 Hi guys this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson which is going to be a year training lesson we are going to look at the quickest method at least in my opinion to detect chords. The quickest method just using your ear and the song or whatever whoever you jam with maybe you're jamming with a guitar player or another piano player. So you hear the you hear the song just use your ear figure out what that is and that's what it is. So a little bit of theory also is needed so get a book out that'll be very helpful and how we've structured this lesson is I'm going to teach you the concept or I'll give you the exercise or the level of the year training so to speak and then there will be supplementary audio resources on our Patreon page where you can practice the exercise and really dive into the concept further on. So let's get cracking before we do it'll be awesome if you could hit that bell icon for regular notifications and if you're a first time viewer it'll be awesome if you could hit that subscribe button and leave us a comment with what you thought about the lesson. So let's get cracking. The strategy I follow when I'm listening to a song so a lot of people ask me how do you get chords for a song so fast especially students and some of my bandmates because sometimes I find errors in the original staff notation or sometimes they may get the chord a certain way they really swear that it is that chord but it's not. So the strategy which really works for me to get the chords is a flowchart driven process and it all starts from the bass it all starts from the lowest possible sound I can hear from that chord and I need to get that in my mind and then I rely on theory to navigate forward and get the actual chord and mostly when I'm getting the bass there's no need of any trial and error I don't have to check three options I can just get the actual note so it may help to sing a bit or maybe go for some singing classes and if you're not able to sing lower notes on the piano you know if you're not able to get those lower notes it's okay you can always sing them an octave higher which itself is a skill so if you can't do that note you may want to do two or two that may be too high so two so when you're singing bass remember to stick in and around middle C you don't want to go above middle C otherwise it'll start eating into the treble register or the soprano or the melody of the song so this entire strategy revolves around listening to the bass of the chord or the root of the chord and then trying to figure it out and in this lesson I'm going to give you a few exercises which will help you to hear it better or to listen to the bass better but before we kind of dive into these exercises when you're listening to songs especially these days with your apple air pods or you know iTunes with equalizers and your car audio systems also will have a very good equalizer what you could do is you could boost the bass frequencies and what I find is don't boost the sub bass frequencies boost the bass frequencies which the bass instrument like the bass guitar or the cello will end up playing so if you have a graphic equalizer you can adjust those take them up and then reduce all the higher frequencies especially around the 2k to 4k region the vocal register male vocals you may want to also drop about 800 hertz and so on depending on how low or high the singers may sing and you can use a software also called Moises which I use sometimes when the song is very tricky I can remove the vocals from the song the the software actually has the feature which allows you to just dump the vocals isolate the drums and the bass from the song and that'll be a very good tool if you're not getting these methods that efficiently so you need to listen to the bass with some absolute clarity and also don't listen to songs and try to figure it out with your cell phone speaker that is the most useless way to learn a song you you need a good pair of headphones or earphones which give you the bass register so you may want to invest I mean I find a lot of students and a lot of musicians who want to invest in instruments and software in a new computer or a new audio card or whatever else don't forget the headphones your listening medium that's the most important because it's basically the garbage in garbage out concept so if you have something which is absolutely crappy you're not going to learn much if you want to especially if you want to hear chords or train your ear for anything so to train your ear you need good equipment so start with just a good pair of headphones or maybe even speakers or earphones you can try a good pair of earphones which sounds the way it should sound which has a good audio range or a good frequency range which it supports so enough of the tech stuff let's get started with the music stuff so exercise number one would be I'm going to give you a host of one four five chords and you need to identify that you need to tell you need to be able to sing the bass notes and for most of these exercises my piano will be off for your view you won't get to see the piano you'll just be able to see my face so you have to deal with that now one four five if I have to play you a one four five like this okay let's try and sing that now before you try singing it you may you may your instinct may tell you to sing because that's the highest note of my chord so the piano chords or any song you listen to you may be governed by the highest note rather than that you have to take a step back and listen to the bass of the chord so the root is D okay so D would be a root D then G not you can sing the high G as well but in this instance the high G and the low G are the same so D not F sharp it's D the lower one G and then A okay that's your five so let's jumble that up four chords let's play that again so I did one one which in the key of D you now know what is