The Harmonious Blacksmith: A Music Theory Exploration

Ep. 20 : Ear Training - How To Hear Chord Progressions Using Bass Lines(Part 1)

• Kevin Patrick Fleming • Season 2 • Episode 20

Share episode

Send us a text

🎧 Ep. 20: Ear Training - How To Hear Chord Progressions Using Bass Lines
Are you ready to improve your ear training and take your understanding of music theory to the next level? In this powerful episode, we dive deep into the essential skill of hearing chord progressions by identifying bass lines. Whether you’re a music student, aspiring musician, or passionate music theory enthusiast, this episode gives you practical strategies to train your ears to recognize intervals, root movements, and the harmonic function of chords based on bass note patterns.

Discover how recognizing scale degrees, diatonic functions, and cadences can unlock your ability to play by ear, compose music, and transcribe songs faster and more accurately. We also break down common chord progressions and show how to isolate the bass line to predict the harmonic structure. This is Part 1 of a multi-part series designed to build your ear from the ground up!

Don’t miss out—subscribe and follow for the next episode in this ear training series.

🎵 Master your ears. Master your music. 🎵

Support the show

Linear Music Theory Learning For Everyone!

UNKNOWN:

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01:

What is up, my fellow music theory enthusiasts? Welcome back to The Harmonious Blacksmith, a music theory exploration. It is a podcast all about music theory and the inner workings of music. Thanks again for joining me. I do appreciate it. That opening guitar track that I played for you today is a piece called Lagrima, which means a single tear in Spanish. Written by the great Spanish guitar composer Francisco Tarrega. What a beautiful storied piece. And this piece has stood the test of time, even though it was written in the late 1800s. And it really is a beautiful guitar piece. And ladies and gentlemen, today you have stumbled upon a

SPEAKER_02:

very

SPEAKER_01:

special episode.

UNKNOWN:

Episode.

SPEAKER_01:

It's a bit of a celebration today to get to number 20, just so you know. And today's episode will be all about how to hear chord progressions using ear training skills. If you are new to the podcast, welcome, and I really hope that you dig what we do and stick around. For those of y'all who have been sticking around, thank you so much for your support. Please do take a look in the description of the podcast. There is a support the show link. Three bucks, five bucks, seven bucks a month money that you wouldn't even notice can go a long way to help me continue to create awesome content for you. So I do appreciate you checking that out and supporting the show. Thank you very much. And as always, I am your host, Kevin Patrick Fleming. Aha! Thank you for joining me for the special episode number 20. Let's have some fun. So last episode, we wrapped up a two-part series on... bass lines, which is really fun. So if you haven't heard those yet, I do suggest going back and checking them out. We learned about just bass lines and bass range and the function of bass in music and how bass lines get so cool and creative. It was a lot of fun. But that led me to this episode on ear training and hearing chord progressions because those two things are so directly related. When it comes to hearing a chord progression In other words, you're listening to a music and you just want to be able to understand how the chords are progressing in a key or a chord progression or just a song you really like and want to learn to play. The answer is almost always in the bass line. And we are going to tie all of that together in this episode to help you understand what you're listening to. So without further ado, let's go ahead and review a very important term. What is ear training? Ear training is the study and practice in which musicians learn various skills to detect and identify pitches, intervals, melodies, harmonies, and chord progressions solely by hearing. So we are retraining our mind to hear things in a different way. It's what we must do in order to get sharp at this skill that we call ear training, which is a must if you're serious about understanding music. And when we talk about ear training, there is one concept and only one concept that starts it all off. And it's called the interval. So recall that an interval is just the distance between two pitches and the related sound that comes with that distance. So an example of an interval would be like a perfect fifth, which sounds like this. Or together it would sound like this. Also known as a power chord in guitar circles. So who out there remembers exactly how many intervals there are in our system? Anybody? Well, Kevin, there are clearly

SPEAKER_00:

26 intervals for every letter of the

SPEAKER_01:

