It’s time to start bringing the theory to life! Here are some ways to start familiarising yourself with the sounds of Chords and Progressions. Then in later sections below we’ll go into more detail on a variety of exercises you can use to develop your chord skills more fully.
How To Use The Basic Drill
Remember that our Basic Drill is simply “listen to some examples of different types of building block, and for each one try to recognise which type it is.”
EXERCISE: The Basic Drill For ChordsWith Chords, the Basic Drill works in the usual way:
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EXERCISE: The Basic Drill For Chord ProgressionsWith Progressions, it’s slightly different, as we need to establish the key first:
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As with Solfa and Intervals, this Basic Drill is a good way to assess our abilities, and a good starting point for developing our skills, but should always be done along with other kinds of practice exercises and applied activities, as covered later in the chapter.
With Solfa and Intervals, it is fairly easy to source or produce examples, and to make use of the various ways of recognising the different types we’re focused on.
With Chords and Progressions, it can be trickier to source or produce suitable examples, and a little more complex to approach recognising them—mostly due to the way we’ll want to leverage Singing, Audiation, Solfa and Intervals.
No need for concern! It just means that as we continue, we’re going to spell out the steps for various exercises based on the Basic Drill more than we did with Solfa or Intervals. You’ll notice that the simple overall structure of the exercise remains the same though: “listen to some examples of different types of building block, and for each one try to recognise which type it is.”
So, how do we make sure that our “answers” are based on recognition skills rather than pure guesswork?
How To Recognise Chords
Let’s start familiarising ourselves with the sounds of Major and Minor Triads. If you’re keen to, feel free to also include Augmented and Diminished Triads at this stage. You will find that each of the four Triad types has a very distinctive characteristic sound, and while confusion can still arise (for example between Minor and Diminished Triads), most musicians find they can quite quickly learn to recognise each type—at least when played in isolation.
We can use each of the three approaches introduced above: “pure” recognition, using Intervals, and using Solfa. Start with the “pure” exercise below, and then when you’re ready, introduce the Intervals and Solfa perspectives to help you advance faster and build the connections between the three.
1. Recognising Directly
Compared to other Ear Training activities, distinguishing the four types of Triad chord is a case where simple familiarisation and direct comparison can work well.
EXERCISE: Recognising Chord Types DirectlyAs with Solfa and Intervals, you can find pre-made audio tracks for practicing with in the Additional Resources, or use interactive quizzes. However, it can be just as effective and a real boost to take matters into your own hands—literally!
As you do this exercise it’s highly valuable to write down any descriptive words that come to mind for each type of chord (e.g. “Diminished chords really clash!”), as well as comparisons (e.g. “Augmented chords sound brighter and lighter than Major chords”). |
| TIP: Remember that when introducing the Basic Drill in Chapter 8: Relative Pitch we suggested using recording as a way to combine instrument practice and recognition practice. So to make this exercise even more effective, record yourself doing the steps above for a few minutes or more. Then use that recording as a practice track, by listening back to it and trying to identify by ear the choices you were making each time. |
If you are playing the examples one note at a time, it will be important to also find some source of examples where the notes are all played together, since this is how you will typically be hearing chords in real music.
Although many musicians find this recognition skill comes relatively quickly for them, it’s still worth being thoughtful about your sequencing. If you’re going to tackle Augmented and Diminished Triads too, don’t dive in with all four types at once! You might like to follow a sequence like this:
- Major vs. Minor
- Major vs. Augmented
- Minor vs. Diminished
- Major vs. Minor vs. Diminished
- Major vs. Minor vs. Augmented
- All Four Types
Aim to achieve something like 80% accuracy with each set before moving on.
2. Using Intervals
To bring your interval recognition skills to the task of recognising chord types, the main thing to practice is learning to hear each note of the chord clearly.
We’re restricting ourselves to three-note chords in “root position” for now, so it shouldn’t be too overwhelming to “tune in” to each note of the chord. However, it is a skill, and you may be surprised how much concentration is required!
EXERCISE: Recognising Chord Types Using IntervalsBoth Singing and Audiation can be a great help:
This exercise alone should be your starting point, until you get some facility with “dissecting” a chord into its component notes. Next, add a third step:
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As we saw above, we can listen for the difference of a Major Third versus a Minor Third to distinguish Major Triads from Minor Triads, so if you are focused on those two types only, you will probably find you can quite quickly tune in to the bottom and middle notes, and distinguish m3 from M3—and hence the type of Triad.
