November 2022 Guitar Newsletter: Learning Songs By Ear!

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Recently I ran into a local Iowa City singer songwriter who I have greatly appreciated for over 2 decades. We reconnected, and I suggested getting together to play his music. He was up for it, and we have been meeting once a week in my studio, and now I am learning some of his repertoire! In this month’s newsletter I would like to take a look at how to learn songs by ear.
Before you start transcribing anything, it is necessary to get familiar with each song. You will need access to the songs, either by owning a hardcopy or by finding them on streaming services such as iTunes, Spotify, Bandcamp or SoundCloud. It is so convenient how this also allows you to quickly create a playlist of tunes you are working on and further categorize the songs by key, genre, feel, level of difficulty. I also embrace the old school approach and record the songs onto a cassette tape. I use a tape deck with a speed control function that enables me to slow down the tunes.

I like to listen to the song a few times from beginning to end, with a good set of headphones, giving it my utmost attention and allowing myself to get immersed in it. Hopefully, I’ll have an initial
strong emotional response, but by the third time of listening, the rational, analyzing part of my brain kicks in and starts asking questions along the lines of:
-How many parts to the song are there?
-What exactly is happening in this one section that always catches me by surprise?
-What is the time signature and does it stay the same throughout the song?
-Does the song have a few chords or many?
-What are the chord qualities?
-What key signature is it in and does it change?
-Do I fully understand the meaning of the lyrics?
-What might the story be behind this song?

This quick pondering is followed by grabbing a designated notebook, a pencil, a good eraser and my acoustic guitar. Now begins the real work of trying to notate a very rough outline of the song. Transcribing songs is definitely a skill that can be learned, and it improves the more you do it. Some songs follow well-established formulas that are recognizable by a trained ear. It gets tricky when you are confronted with a curveball and despite listening to a section over and over you can’t fully make sense of it. I still notate it to the best of my knowledge.
When jotting down a rough outline, I first notate the chord progressions with proper chord symbols (G, C, D Em etc.) and determine what part of the song they belong to. Often a song will have an Intro, a verse, a chorus, perhaps a bridge and an outro. You can designate these song parts using the letters A (verse), B (chorus), C (bridge) etc. This let’s you decode the form of the song, also called the roadmap, using the letters in the order the parts of the song are put together.

There are many standard forms and equally many variations. To my surprise, I noticed while working on my friend's song repeatedly, I was totally mistaken, deeming the song structure rather complicated, when in the end it turned out to be a cleverly constructed chord progression that kept repeating itself. There are so many components to songwriting, and how the melody and harmonies interact, that affect the listener’s sense of complexity. From a psychological viewpoint, this phenomenon of how your mind can be mistaken into thinking a musical element is simple or complex is intriguing.
Once the chord progressions are clear, I notate them again using the Roman numeral system. This logical approach helps tremendously in understanding chord progressions and is one of the best reasons to acquire a solid understanding of music theory. Grasping a song in this manner is extremely useful. It is not uncommon for songwriters to change the key of a song and as an accompanist you don’t want to be bound to knowing the song only as it is on the recording you are working with. In a nutshell, understanding a song with the Roman numeral system does not bind you to one key center and let’s you transpose it on the fly.

This training period of learning somebody’s repertoire becomes a balancing act of learning the songs properly and yet also allowing yourself to respond to them creatively. You want to play the right changes and minimize mistakes during rehearsal, but at the same time, you don’t want it to sound sterile or predictable. I navigate this by designating two separate practice sessions while playing along with the recorded version. One is trying to play the song correctly using my notes, and then I have a different practice session where I allow myself to get creative and be less bound to what is notated.

At the moment I don’t know where these weekly rehearsals will lead to, yet I feel content with knowing that it is the right thing for me to do. There does not have to be an immediate goal, like a gig or recording. Being at a place where you are doing something creatively because you like it and know that it is good for you is refreshing and freeing.
Learning songs by ear definetely takes time and a lot of practice. Being open to learning other musician’s songs is a fantastic learning experience!
Chris