challenge is when we play it all together, we can't find all the three notes that easily as it is when we play it one by one. So this is an exercise where you have to whack the chords together. Now similarly, now what is that, the top note happens to be, it's also the root of the chord and then invert it, B flat, so you're scrolling through all these inversions of the chord. So it's a good way to improve your inversion knowledge, at the same time improve your harmonic here and another good way is to combine a couple of these chords together and practice the voice leading between the two chords. So for example, if I take G minor and C major, okay, G minor, C major, now the top note is G, so just basically sing G throughout the journey of G minor to C major, that's your job. The melody I play doesn't matter, another two notes, so I can do a B flat going to C, B flat for the G minor chord which I have promoted to the top, C note, the melody note C for the C major chord which I have promoted on the top and as you'll see on the piano, these two chords are leading very well into each other. So you can even move those high notes around, but land back on that, it's a good way to even compose melodies. Now you get into like an anticipation mode because you're figuring out a way how to go to that next landing, okay. That's the other permutation left in this G minor going to C major, we've done high G, high C, we've done high B flat, high C. The other thing pending for us would be Ds, D going to the C, that's and you know this song. Really allow you to kind of bring out your melody, knowledge as well through the chords, using the chords. So it's another nice way to train your harmonic here, just an organic process, everything I have for you in this lecture is just things you can do without any tech, you just put your piano on, you have a voice which we all do thankfully and that's it, that's pretty much it. Right, so I have one more really nice fun way, a fun strategy of dabbling with chords and melody at the same time, basically it revolves around you taking a chord, plonking it on the piano, you could do this on any instrument actually. In fact, most of these lessons, I don't even know how I came up with them, whether it happened on a guitar or a piano or a bass sometimes or sometimes without any instrument. So that's the thing about ear training, it's not a piano dependent thing. I understand a lot of you who watch our videos are pianists or upcoming players. So a lot about ear training and music theory bypasses the instrument, in fact the instrument can slow you down, come to think of it. So you need your ears and the music, it's not very instrument related but nevertheless I'm explaining it on the piano so if you take let's say a chord E minor, plonk it down. Now of course you have different inversions but I'm just going to take the normal position which is E, G, B and a good exercise would be to move or float each of the positions, this is the low note of the chord E, this is the middle note of the chord G, this is the high note of the chord we call it B as we all know. So take the low note for a start and float it in your mind first, first you need to catch it before floating it right? So if you don't get it, hit the whole chord and then only hit that single note. So hit the whole chord, you may have got E by now but if you don't get it try to hit only the E with that one finger namely your thumb. So okay so now you got your hold of the E, now after you got that E in the vicinity of this E, try to move around, we are on minor so access some of those minor sounds but you don't want to go too high in that range. Now low you can go very low but you don't want to go and invade the middle note so to speak which is that guy's spot and build a melody on that E. So I did laden de laden de laden de laden de laden de laden de laden de laden de laden Just get used to everything around that E, now let's look at a G, how do I get myself the G, only play the whole chord and then play only the middle note. Now with the middle there is a kind of a trap because you don't have that many notes to explore otherwise it will invade the low or the high territory. Let's sing two notes, laden de laden de laden de laden de laden de laden de laden de laden You can even go like in a more exotic flavor by choosing maybe an F which makes it a very beautiful Phrygian sound. Laden de laden de laden de laden de laden de laden de laden Okay then we have the high note which is B again if you can't hear that, first get yourself pivot the high, now explore, laden de laden de laden de laden de laden de laden You have to be creative here, you can't do this to learn, you have to do this to enjoy and to make something, to compose, laden de laden de laden de laden de laden de laden You can access all those ingredients, laden de laden de laden de laden de laden de laden Come back to be from time to time, laden de laden de laden de laden de laden de laden You can fool around and mind you there is so much more you can fool around with which this video may not have the time to keep talking about, you can invert this chord and just the same friend of ours E minor can be revisited differently because G would be the low note in this inversion, B would be the middle, E would be the high, you are going to create a completely different melodic context, right so let's just have a quick recap of what we have done, we first of all looked at identifying the bass note and then changing it based on the chord progression so then you can have a floating bass if you will just hunting for the bass primarily so or the chord roots as we call them then we looked at the inversions mostly learnt in our right hand where you use the highest note of each inversion to sing out and train your ear that thereby then we looked at changing basically having a couple of chords and then looking at the top most note of those two chords promoting them to the top so a year can hear them better and then changing between them example E minor to C major G on top B to C on top E with E on the top because both E minor and C major have E in it right and last but not least we looked at a floating option where you plonk down a chord and then float the left note the low note float the middle note and or else float the high note right guys so this was hopefully a useful ear training lesson for you do let us know what you think in the comments and a lot of our lessons at Nathaniel on our YouTube channel can be accessed through convenient playlist you may want to get your cells or bookmark the links of some of these playlist in this particular lesson year training for sure is something we cover a lot on our channel even music theory and if you'd like to make the process easier you can even visit Nathaniel school dot com under the free tutorial section which has these tags easy to use tags you can also consider supporting us on patreon where for $5 a month you will get my handwritten notes my notation wherever applicable and other media which will help you to supplement these lessons if you'd like to do something more regular if you want more structure in your learning if you feel this lesson was a bit tricky you want to start with melody intervals rhythm like the ground basics you can consider a semester at our school you can just go to Nathaniel school dot com fill up a form and one of our course advisors will get in touch with you right thanks so much for watching the video hope it was useful catch you in the next one cheers