This is a great example of one of the benefits of Singing mentioned in Chapter 4: Singing: that it can provide a way to “experiment out loud” and explore the pitches you’ve heard, giving you time and control to compare and contrast the pitch relationships present. The same goes for Audiation, though you will probably find it easier to “keep a grip on things” when singing.
As you practice, you’ll find you can move from doing various comparisons singing out loud, to audiating that same process, and (perhaps quite quickly) being able to just directly hear the three notes present and the intervals between them.
It’s worth mentioning that this process may seem like overkill if you work with just Major and Minor Triads, since their overall sound and the difference in tonality is typically enough for most musicians to tell them apart quite reliably. To put that another way, the “pure” recognition approach covered above may well get the job done for you, without needing to dissect the notes and analyse the intervals.
However it’s still very valuable to go through this process, because the Intervals approach also works well for Augmented and Diminished Triads, four-note Chords, and all kinds of other harmony you might encounter in future.
3. Using Solfa
When it comes to Solfa for Chord Types, we have two options available to us: practicing with examples in isolation, and practicing with an established key.
EXERCISE: Recognising Chord Types Using Solfa (In Isolation)The isolated approach involves listening for whether the notes sound like the Solfa corresponding to one type of chord or another. As we saw in the table earlier in the chapter, for Major Triads it should sound like do mi so , like fa la do’ , or like so ti re’. For Minor Triads it should sound like re fa la , like mi so ti , or like la, do mi.
3. Now use Singing or Audiation to examine each note and recognise the Solfa identities as either do mi so or la, do mi. If you’re having trouble, try singing up the major scale do-re-mi-fa-so from the bottom note of the chord you heard, and see if the third and fifth notes match what you heard in the chord. If not, try singing the la-based minor scale: la,-ti,-do-re-mi and see if those third and fifth notes match. |
This is… okay. But it’s a bit like using an electric drill to hammer a nail into the wall. You’re missing out on the real power of Solfa.
EXERCISE: Recognising Chord Types Using Solfa (With Context)As we saw above, the beauty of Solfa for Chords is that it can reveal both the chord’s type and the scale degree it’s based on, at the same time. Better is to first establish our key (for example, by playing the scale, or playing through a IV-V-I progression), and then play examples of the actual Major and Minor Chords from the family. This allows us to hear, for example, not just “it’s a Major Chord” but “it’s fa-la-do’ not do-mi-so“, identifying both the type and the degree in one. This reinforces our Solfa skills and leverages the full power of Solfa.
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As always with Solfa, Singing is going to be your closest ally! In what follows, we’ll introduce various ways to sing Solfa to develop your abilities with Chords and Progressions.
How To Recognise Chord Progressions
We’ll get started with recognising Chord Progressions a little differently to Chord Types. There are three routes in, and each can usefully leverage any Solfa or Intervals skills you’re bringing to the table.
1. Based On Degrees
Just like the “pure” approach for recognising Chord Types, one way to approach Chord Progressions is simply to practice tuning in to the overall sound of each chord in the family. The whole reason we focus on Relative Pitch in our Ear Training is that it matches how our ear naturally hears and makes sense of music, and so it is meaningful to listen directly for “What does the I chord sound like? How about the IV chord?” etc.. You can start to get a feel for the musical role, or character, or distinctive sound of each chord in the family.
Note that this is only possible with some sense of the key! For example, a C Major chord would sound like the I chord if our key is C Major—but would be the V chord if our key is F Major, or the IV chord in the key of G Major. So to practice listening for Chord Progressions directly, we must first establish a key. As mentioned in the section above, you can do this by playing through the scale, or playing a quick IV-V-I progression before you start with examples of different progressions.
Personally, this is how I learned to recognise Chord Progressions, before I ever went deep with Solfa. Looking back, and now when guiding our members at Musical U, I would absolutely recommend combining it with Solfa for faster, easier progress!