alphabet. No, no, that's not even close, man. Anybody else? Well, Kevin, there's got to be seven of those intervals, one for every single note in the scale. Ooh, that was actually a better guess, but also ultimately incorrect. The answer is 12. There are 12 intervals in one octave in our Western Harmony system. as there are also 12 half steps in an octave. Now, I'm going to review a few of them, but I'll remind you I broke down all 12 intervals in episode 9 when I introduced ear training and intervals. Please do go back to that if you need to and you want to brush up on your sounds. But for the purposes of learning how to hear chord progressions, the two most important intervals you need in the beginning are a perfect fourth and a perfect fifth. A perfect fourth sounds like this. And now I get to the part where you again need to associate something familiar with the sound in order to recall it. So in this case, I'm a classical guitarist and I've played a ton of weddings in my lifetime. So I recognize here comes the bride when I do a perfect fourth. And when I hear a perfect fifth... I hear the Top Gun theme song that dates me. But of course, remember, you want to find the sounds that relate to what you know. So you want to take those sounds, make sure you have a relationship on what that sound sounds like to you. So you can recall it just like it is in a file folder in a filing cabinet. Hmm, where's that perfect for? So let me find that thing. Oh, there it is. Here comes the bride. And in your head, you can hear the beginning of here comes the bride. That connects you to the interval. Look, Kevin, what in the world does this have to do with hearing chord progressions? Yes, yes, that is the question you should be asking. And the answer is they are directly connected. Like I was talking about before, you can hear chord changes, chord progressions, simply by hearing the bass movement or the bass line. All right, so let's get into some audio examples. So I'm going to start you off with the good old-fashioned 1-4-5 progression in major, the number one chord progression in the history of Western music, right? We're going to do it in the key of G, which is going to sound like this. G major is the I chord. C major is IV. And D major is five. We're gonna make it a dominant seven for the purposes of a stronger chord progression. And then that returns us back to one. Again, that chord progression is one, four, five, seven, and back to one. And you can clearly hear that we're in the key of G when we return to the G chord. And now we are going to implement the most common and perfectly logical bass line that goes with that 1-4-5 progression. Now, you probably already know what it is. If we're on the I chord G, your root note is a G. That's easy enough. Well, what do you think it's going to be on C? It's C. And of course, when we go to V, which is D7, it's going to be D. And then we're back to G. So if you're the bass player in the group, or this might be your left hand on your piano, for example, it would sound like this. So that's what it sounds like. And functionally, it would go... five one okay so now we have a one four five progression and we have a root note bass line so now it's time to play a bit of that ear training game we were talking about all right let's go ahead and just take the first chord movement in this progression G major is 1. And C major is 4. We're just going to start there. So that may sound familiar in a lot of songs, for example. It probably reminds you of a ton of stuff. And that's good. But how can we tell that this is a 1 to 4 progression? Well, again, we're going to the bass line. So the bass line is a G. to a C. And that is, of course, a perfect fourth. Recall my filing cabinet for the perfect fourth. I use Here Comes the Bride.

SPEAKER_00:

Right?

SPEAKER_01:

We all know that. That's a pretty low key for it, but you can still hear the tune. So when I hear... I hear a one chord to a four chord, okay? Now I'm going to play the chords for you in a way where you can hear the bass note more than the rest of the chord. I'm doing it intentionally with my thumb. Now, do you hear the bass notes? You should hear... Here comes the bride. That, again, is a perfect fourth, right? Now, let's go ahead and establish what it would sound like to go from a I chord to a V chord. So, again, that's going to be a I chord as a G. And the V chord we're playing is a V7, which is a D7. Okay? But now, I'm going to do the same thing I did before and bring out the bass note. It's going to go from I, V, I. Now, remember, my sound association was the Top Gun theme song.

UNKNOWN:

Okay?

SPEAKER_01:

So, and yours can be anything you want it to be, as long as it works consistently for that interval. This is the one where I hear top gun. So if I bring the bass line out more. One, five, one, five, one. So notice I'm playing the chord, but I'm emphasizing the bass line. Then when I'm singing the bass line, I'm pointing out to you what I hear when I hear chord movement. It is always that low note. Granted, you're going to have a million questions about, well, what if the chord is inverted and you don't have the root note in the bottom? What if it's a key change? What if it doesn't start on the one chord? There are a lot of questions that come out of this, and it'll probably prompt me to make another episode about this after this for the more advanced concept but stay with me on the basics here and see if you can apply them to many things. Okay, so now let's connect our ear training skills, what we talked about earlier with perfect fourth and perfect fifth, and let's connect that to hearing core progression. Is anybody out there ready for their first little ear training test today? Anybody out there ready? Kevin, I am always ready for your tests. Yeah, yeah, I know you are. Anybody else? Kevin, I hope this is not too hard, man.

UNKNOWN:

Come on.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, I won't make it too hard. It's going to be fun. All right, let's dive in. So here's what you're trying to tell me. Is this interval a perfect fourth or is it a perfect fifth? Are you ready? Here we go. I'll play it one more time. Have we figured it out yet?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, Kevin, that sounds like a perfect fourth to me. Here comes the... Oh,

SPEAKER_01:

I'm sorry. That's not correct. Well, Kevin, that is clearly a perfect fifth interval. You are correct, sir. That is a perfect fifth interval. I was going from G to D and back to G. So when I play a one to five progression, those are going to be the notes at the bottom, the bass notes at the bottom of the chord that you need to be listening to so that you know that it's a one to five progression. So It's going to sound like this. So don't forget whatever your audio association was for a perfect fifth. Were you able to access that in your mind? That's going to be the important key. Now let's go to question number two. Listen to this interval, and I'm going to switch the key up to be a little bit tricky. But the intervals should sound exactly the same. Do you hear a perfect fourth or a perfect fifth when I play this? One more time. Anybody?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, Kevin, that is clearly a perfect fifth

