Beginner’s guide to learning by ear

Learning by ear can be incredibly intimidating if you’ve never done it before, but the more you do it the easier it becomes. Here’s a guide for beginners on how to learn songs by ear.

Here are our steps:

1. Sing it
2. Slow it down
3. Learn the melody
4. Find the key
5. Find the chord progression
6. Learn any other parts
7. Roman numerals and solfege
Final notes

1. Sing it

This might seem like a strange first step, but learning to hum or sing along to the part that you’re learning can really help at first. If you’re learning a song with vocals I recommend learning to sing along with the entire song before learning anything, or even starting to sing the goal part. The main benefit this gives you is a reference point for where in the song different sections are. When you’re able to sing along with the song you’re able to remember the form of the song.

This way you’ll be able to learn the other sections a little faster with this reference point.

What if I’m learning a guitar part?

I recommend doing this for every song you learn just to more fully know the song, but you don’t need to learn every single lyric. It definitely helps me get into the song a little more if I can sing along with it, but if you’re under a time crunch it can be an extra step that takes up a lot of time that isn’t worth the effort.

The main idea is to learn to hum along with the melody. Knowing the lyrics isn’t as important as being able to hum the melody along with the song.

But if you haven’t ever learned a song by ear this step is almost necessary and will help loads in being able to learn the rest of the song.

2. Slow it down

When you haven’t learned a song by ear it might be going by a little too quickly to be able to figure anything out. You might feel like the song is just too fast for you to hear where the notes are.

That’s not uncommon.

So after you’ve learned to sing the song, sing it slowly. Slow it down in your head and sing it slowly. This is the primary benefit of being able to sing along with the song. Once you’re able to sing it well enough to hear it slowly and accurately in your head you can match the pitches you’re singing on your instrument. I’ve found this to be more useful than slowing the recording down because it forces me to listen closely and to use my inner ears to slow the music down. It forces me to focus on the sound of the entire musical phrase, rather than focusing on individual notes.

You can also use programs to slow down extremely fast passages. If you’re learning a solo there may be passages that are hard to hear accurately at full speed. They may be too fast or just too complicated. Fortunately, YouTube has a playback speed feature that can be useful here. I’ve used it many times to learn guitar and piano solos because the notes are sometimes so fast that it’s hard to hear clearly full speed. But once I’ve slowed down the music I try to focus on learning to sing the melody, and then I learn it on my instrument. That way I’m still going through the same process of internalizing the music and being able to recreate the music before playing anything.

3. Learn the melody

If you’ve never learned a song by ear then this will likely take a while, but your goal is to be able to play the melody of the song on your instrument. Even if your instrument is a chordal one (like piano or guitar) and your goal is to learn to play that specific part. Fiddle with your instrument and play a bunch of wrongs notes until you find out how to play the melody.

An exercise I often have my private students do is a call and response exercise. I’ll tell them the scale that I’ll be using and the starting pitch and I’ll play something for them. Their goal is to play it back. I play it as many times as they need and as slowly as they need. I’ll even play what they just played, their “guess” for what it is, and then what I played so they can hear it played on the same instrument and by the same person. That often helps them hear that they didn’t play the correct thing.

Count the notes

Another thing I have my students do, especially if they’re new to playing by ear, is count the notes. I’ll ask them to count how many notes the passage contains. I normally don’t play more than 8 notes, and for newer students I start with 3 or 4. But I’ll ask students how many notes the passage had and sometimes I’ll have to play it slowly. I also make sure I ask them how many total notes, even if some notes are repeated. If I play one note five times, that means that passage has five notes. Rather than counting how many unique notes the passage has.

Learn the rhythm

Next learn the rhythm of the passage. Make sure you can play the rhythm on your instrument. Then start adding notes to it. Sometimes the tricky part of a passage is the rhythm and the notes aren’t all that difficult, but the difficult rhythm makes it sound like the notes are difficult too. So learning the rhythm first, without any notes, can help remedy this problem.

Use your music theory

Use your knowledge of scales and music theory to help you out here. If you recognize that you have five notes within a specific scale, check to see if that scale is used for the song. You can basically use the process of elimination if you know your scales well.

Here it’s especially useful to be able to sing along to the song so that you can use your instrument to match the pitches that you’re singing.

Don’t be afraid to go note by note and figure out each note individually.

4. Find the key

Once you can play the melody, write down, or put together all of the notes used. That’s the key.

This step can be done quickly, but it can be helpful to make a conscious note of what key a song is in. It can just help figuring out other sections of the music because you already know what group of notes that section is likely to use.

5. Find the chord progression

Listen to the bass line. The bass player will likely be playing the root notes of the chords. If they aren’t playing the root notes, then the chords may be inverted.