Why? Because recognising Progressions based on degrees is so closely related to Solfa. When we learn to hear the “IV-ness” or the “V-ness” of a chord, we are essentially tuning in to the “fa-ness”or “so-ness” of it. The same relationship to the tonic is what we’re listening for. And so the better you get at distinguishing, say, do vs. fa vs. so, the easier you’ll find it to spot the I, IV, and V, and vice-versa.
We are essentially trying to tune in to the root note of the chord, with the other notes serving just to reveal its quality (Major/Minor/Augmented/Diminished). And identifying that root note relative to the key’s tonic note is exactly what Solfa is all about!
If you’ve been doing Ear Training for Solfa, then singing Solfa syllables is a great way to explore and test whether you’re hearing the right chord degrees. For example if you think a progression goes I-IV-V-IV, sing along with “do, fa, so, fa” and see how well the notes gel. It’s not foolproof (since, for example, the so note is also part of the I chord) but if you’re also practicing “dissecting” a chord into its notes as covered above, you can quickly learn to reliably tune in to the root note, and identify it with your Solfa skills.
You can also recognise Chord Progressions based on degrees by using Intervals: simply listen out for the interval between the chord’s root and the key’s tonic. You are essentially using your interval skills as a proxy for Solfa skills, for example by recognising IV not by recognising fa but by recognising a Perfect Fourth above the tonic. This wouldn’t be my first choice of approach, but if you’re comfortable with Intervals and not yet with Solfa, it’ll work just fine.
EXERCISE: Recognising Progressions Based On DegreesTo get started practicing recognising Progressions based on Degrees, you can use the same process as above for Chord Types:
Again, you can make this even more effective by recording yourself doing it. Either:
Note that although you may be using Solfa skills, you’ll still want to label each chord with its numeral rather than the Solfa name for its root note. And although it would be neat to speak in Roman Numerals, the convention is to just use the regular number names! (i.e. “one, four, five, etc.”) |
| TIP: We are focusing on three-note (triad) Chords in this chapter, but one very helpful stepping-stone to recognising the V chord is to use the V7 instead: for all the exercises, simply play the V7 wherever you would have played the V. That means adding the fourth degree of the scale, in the octave above. In Solfa: so ti re fa’ Doing this amplifies the “unresolved” feeling of the V chord, making it stand out much more from the IV and I. Most musicians will find this makes it quite easy to start recognising I, IV, V7 Progressions. This may seem like cheating, both because you’ve made one chord a four-note chord where the others are triads, and because it stands out so clearly. However, the advantage is that it’s genuinely a stepping-stone rather than a diversion, since that same “unresolved” feeling will be present (and now more obvious to you) when you use the simple V triad instead. |
2. Based On Basslines
Another approach to recognising Chord Progressions is to focus on the bassline of the progression. In our simple starting case of triad chords in root position, this means honing in on the root note, just like above.
It’s worth mentioning in its own right, however, for a couple of reasons:
- In more complex arrangements, chords can be voiced in a variety of ways, played on multiple instruments, etc. And the bassline may literally be played by a bass guitar or other low-register instrument. This can be easier to tune in to, and even if it’s not literally just playing the root note of each chord in the progression, it’s typically very revealing of which chords are being played.
- give a concrete example: you might be listening to a track with a very complex harmonic arrangement, and having a hard time finding the root notes by ear—but (through Active Listening) you tune in to the bass guitar’s part, and realise that it is starting each measure by playing the root note of the current chord. This gives you another route in to identifying the Chord Progression by ear.
- It helps us to focus more on the movement from chord to chord.
It’s this second point we’ll focus on here, since we’ll stick with our simple triads in root position for now.
The “Based on Degrees” approach covered above is based on the harmonic context (i.e. the key and its tonic), but focuses on recognising each chord’s degree in its own right.
This “Based on Basslines” approach is about listening for how one chord’s degree moves to the next. It’s particularly well-suited to taking an Intervals perspective.
The idea is to listen for how one chord’s root note moves to the next. With our I, IV, V progressions, the root notes will be moving by intervals of Fourths and Fifths (between I and IV or V) and Major 2nds (between IV and V):
In this diagram we can see all the possibilities for moving between the roots of these three chords. The root note can move upwards or downwards each time, and the possible Intervals are M2, P4 and P5
Technically we could allow the Chords to “jump” up or down into a different register each time, producing Intervals larger than a P5. However, the same point about such “compound intervals” as covered in Chapter 10: Intervals applies, i.e. it can generally be treated as the smaller interval with a mental note of “plus an octave”, rather than requiring a fundamentally different recognition skill.