SPEAKER_01:

again. I just told you last time. Oh, you're incorrect this time. Anybody else?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, Kevin, it sounded like a perfect fifth to me.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I'm sorry. Both of you are incorrect. It's actually a perfect fourth. Again, if you're listening out there, were you able to pull from your mind's filing cabinet? And here comes the bride. Now, what would it sound like if I would have gone up a perfect fifth from that C? So there's the fifth sound, and now back to the fourth sound. All right, let's go ahead and initiate ear training test number two for the day. Now this time I'm going to combine some things a little bit. So I'm going to play either a one to four or a one to a five, but this time I'm going to play the entire chord and emphasize the bass note. So you're going to hear the chord moving to the next chord with an emphasis in the bass note. Y'all ready? Let's do it. Again, is this a one to a four or is it a one to a five?

SPEAKER_00:

That sounds like

SPEAKER_01:

a

SPEAKER_00:

one to five

SPEAKER_01:

to me. Oh, that's not correct. Anybody else want to try? Well, Kevin, that's clearly a one chord to five. A four chord. That is correct. That was a one, two, a four. Was everybody listening for the bass note? So the bass note was... Again, my association. Here comes the bride. So the perfect fourth is there. And then when you put it underneath the chord progression... All right, very good on that one. Let's do one more. Ooh, ooh, I heard that one, Kevin. That's a perfect fifth. I heard it. You got it. All right, y'all are already getting better at it. This is awesome. Nice job, y'all. Way to go on that round. But now it is time for the super duper bonus round. That's right, I'm combining things for the final test. And what do you win if you get these right? You win... Invaluable Music Theory Knowledge! That's right, you win Invaluable Music Theory Knowledge! All right, here we go. So I'm going to give you a combination of things this time. Okay, so listen up. Here we go. One more time. Can anybody get it for the win? Well,

SPEAKER_00:

Kevin, this is elementary, my friend. The first one was a one chord to a four chord. Then the second part was a one chord to a five chord for

SPEAKER_01:

the

SPEAKER_00:

win.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, that is incorrect, sir. Nice try, and thanks for playing. Is there anybody else out there that can get it? Kevin, I'm not 100% sure, but I think the first one was a 1 to a 5, and then the second one was a 1 to a 4. Oh, you got it! Yeah! Way to go! You win all the music theory knowledge in the world! Okay, maybe not in the world, but you just learned a lot about bass lines and how to connect them to hearing core progressions in music. What a fun experience. and enriching exercise. So to give a quick sum up to all of this, I would focus in at the beginning on these few intervals I just talked about. The perfect fourth and the perfect fifth. Now there are a bunch of other intervals and as we know there are other chord progression. Taking on all of it at once is going to be frustrating and difficult and tedious. Mastering small bits of it one at a time is going to be way easier, way more rewarding, and way more motivating in the end. So now let me give you some ways to continue this study before my next episode comes out, which will continue all of this. So for example, now what you want to do is just go through every chord in a major key from the one chord to whatever, either two, three, four, five, six, or seven, right? Because we have seven triads and seven main chord groups in a diatonic major key or a diatonic minor key. And so in this case, again, if I'm in G major, we have G major, A minor, B minor, C major, D major, E minor, F sharp diminished, and back to G. So to give you an example, let's say I go from the I chord to a II chord. Then how would you set yourself up to get used to that, right? First of all, bass line, right? Starts on a G. Goes to the A. Anybody out there remember what interval that is? That is a major second. Because the first pitch in a G major scale... And the second pitch in the G major scale are an interval of a major second. So when you're building your chord, that is the root movement. Now, what if we go from a I chord to a III chord? Right? So now your bass interval is... And that is a major third. So again, you're listening for that when you do the progression. So I urge you to continue this exercise for more chord progressions before I get into my next episode, which I will go through more of this. But for now, it's time for a break. Today we learned the basics on hearing a chord progression based on baselines and intervals. We reviewed the intervals, perfect fourth and a perfect fifth so that we can use them for our ear training. We took a one, four, five progression. We separated the baseline. and the chords so that you could hear the bass line moving and hear the intervals. Then of course we focused on audio examples as any good musician should and we tested our ear and our knowledge. Coming up on episode 21, we will continue this ear training exercise, but we will take it further to more extended chord progressions as we continue to learn more and more about the building blocks of music. Thanks again, everybody, for joining me on the Harmonious Blacksmith. Until the next episode, I will look forward to... continuing this music theory exploration with all of you. Thanks again for joining me again. Until next time, gang, have a beautiful music-filled week.