Learn to Hear Chords - Play Music By Ear

Most tonal music is structured around a key. The key may change, but in the vast majority of cases, there’s always one there. The key of the piece contains the notes that can be used, and gives “accidentals” their special characteristics. In popular music and jazz, the key, and the chord progressions that occur within it, are the backbone of any piece.

If you’re playing an improvisational form like jazz, or jamming, you’ll need to know what key you’re playing in. If you’d like to play a song you’ve heard by ear, identifying the key will make the task a lot easier.  Identifying the key also means you can begin transcribing the piece. So, being able to identify the key of a given piece of music is a useful skill for any musician.

How do you go about doing that?  Well, there are a lot of imprecise methods out there.  Some people suggest just figuring out the chord on which the song ends, arguing that the last chord will tell you what the key is; so if the last chord is a G, then the song is in the key of G, and so on. This method won’t work all the time, though.

Others suggest various trial-and-error methods like trying to play the melody, and once you think you’ve finally got that, you might be able to figure out which key those notes fall into. This is an even less effective technique, as melodies in popular music rarely make use of all available notes, and even if they do, it might narrow the possible scales down to three or four.

The only sure-fire method for identifying the key of a piece of music is to train your aural skills. Ear training will teach you how to identify all the pitches, intervals, and chords you’ll come across. Once you can accurately identify pitches, you won’t need to go through the trial-and-error of trying to find the right note one by one on your guitar or piano. Once you understand intervals, you can know what chords you’re hearing just by hearing them. And once you can do these things, identifying the key of a piece of music, even without an external reference, is not only possible, but natural.

Identifying the key of the music you’re hearing is an important skill for any musician.  This ability is just one of the benefits of ear training.