In any case, we are just getting started here, and needn’t worry about such octave leaps—they’re part of the whole wider world of voicing and arrangement and how these progressions actually show up in real music. The core skills we’re building here will still be a useful and applicable foundation for those tasks.
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This means that if you’re familiar with recognising Major 2nds, Perfect Fourths and Perfect Fifths, and you wrap your head around the diagram above, you can start to recognise these progressions quite easily.
Here’s an example of how the chord roots might move in a I-IV-V-I-IV-V progression, and the corresponding intervals you might hear:
It’s true that we’ve made our task relatively simple by restricting to root-position triads. In real music, things will rarely be so simple. The chords typically won’t shift upwards or downwards as a fixed “block” of notes like this. However, the exact same listening skills, of following that chord root upwards and downwards still apply.
So whether you’re listening out for the bassline in an arrangement, or honing in on the root note of each chord, learning to listen for that movement in terms of Intervals can be very helpful.
To get started practicing this, you can use exactly the same exercise as above—but pay attention to the movement from one root note to the next, in terms of Intervals.
3. Based On Cadences and Resolution
So far we have been discussing Progressions without specifying how many chords are in the sequence (or how long each is played for). In reality there are conventions for those things.
For example, changing chord more than once or twice per measure would be unusual, and chord progressions often repeat after 4, 8 or 12 measures, and change slightly or entirely when moving to a new section of a piece. These topics are more related to Songwriting (see Chapter 16: Songwriting) and to musical Form (see also Chapter 5: Active Listening).
For our purposes in Ear Training for Progressions, in a sense it doesn’t matter how many chords are in a sequence we’re practicing with. We will make some recommendations below about what to aim for.
There is, however, a special case: the shortest possible progression, consisting of just two chords. This is sometimes referred to as a “cadence”. It’s helpful to have this term “cadence” to mean a two-chord progression, but I should mention that the more traditional precise definition specifically refers to the two (or more) chords right at the end of a piece, or section.
This is interesting for our Ear Training purposes because, just like a melody can be analysed in terms of Intervals by looking at each pair of notes in turn, we can interpret a Chord Progression by analysing each pair of Chords in turn.
If we develop our ability to distinguish, for example, a IV-I cadence versus a V-I, and a I-IV versus a I-V, and a IV-V versus a V-IV, suddenly picking apart a long progression featuring the I, IV, and V chords becomes much simpler!
What really makes this interesting though is that it introduces the idea of resolution.
In the context of Cadences, this word “resolution” means “coming back home”: how does the harmony return us to the tonic chord by the end of the piece?
However, it can also be useful in a broader sense of “resolving musical tension”. This is something we’ll discuss a lot in Chapter 16: Songwriting, because creating and resolving musical tension is at the heart of what makes music interesting, meaningful, and impactful on the listener.
Here, we’re interested in how a sequence of chords creates and resolves tension, and how we can start tuning in for how particular chords in the family sound and feel like they “resolve” when followed by particular other chords in the family.
We’ll go through this in more detail below, but hopefully you can already see how this relates to the tip above about using V7 in place of V (V7 has more inherent tension, so that its creation and release is more recognisable) and how it could provide a different route into recognising Progressions than either the Degrees or Basslines approaches outlined above.
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Side Note:
If you have read Chapter 10: Intervals, you may remember the discussion there on hearing Intervals in terms of “opening” versus “closing”. This is a big part of what made our Winter Season of Living Music so impactful for students going through it: the Circle Of Fifths encapsulates this whole idea of “inward vs. outward” or “opening vs. closing”, and reveals connections between all the Intervals and Chords contained in the Circle.
Perhaps most notably, it helps greatly with distinguishing Perfect 4ths and Perfect 5ths (remember that “inversion pair” source of confusion mentioned in Chapter 10: Intervals) and the IV and V Chords—which can otherwise be easily mixed up.
That is a whole (wonderful!) rabbithole which we won’t be diving into in this book. For now just be aware of this “resolution” perspective on listening to Chord Progressions as we continue, and know that if you want to go on a fascinating music theory exploration in future, wonders await you…!
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