one five four one or at least you should know based on the theory of the scale of D which is let's try a few more examples try to sing the bass you need to access the G D and then again and a good trick to kind of get by if you got the first note G and you're not getting the second note a good thing would be to actually sing a linear line with your voice and see where it goes to G D you know G D or two and you can even sing that as a line as a linear movement even though that's not there in the song or what I'm playing you're still singing it because it allows your voice it guides you to that destination so a few exercises will be waiting for you on our patreon to practice one four five a lot more further than this so do head over there in the due course okay so hearing one four fives in songs are very important you can listen to maybe the album oh brother where are thou from the movie oh brother where are thou you'll have a lot of one four five songs like I'll fly away and so on and so forth the usual old school gospel and country songs will have a lot of one four five so when you're training your ear to detect chords or to find chords make sure to start in a in a way which which works for you so do just the one four fives one major four major and five major because those are the easiest chords to detect in a song and listen to the bass that's very very important that's what this lesson is about so let me do one more exercise which has bass movement and then it's not going to be one four five but I just want you to hear the bass okay that one what's the bass doing here it's going and again you could go linearly with your singing one more time and another way I hope you can detect bass lines is if I actually move them linearly with you in a progression like maybe this one see that you feel a climb almost a ladder like movement in the bass right even though the right hand appears to just be stagnant there so let's try and get our ears or our and our voices to hear the bass I'll first play it with without singing one more time okay let's try and focus on singing first note is very important when you're doing these climbing bass lines so now it's very low for me at the moment that's a low D flat so that's your D flat you don't have to know what it is just first sing it then so once you get the first note I think the others will follow isn't it so that those are the notes and now that you've heard those notes you can decipher okay now based on the quality of the chord which I now experienced I know the root and I know the quality of the chord quality is major minor diminished augmented or whatever you can then add the quality to the bass note and you got yourself the chord so major you could say another major minor that feels diminished or dominant and back to major so major major minor diminished major and then major major major major major thought of majors in then the second occasion right so practice this linear jump as well we'll have a few lessons on patreon definitely to explore these linear climbing bass lines that's very very important for your study moving on so in this style of chord progression what I did was I'm moving or floating in and around the circle of fifths now you can practice the circle of fifths either in a clockwise manner that would be C G D A E B F sharp C sharp A flat E flat B flat F C or you can practice it in the counterclockwise direction which will be C F B flat E flat A flat D flat G flat B E A D G C with major or with minor chords this is a good practice you can do on your own you don't need to rely on a chord exercise or a ear training app you you know your circle of fifths and you can just formulate the progression and see how far you can go I would recommend just maybe four chords or three chords or a max of five chords so if I start with C and move clockwise in the circle that's five of them so and just to confuse you I'm playing other notes on top I'm not playing the roots on top and the bottom which is how it will be in the real world you know let's try and dive to that bass let's try and get it you may know it's C G D A E because I'm playing it and you can kind of see it as well but you need to sing that so singing that is the first step to identifying it even in actual songs in a song it'll be so easy because the bass would be loud and booming you know in your system especially when you EQ it cleverly so C G D A E and all these feel major it could also be minor C G D A E all minors so remember quality of the chord can come later first get the bass of the chord because the bass note if you heard C it's bound to be either C major or C minor if it sounds happy major job done if it sounds sad minor job done so C G D A E okay so circle of fifths that was a circle going clockwise that's with the clock then you can go counterclockwise where you're going to move in perfect fourths which would end up being C F B flat E flat maybe A flat let's take five of those C F B flat E flat A flat that's C don't get sing E by mistake C F B flat E flat C F B flat E flat A flat okay so singing in fifths or singing in fourths getting that bass motion very very important so another way you should practice your bass movement should be with something we should never forget two five one motion which is a very common thing in jazz now two five one originates from the circle of fifths itself it's just the circle in counter clockwise direction but the quality of the chords will differ it will not just be major major major or minor minor minor it would be an assortment so two five one in the key of C for instance would be D minor G major C major and you could also get in those jazzy seventh chord extensions which is D minor seventh G dominant seventh which is G seventh and then C major seventh so get your bass movement now two two two you could do two five one or else you could consider two five one both work you can