Epic Ear Training

A Chord Progression Marathon

• Joe Luegers Music Academy • Season 1 • Episode 6

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0:00 | 59:06

Introduction/Lesson

SPEAKER_01

Today on Epic Gear Training, I've got about 45 minutes of chord progressions for you to learn by ear, which is a skill that you definitely need to work on. That's right, I mean you specifically. You want to learn how to play and understand music using nothing but your ear? This is a learnable skill, and I've got the resources to put you on the right path. Welcome to Epic Gear Training. Please welcome our host, a marginally celebrated local airfluencer. Don't leave yourself. When I was in college, anytime I would say something like, That's hard for me. My piano professor would respond, five. Yeah, it's hard for everybody else too. I see comments on YouTube like this all the time. I say something along the lines of I have a hard time with core productions. And I'm sorry to say that you're not special. People have a hard time learning core productions by the R5. Because that skill is really a common water skills are. If you're not called on your music theory intervals, you don't skill the credits on the logic, or if you're the work and the majority of the benefits on the code of corporations. For those of the skills totally lost the exercise of recommended fields, the fact that the latest skills out to go to the five. That way this lesson can be something that you continuously come back to in your oral skills practice. All of the chord progressions in today's exercise will be built from the major scale. If you stack thirds from each skill degree, you will always get the same pattern of major and minor chords regardless of what key you're in. And scale degrees two, three, and six give you the minor chords. If you stack thirds on skill degree seven, it gives you a diminished triad. But you're more likely to see fancy things like modal mixture than you are to ever see a diminished triad. So let's just go ahead and toss this chord in the recycling bin for now. Blues, reggae, and folk music tends to use almost entirely the one, four, and five chords. And if you do see minor chords and pop music, it tends to be the six chord more often than not. By stringing chords together, you get a chord progression for. I've got a lot to say about how to identify chord progressions by ear, but today I'll narrow things down to five basic techniques. Technique number one, dictate the bass line first. And it's really not a bad idea for this to be the only technique you use for these exercises. When you hear the progression, ignore everything else and zero in on what is happening down in the bass register. If you can identify the scale degrees happening down there, then you've got your chords. Now, to be fair, this only works when we're not doing an inversion of the chord where the bass is playing something other than the root, but in most popular music, you're not really going to see a ton of inversions. And even when you do, it'll probably be the same inversions you've seen a million times, like the five first inversion chord in this progression. Essentially, doing this exercise means doing melodic dictation for the lowest notes in the texture. To make this technique a little bit easier, I'll boost the volume of the bass the final two times for the chord progression. If you need more practice doing melodic dictation, check out my lesson 48 melodies to learn by ear. Technique number two, five. Lesson for major chords versus minor chords. There are only three major chords and three minor chords that naturally exist five. So your choices are hard narrowed down considerably if you can do that five. If you need more practice with identifying chord qualities, check out my previous episode of epicure training called the 10 best chords. Technique number three, five, lesson for cadences at the end of the progression. Instead of focusing on the chords themselves, you have to listen to the relationship between the chords. A 5-1 progression, also known as a perfect cadence, has a very distinct 10-10 resolution sound. If you can identify the cadence by ear knowing the other chords, it's usually just sort of reverse engineering. For more practice with this, check out my lesson called Cadences Are Rad. Technique number four. Lesson for specific skill degrees in the texture. For example, skill degree one only exists in the one, four, and six chords. If you're good at identifying the tension of specific skill degrees, it immediately narrows down your options quite a bit for what chords you're hearing. Of course, for this to work, you need to actually know what the skill degrees are in every chord. I'll put a chart up in the video edition of this lesson for you to memorize. It's boring, but it's good for you. If you need more practice identifying skill degrees, check out my first podcast called It's All About the Tonic. Technique number five. Build your harmonic vocabulary or vocabulary, as I call it for it. So the chart is that none of this really matters unless you know what chords are in what keys and have a few basic chord progressions memorized in every key. That's the kind of advice people don't like to get because it's not a fast to loot. So I'll go ahead and apologize on behalf of the way our brains work. If you haven't downloaded my list of 10 mandatory chord progressions and every key available to members of my free newsletter, put the link in the photo and the video description of. You've got to get these chords under your fingers to be able to visualize them after life. Now I totally understand if you're frustrated with the advice I've been giving today because it's really just pointing you in a lot of different directions. But really, that's what corporations are. A lot of people try to jump into corporations when they haven't built up these stuff. Other foundation skills struggle, but hopefully these other resources that I've given you will help you. The final two times for each progression, I'll boost the volume of the baseline to help you a bit with the first technique I discussed earlier. If I were you, I would focus more on getting the Roman numerals correct and consider getting the letter names of the chords right as more of a bonus. We'll work our way through the circle of fits three times. Basically, what I'm saying here is I've got three chord progressions in every major key for you, for a total of thirty-six chord progressions. Stick around after the exercises for my listener mail, where I'll talk about composing melodies.

Ear Training Exercises

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C major. Answer five one C F flat C majority. Answer two five two five D minor G minor G majority. Answer One Four Six Five G E minor D D major. Answer Diffi One Three Four D E minor F sharp minor G A major. Answer one six four five A F sharp minor D E major. Answer One Four Five E F sharp minor B major. Answer One Four Five Six B E F sharp G sharp minor. F sharp majority. Answer Four Five Three Four B C sharp A sharp minor B flat major.

SPEAKER_02

Five four one four A flat D flat G flat A flat majority.

