Remember chord progressions

I love practicing ear training. I love being able to hear songs and understand them by ear. I definitely don’t practice ear training as much as I probably should, but I think it’s one of the most useful skills that a musician can learn.

For an intro for people that may be unfamiliar, ear training is the ability to recognize different aspects of music (rhythms, harmonies, melodic intervals, instruments) just from listening. So that’s a lot of different things to be able to recognize.

Today’s post is only about chord progressions.

When you learn a new chord progression or harmony, remember the sound of it. Play it in different keys and pay attention to the sound of the chord progression. Listen for what different intervals you hear and how each note changes from chord to chord. Listen to the voice leading that’s often used. If you use solfege or scale degrees, listen to which different scale degrees you hear in each chord.

If you can do that for every new chord progression that you learn you’ll be able to recognize chords in a lot of different songs. They might be in different keys, but if you know the sound of the chord progression as a whole it can help you recognize it regardless of the key.

Another thing to pay attention to is how the chords change. Listen to pairs of chords. How does I to V sound? How about V to vi? And so on. Continue paying attention to different chord changes.

Compare them to other chord progressions that you know and try to hear them as being distinct. Listen to the chord quality and what type of chord it is.

Doing this can help you improve your ear training without adding much more work to your practice sessions. If you play a chordal instrument like guitar or piano then you learn to play chord progressions all the time. And those chord progressions will often come back in other songs. Or parts of those chord progressions will come back in other songs.

Being able to recognize what type of chord progression you have before you start learning the song can be a great confidence boost and can give you a head start in learning the song.

This can be something that you add while you’re learning a song. You can use the songs that you’ve already learned to help yourself learn ear training.

I’ve personally had this help me with ear training classes while I was at Berklee College of Music. Some of the chord progressions we had on the ear training dictation exams I recognized from songs that I’d learned on guitar. It made it a lot easier to do well in ear training classes.

ISJ