For a long time, I wandered lost in a sea of chords. I had studied harmony in music theory, and I had learned how to play a wide variety of chords on both piano and guitar. But my ears were essentially deaf to how chords worked, why certain chords were chosen, or how I might make any creative use of chords myself.
All I knew was that harmony seemed a lot more complicated than melody! And since I couldn’t do anything with melody except learn to play what was written, note-by-note, it frankly didn’t even occur to me that I might be able to do anything more than that with harmony. It probably didn’t help that I was learning piano, where “harmony” seemed to mean “playing up to eight notes at once across both hands”, with no real understanding of why it was those notes that were written on the page.
I want to cut right to the chase and share with you the two big epiphanies which broke the world of Chords wide open for me. We’ll be leveraging these two ideas in this chapter to help you quickly get comfortable and confident working with Chords in your Ear Training and across all your music-making:
- Although “harmony” can mean any possible combination of notes played together, in fact the same pitch relationships we explored in Chapter 8: Relative Pitch mean that there is particular musical significance to certain combinations of notes in a given Key.
In all the genres of the Western music tradition we focus on in this book, harmony can be usefully understood in terms of which degrees of the scale are being used, and how that changes over time.
To put that another way: it’s not arbitrary! There are certain patterns, combinations, and note choices which are commonly chosen, because of the musical effect they have on the listener.
Just like the shorthand of saying “the key is C Major” rather than specifying each and every note we’ve chosen for our key, there is a shorthand of describing harmony, which will be introduced below and allows us to say things as simple as “It’s a I-IV-V7 progression in C” even though there might be dozens and dozens of notes involved.
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A staggering number of songs use just a handful of Chords.
Again, there may be many, many notes being played, but only three or four different Chords. Even better: it’s actually the same three or four Chords which are so extensively used!
You might have heard of the idea of a “three-chord song” or a “four-chord song”. Particularly in pop, rock and country music, but also in classical, electronic, and more varied genres, the same three or four Chords are being used. The key may vary, the particular “voicing” of those chords with specific notes may vary, the arrangement across instruments may vary—but once you understand the shorthand of Chords, you’ll see (and hear!) that the same three or four Chords are at play, perhaps up to 90% of the time.
In this chapter we’ll introduce a particular way of thinking about Chords and developing your ear for them, which allows you to fully leverage the two points above. This will transform “harmony” from something that seems endlessly complex and overwhelming, into something that feels just as simple as the note-by-note movement of a melody.
So far, in the previous chapters, we have covered two types of building blocks:
- Solfa, where we recognise one note at a time, based on its relationship to the tonic (or “home”) note, and
- Intervals, where we recognise pairs of notes, based on the relationship between them.
In this chapter we will introduce our third type of building block: Chords, consisting of three or more notes played together.
While it might be tempting to think that our building blocks are becoming more complex as we add more notes (one for Solfa, two for Intervals, three or more for Chords), in fact it’s better to think of them as three perspectives, or ways of interpreting the notes we are working with. Developing your ear for Chords is no more complex than for Solfa or Intervals, and (in the spirit of Convergent Learning) you can usefully work on all three together, as they all develop your core sense of Relative Pitch.
With Solfa and Intervals, we focused on a certain moment in time i.e. “what one (or two) notes are happening right now?”. With Chords, we can do the same thing, to identify the type of Chord being played. For example a “major triad” or a “dominant seventh chord”. However, with Chords it is particularly valuable to also consider the flow from one chord to another over time, what we call a “Chord Progression”.
In this chapter we will explore both Chords and Chord Progressions, as well as the connections to our other building blocks of Solfa and Intervals. You will see how all three together provide a “360 degree view” of everything pitch-related that’s happening in a piece of music.
As with everything in our world of Relative Pitch, we are taking a descriptive view of the theory (see Chapter 1: Musicality) rather than a prescriptive one. So we will focus on the building blocks which provide the greatest “bang for our buck”, but that doesn’t mean that’s all that’s possible or all that’s “allowed”. It’s purely because if most music tends to use particular elements the most, it makes sense to begin our Ear Training with those, and then introduce the less frequently-used possibilities later.
Overview
We will follow the Learn, Practice, Apply approach of Integrated Ear Training. We’ll go through these one by one in this chapter, and you will probably want to read through the chapter in order to begin with—but remember that when it comes to actually doing Ear Training, these are best done as a short loop: learn a little (e.g. by re-reading part of the chapter), practice a little (doing an exercise or two from the chapter), try applying it (doing one or more of the applied activities at the end of the chapter).