do a higher five or the lower five two five one two five one let's try it on a few more keys what's that now F B flat E flat let's try another two five one five and with two five one you can modulate it slightly like two five and you can do stuff like that you know which is the one you can also do minor two five one so for a minor two five one the qualities of the chord will change because it ends with minor and the scale is generally the minor or the harmonic minor scale so so that's your two five one and again it helps to sing linearly la da da da da do wave and going two going to five if going to one okay so minor two five one as well as major two five one which is minor seventh dominant seventh and major seventh or just major or major sixth okay guys so moving forward just to make two five one a bit more sophisticated and a lot more musical and scalable you could do a two five and then the one would be a minor and that will be the two five of the next two five one so if I take F minor again this is all relying on the circle of fifths knowledge because the circle of fifths moves like that it moves in this direction so F minor seventh B flat dominant seventh instead of doing E flat and ending I do F minor seventh B flat dominant E flat minor seventh A flat seventh and then A flat goes to C sharp or D flat but I'll do minor there of course I'm not singing the bass now but now you have to practice singing the bass if it goes too low as you observed it was for me then I think if I believe so I've gone through the entire round robin of the circle of fifths which is a nice exercise on its own so two five one movements are very important to to get your bass into play to get your bass into your ear so listen to more music which has this stuff as I keep telling students so whoever asks me how do you find chords of a song by year well maybe I don't have a technique as such maybe I just listen to the right music you know it could just boil down to that and I'm not trying to to show off about you know what I have listened to in my formative years but I feel I've definitely listened to music with some great chord progressions if I were to stand them with what we have today you know if you take some of the modern day artists some of them share my name like Jason Derulo for instance he doesn't even make chords so it it's really annoying to listen to such music you know that or you know a Nicki Minaj song I've heard maybe one in my entire life and couldn't handle it at all so things like that which have absolutely no harmonic information why would you want to waste your time training your ear with that stuff so you may have to rewind the clock go back in time to train your ear you need to well start with the Beatles start with Bach start with some of the older music out there and get better listening equipment as I've been telling you throughout the video so I usually end my lessons with some weird stuff or some out-of-topic stuff but this one is still in the topic but it'll involve some weird chords and still trying to train your harmonic ear hopefully so the first chord will be a diminished chord and you're not going to sing the diminished chord you're going to form chords based on the diminished seventh chord so what does that mean you take the C diminished seventh which you see here which is C flat F sharp A and just do minor movements minor triad movements C minor what's the next chord chord in the diminished family E flat minor which is a minor third next chord in the diminished family will be F sharp minor which is A A minor now look at all the minors available C minor E flat minor F sharp minor A minor there we go and try to sing the bass of these C E flat F sharp A or jumble that C F sharp E F sharp it's a very ghostly chord now and then jumble that A to E flat A to E you may sing that but you should sing E flat and then F sharp A C E flat so sing the bass of these chords or just start by singing some part of the chord that'll be very helpful and the last weird ear training bass note strategy I have for you is to take an augmented family of major chords what I mean by that is take a C augmented chord in this instance it could be any augmented chord I'm just taking C and build major chords from this particular augmented set of three trio if you will so that'll be C major E major and G sharp or A flat major so C E A flat and again focus on the bass C A flat E if it's too low go to the E or the E but don't go to don't go really high so C A flat E that's your bass C okay so these are rather unconventional ways to hear the bass because the chord progression is not very conventional so hope you found this ear training lesson useful if you'd like more structured ear training lessons weekly with me it's a it's probably not probably it is my favorite topic as a teacher you see me teaching piano on this channel sometimes guitar theory composing song breakdowns but what I love teaching the most is ear training so you can head over to our you have a lot of resources we have a ear training playlist on youtube we also have a year training playlist on nathanielschool.com in our members only section where we go from absolute zero how to actually detect intervals how to find you know chords in different ways how to actually use songs with year how to train your ear with songs because I'm not allowed to play any songs in a youtube video unfortunately at least the popular ones so our website has a lot of information and patreon for additional learning for sure thanks a ton for watching the lesson do share the video with your friends give the video a like leave us a comment with what you thought about the lesson or suggest something further some topics which might be haunting you which I can definitely consider doing a lesson off in the near future thanks a ton for watching the lesson again this is jason zack from nathaniel school of music cheers