Recognizing common chord patterns.

Easy ear-training exercises. (Part 1)

When you listen to a song, what are you actually listening to?

In most cases, (and especially if you are a non-musician), your first impulse is to immediately follow the groove or the beat of the rhythm, followed by singing the lyrics to the melody of the song. This is what most people do when they listen to music.

This is why so many people know lyrics to songs, and can immediately recognize the rhythm - but cannot always distinguish the differences in the actual musical parts of the song. Non-musicians aren't normally educated in learning a musical instrument or the basics in music theory. All they understand is whether or not they can sing the song and do the "jello-neck head bob" to the rhythm. This is why we love music!

Over time, musicians hear, learn and understand music quite differently from non-musicians. Musicians adopt a method of practicing a recognition of "ear-training" during the process of learning how to play their instrument. In this process, mathematical musical patterns and formulas are learned, studied and applied in the practicing of the instrument. This process of recognizing these patterns and formulas can take several years to learn.

How did I do it?

Older musicians (like me), can well remember a time before internet websites, cell phones and social media, when learning how to play an instrument came from two places: "Hearing" and "Reading". If you could afford to purchase music books at a music store, you always had reference material to read. I think that as a teenager, I may have had three books. I was a kid with a paper route. I couldn't afford to buy guitar lessons and music books. It was one or the other. I chose lessons. I got into the habit of keeping a notebook and writing down all of the songs I could play. I wrote down chord charts for the songs, to the best of my ability (which wasn't always correct), and I used this as my "go to" source for building my repertoire of songs.

One day, it occurred to me that many of these songs had a lot of the same patterns and chords in them. Again, I was still theoretically challenged when it came to understanding basic principles of music theory, but the math was right there on the page; and it made enough sense to me that I could easily figure out other songs that were similar in structure. I had no idea how significant this ability would serve me in later years.

Learning to listen.

When I stopped taking guitar lessons, I had to learn just about everything I could, by listening to the actual music. This was the only option I had at the time. Luckily, I was a resourceful kid. I was inventive and curious. For me, it was a welcomed challenge to be able to figure out how to play a song just from listening to it on the radio or recording it to a cassette tape. I didn't know why I was able to recognize the theoretical patterns, I just knew that certain chords belonged together - and knowing which chords they were, was simply a matter of the process of elimination.

What I didn't know then was that I was inadvertently training my ears to hear these patterns almost immediately. I was also learning how to quickly anticipate chord progressions in new songs. I could hear the differences between major, minor and seventh chords. Beyond that was still no man's land for me. Rock and roll, country and blues was easy for me to figure out. However, Jazz was still way above my head. So, I didn't pay much attention to Jazz until high school.

Some learn how to train their ears to listen for certain sounds. Some learn the ability to recognize these sounds by having perfect pitch, associative pitch or relative pitch. How do people learn how to do this? For me, it was constant repetition and endless hours of practicing my guitars. One of the best ways I know to learn ear training is to listen for patterns.

Recognizing happy and sad chords.

You must learn how to recognize happy chords and sad chords. Happy chords are major chords. Sad chords are minor chords. Both of these types of chords are exactly the same, except for one note - the “3rd”. The major chord has a “major 3rd” and the minor has a “flatted (or minor) 3rd”.

Practice the exercises below and record yourself on your smartphone "voice recorder". Honestly, sometimes you may need to be a bit resourceful in your learning and practicing process. Trust me - get into the habit of recording yourself playing.

Practice the following two-chord exercises so that the chords become easier to recognize when they are played.

This exercise may take many times to do. Also, you will need to know how to play both major and minor “barre” chords for this exercise. Assuming you can read tablature, each of the chords will be structured in the tablature below.

Set your metronome at 90bpm. If that’s too fast, slow it down to 70 or 80bpm.

Do these exercises often so that hearing and recognizing the difference between major and minor chords becomes second-nature to you.

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