By Raj Jayavant · Updated
The bass line tells you the harmony, and the harmony narrows down everything else. Once you know a bar is sitting on a G, the melody notes over it are far easier to place, because most of them will belong to that chord or the scale around it.
Starting with the melody means guessing at notes with no context. It is the hardest possible entry point, and it is where most people start.
Play the song and hum whichever note feels like home. That is usually the root. Find it on your instrument, then work out whether the third above it sounds major or minor.
With the key established you have narrowed the likely notes from twelve to seven, and the likely chords to a handful. Most popular music stays inside that set for long stretches, so a large part of the work is now recognising which of six or seven options you are hearing rather than identifying a note from nothing.
Take two bars at a time. Not a verse, not a phrase you find musically satisfying: a chunk short enough to hold in your head accurately.
Play the section, sing it back, then find it on the instrument. The singing step matters. If you cannot sing it you have not really heard it, and playing it will be guesswork with an instrument in the way.
A run that goes past in half a second contains notes you can absolutely identify at half speed. This is where by-ear work either becomes possible or gets abandoned.
Slow the recording rather than trying harder. Modern playback keeps the pitch where it was when you change the speed, so the notes stay in the same key and stay identifiable. If you want the detail on why, see does slowing down a video change the pitch.
PhraseLoop is built for this part: mark the two bars, drop to half speed or slower, and let it repeat while you hunt for the notes. The loop keeps going so you are not restarting the passage every few seconds.
Hearing a phrase twenty times is normal. Each pass you pick up something the previous one missed: first the contour, then the rhythm, then the actual notes, then the articulation.
This is why looping matters more than any other single feature for ear work. Manually rewinding twenty times is tedious enough that most people stop after five and settle for approximately right.
When you think you have a section, play it along with the track at slow speed. Wrong notes are obvious when they are sounding at the same time as the correct ones, and almost impossible to spot when you play your version afterwards from memory.
The first song is slow. The tenth is much faster, because you have started to recognise patterns rather than deducing each one: common chord movements, standard bass shapes, the intervals that turn up constantly in the style you play.
That accumulated pattern recognition is what people mean when they say someone has a good ear. It is built, and this is how it gets built.