SPEAKER_01

Answer Six two five one F minor B flat minor E flat A flat E flat majority Answer Six Five Four One C minor B flat A flat E flat B flat majority Answer One Two Five One B flat C minor F flat F major Answer One Three Six Five F A minor D minor C major Answer One Four Five One C F C major Answer One Three Five One G B Minor D Major Answer One Four Two One D E Minor D A Major Answer Four Three Two One D C Sharp Minor B minor A E Major Answer Four One Four Bive A E A B B Major Answer one five four one B F sharp E B F sharp majority answer four five one six B C sharp F sharp D sharp minor D flat major answer one five one five D flat A flat D flat A flat E A flat majority Answer One six one six A flat F minor A flat F minor E flat majority Answer Three Six Two Five G minor C minor F minor B flat B flat major Answer Six Four One Five G minor E flat D flat F F major Answer Four Five Four Five B flat C B flat C

Listener Mail

SPEAKER_01

Okay It's That Time Again Everybody's Favorite Part of the Show Who Fell Asleep During The Exercises Listener Mail Um So today's Message is from Taz the Dogger And it says I can write lyrics, make a chord progression, play a simple bass track, but melodies, not so much hard. I've studied and researched endlessly, so maybe I'm not asking the right questions. As I go back and revisit many of these songs I've written to produce them in Pro Tools or adding onto the lyrics and chord strumming, I'm hitting the brakes when I get to the melody track on piano or guitar. I prefer to start with a very basic guitar riff or even piano and then later move on to more complex melodies as I improve my theory and fingering skills. So I'm not trying to create melodies as the first step, but to create and then incorporate them into an existing song. Hope you can help. So let me say first that some people are very natural at this. Like my wife is a vocalist and one time I was writing a kind of an unusual chord regression and having a hard time coming up with melodies on top. And she just started singing and and uh improvising just off the top of her head, came up with a much better melody than any of my ideas, which is really frustrating for to people like me who have to put a lot of work into things. Um but that's not to say that's it's impossible. It's just the rest of us need to actively work on this skill for. Now, one of the things that helped me the most is the first band I was in, or one of the first bands in high school. Uh it was kind of the situation a lot of people in small towns find themselves in where the members of my band were the two other competent musicians I knew. And uh the band was drums and two guitars, two electric guitars, and that's it. Uh, because we were the only musicians who really knew each other in our little friend group. So what we would do is um the rhythm guitar player would play the chord progressions and I would play the melody. And uh we would play like buckethead, Joe Saturati, like guitar virtuoso type songs sometimes, but a lot of the times we were just learning songs we liked, and the other guitar player would play the guitar part, and I would uh learn the vocal melody on my guitar. So um learning all of these vocal melodies on the guitar really infused a sense of melody into my head. And really, if you think about it, a lot of musicians don't actually learn a lot of melodies unless you're a vocalist. So if you play like a brass instrument or a bowstring instrument, you're just playing part of the overall texture in the band or the orchestra. If you play guitar or piano again in a band, you're just adding a texture more than uh melodic material a lot of the time, unless you're playing a riff. So even if you're not a vocalist, I think the most important thing is to think like a vocalist. Don't think straight and patterns off. Um think with your voice off. So I used to compose on the piano where I'll play the chords in my left hand and I'll play the melody in the right hand, and that would be my kind of first step in uh in my creative process. But now, even though I'm not a vocalist, my first step is always to sing it. Now, if you're not a singer, then that's just something you need to get used to. I think anybody can put the right amount of practice in to at least have a little bit of control of their voice. Uh, but some of the best melodies I've written. I've just kind of been in a car, just humming. And then I'll go home and I'll transcribe the melody. And it's possible to do that over a chord progression, turn on a chord progression, uh sing over the top of it, and uh then go and learn that on an instrument. Instruments that you don't breathe into naturally kind of put you at a handicap for melodic writing because if if you're breathing into it, that naturally creates phrases and stuff like that. So it's easier to write a good melody on a saxophone or at least to feel a good melody on a saxophone than it is on something like piano or the or a MIDI roll on uh Pro Tools or Logic or something like that. Another thing is you need to learn a lot of melodies. Like I said earlier in my my first band, I learned a lot of melodies on guitar. So uh don't just learn like melodic guitar solos or melodic keyboard lines, learn what the vocalist is singing on your instrument, and that helps quite a bit. That'll probably be my one number one piece of advice. Um another thing you can do is go through some melodic exercises, like tell yourself, oh, I'm gonna write a melody using these three notes, go to grades one, two, and three, and the interest is all gonna be kind of in the rhythm going on or I'm gonna write a melody that's entirely step-wise, where I'm moving from one scale degree to the next, never skipping over anything, or do the opposite. I'm gonna write a melody that is entirely composed using the tones of each chord, the chord tones are another thing you can do is use uh target notes and approach notes or approach tones or whatever you want to call them, uh, which is kind of like a jazz term I've heard before. So you could tell yourself, like in this chord, when this chord happens in my chord progression, I'm gonna be landing on this note, this chord tone. So if it's a C major chord, C E G, you could be like, my goal tone is E. I'm gonna land on that note. And then if the next chord is F minor, you could be like, oh, I'm gonna land on A flat. So you would compose a melody connecting that E to that A flat using approach tones. So all of this doesn't sound very creative, it's very um sort of thinking analytically, but it is uh these are good techniques to help you get from here to there. Another thing is you could write the rhythm and then add a melody to the rhythm. Um I guess my whole point here is with these exercises, uh you're controlling, you're very carefully controlling one of the elements so you're not just overwhelmed with possibilities. So I hope all that helps, and I maybe brought up a few things you didn't think of before. Or maybe it didn't help at all. Who knows? Well, everybody, I will see you next time on Epic Ear Training. Have a good one.