Once you can sing along to the bass line, figure it out on your instrument. That will give you some clues as to what the harmony is. There are a few things you can do after you’ve figured out the bass line. You can check the chords built off of that note within the scale. You can listen to the chord quality (major, minor, diminished, augmented, etc.). You can also use the melody to figure out what the harmony is.

Check chord quality

Listen to the chords and see if you can figure out what type of chord each one is. Are there any major chords? Are there any minor chords?

One way that I’ve seen this taught is telling people to listen to whether the chord sounds “happy” or “sad.” This doesn’t always work, but can be used as a crutch at the beginning.

After you’ve figured out the order of the chords and what chord quality they are try testing out different chords or arpeggios on top to find out what specific chords that song is playing. This is easier to do on a chordal instrument.

Check chords within the scale

Given that I know what scale the song is using and I know my diatonic chords, I’d check if the bass line lines up with any diatonic chords in root position. This takes some knowledge of music theory and scales to do. If you don’t have that knowledge this step may take a little longer, but it’s still doable.

Check the chords in root position built off of the notes in the bass line. If the bass is playing a C chord check if C major or C minor is the harmony there. If it isn’t the chord could be an inversion. Check diatonic inversions like Am/C and F/C.

Check other chords outside the key

If you play the arpeggio or chord built off the bass note and it doesn’t sound correct check other chords that include that note.

For example if the bass is playing a C and the chord isn’t C major, there are a number of other chords we can check. After you’ve checked Am/C and F/C check other non-diatonic chords. Those are chords not within the key. Check C minor, Ab, Fm, and D7. Not all songs exclusively use diatonic chords, but some songs may have chords that are outside of the key and if the chord you’re testing out doesn’t sound correct it might be a non-diatonic chord.

Use the melody

If you know the bass line and the melody, you likely know multiple notes in each chord. Put them together. The melody is often playing a chord tone (in a lot of styles of music at least), or accenting or centering around a chord tone or chord tones. Use that knowledge to figure out the harmony.

6. Learn any other parts

Lastly learn any other parts within the song that you think are interesting. This is the step where I’d suggest learning the specific instrumental part that you’re looking to learn. If you’re learning a specific guitar or piano part this is the step you’d learn that.

Repeat the above steps (when applicable) and use the knowledge that you gained through the previous steps to help you.

The reason I put this one so far down the list is because all of the previous steps will give you a solid amount of background knowledge of the song to be able to easily figure out other parts within the song. Having knowledge of the structure of the song and how the song is formed can help guide you in learning other instrumental parts within a song.

Learning the harmony will especially help you figure out what the guitar and piano parts likely are. Being that they’re both chordal instruments, they’ll likely be outlining the chords in some way. So you can get a head start on learning that part if you already know the harmony.

7. Roman numerals and solfege

I use roman numeral analysis and solfege all the time. They’re two incredibly useful tools for ear training. They give you a reference point for what you’re hearing. You can relate the melody and chord progression that you just figured out back to some type of framework like roman numerals and solfege so that you can better learn songs in the future.

What they do is they give you names for the sounds you’re hearing. The different scale degrees have names with solfege and being able to listen specifically to the relationships between the notes will help you learn songs in the future without needing an instrument. You can figure out how the notes are related even if you haven’t learned the key because you’re listening within that specific scale.

Roman numeral analysis does the same thing. It gives you names and a reference point for chord progressions. It can help you listen to a song and hear how the chords are related, and how they relate to the tonal center, even if you don’t know what specific notes a song is using.

This skill is called relative pitch. You’re listening to the relationships between the notes and how they relate back to the tonal center, rather than listening for specific pitches.

Final notes

Learning songs by ear is a lifelong endeavor and you’ll always be able to improve your ear training skills. But it’ll get easier the more you do it. The more songs you have learned, the easier it will be to learn songs in the future. You’ll start to recognize chord progressions that you already know. You’ll start to recognize solfege syllables or scale degrees. You’ll start to hear rhythms that you know and strumming patterns, and piano parts, and harmonies. You’ll start to recognize licks in guitar solos. Eventually you’ll be able to hear modulations. All of these things will happen the more you practice ear training and learning songs by ear.

The better you get, the better you get. It’ll be easier to pick up songs by ear. One of the best feelings that I’ve had as a musician is seeing the results of my ear training practice. Listening to a song and understanding what the chord progression is and knowing what solfege syllables the melody is playing is an amazing feeling. And this doesn’t even take all that long to achieve. For some songs it may be pretty quick if the song is similar to the songs that you have previously learned.

As tired of an analogy as it is, you’ll start to hear music in a similar way to hear a language. You’ll understand the different phrases and combinations of notes and musical ideas that the musicians are using.

So go practice some ear training.

ISJ