Learn
We’ll begin by discussing the benefits of training your ear for Chords and Progressions, since the applications vary a lot across musicians. In “What is a Chord?” and “What is a Chord Progression?” we’ll lay out the basic definitions and theory, as well as introducing a way of “thinking vertically” which can bring a lot of clarity to your mental model of harmony.
Then in “How Chords and Progressions Work” we will dive deeper into the construction and use of Chords and Progressions, making the links to our other building blocks of Intervals and Solfa.
You’ll notice that the “Learn” section is beefier than those for Solfa or Intervals! It’s a very Head-heavy chapter.
This is partly because we’re tackling both Chords and Progressions, but mostly because if you’ve read the Solfa and Intervals chapters, or ideally begun working with those building blocks already, we want to really spell out how all these building blocks relate. As you’ll discover, this will help you not only intellectually, but in a very practical way with your Ear Training for Chords and Progressions.
Practice
In the “Getting Started” section we’ll cover how our Basic Drill (playing examples and trying to identify which building block it was) can be used for Chords and for Progressions, and introduce different ways you can start to distinguish between the different types of Chords and Progressions (Hearing and Heart).
Then, in our “Start With Aiming For…” section we will focus on just a couple of Chords and the most commonly-used Progressions, to let you reach a highly versatile and practical ability with Chords and Progressions quickly.
The world of Chords and Progressions is vast! In the “Going Further” section we’ll briefly explore several ways you can extend your abilities to handle more varied and complex forms of harmony (Head, Hearing). Depending on your musical interests, activities and background, some of these may be immediately of interest to you to pursue, while others may be irrelevant, or safely left until later.
Apply
Finally, in the “Additional Exercises and Activities” section we show how to use both your singing voice and your instrument (Hands) to develop your ear for Chords and Progressions, as well as how to take your burgeoning skills to practical musical activities such as Playing By Ear, Improvisation and Songwriting.
The Benefits Of Developing Your Ear For Chords
Before we continue, I think it’s important to say a few words about why you might want to explore Chords in this way.
Depending on your musical background, this may be obvious to you. For example, if you’re a guitarist who’s currently dependant on doing a web search or consulting a stack of books to look up the Chords to play any new song you want to, the idea of just being able to “hear it, then play it” probably has you sold already! Or similarly, if your Big Picture Vision depicts you writing wonderful, moving music to bring your poetry to life, knowing how to choose just the right harmonies should have obvious appeal.
But what about if you’re a trumpet player? Or a singer? What if you just want to improvise melodies, or perform music more compellingly?
Harmony (meaning how multiple notes work together to create an overall sound) is central to music, and Chords are the building blocks of harmony. Believe it or not, even music which doesn’t seem to have harmony (for example, a singer performing unaccompanied) still has an underlying harmonic structure, through the particular melody notes being chosen, and the harmony they imply.
One useful way to think about it is that harmony is about the overall musical flow of a piece. Just like in Chapter 5: Active Listening when discussing Form, the progression from one chord to another is what creates the “journey” that the music takes the listener on. This is a big part of why we won’t just consider individual Chords in this chapter, but also look at Chord Progressions: how the sequence of Chords work together to create that “musical journey”.
Because harmony is so fundamental and prevalent, and because it closely relates to many other aspects of music, learning to hear and understand Chord Progressions can unlock considerable musical understanding for you, whatever your musical life looks like.
Coming back to our two examples above, a trumpet player interested in improvising will find that understanding Chords and Progressions by ear reveals a lot about which notes will be most effective at any given moment in the music. Beyond just “play the notes from the current chord” as some improv methods might preach, you will understand deeply how any note you choose will create an interplay with the underlying harmony and have the musical effect you intend.
An unaccompanied singer, on the other hand, may not be interested in improvising—but understanding the harmony of the full arrangement will both aid memorisation and keeping your place in the music during a performance (through having a clear mental model of the Form). It can also provide a vivid audiated accompaniment, helping with pitching, phrasing, and expression. Even when the harmony isn’t heard “out there” in the real world, it can still be alive and influential inside your own musical mind!
Exactly how you make use of your newfound chord skills will be up to you, but there’s no doubt that gaining a deep understanding, appreciation, and facility with Chords and Progressions can have a profound and far-reaching positive effect on all your musical activities.