How To Transcribe HARMONY And Not Just MELODY
Why is transcribing chords so much harder than transcribing melodies?
Well, let me answer that question with another question: when you transcribe melodies, do you use trial and error for each note until you find it?
If you answered "yes", then that is why you can’t transcribe chords.
Because, while trial and error will work fine for a melody - simply because the melody plays one note at a time - it will fail miserably for chord progressions that are made of several notes at a time!
To transcribe chords effectively and quickly (or at all) we need to use a different method. We need to develop a vocabulary of different chords, understanding how they sound, when they should be used, how they ‘feel’, etc.
Once we have this vocabulary, we can start connecting it to the songs that we hear.
“But Tommaso, how could one possibly develop this ‘harmonic vocabulary’”?
Glad you asked. If you want to develop your vocabulary and get way better at transcribing chords, check out the video linked below and I’ll show you how:
Now, one very obvious way of developing a bigger harmonic vocabulary is to check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course. If you follow this course, you will make a massive improvement to your chord vocabulary right away!
Video Transcription
Tommaso Zillio 0:01
Hello internet, so nice to see you. How do you go about transcribing chord progressions? How do you hear if a chord is a tonic or the dominant or the subdominant? How, how can you listen to a song by ear and then transcribe those chords? Onto your guitar? Lots of people will tell you, it's just practice. Well, yes, thank you. That's perfectly correct. But what exactly what exactly we should practice, okay?
Because if you cannot hear, for instance, the difference between a major and minor chord, I can play major and minor chords at random for you, and you can try to transcribe them randomly, but we're not going anywhere, right? So that's the problem. What do you start? How do you get started in hearing chords, harmonies and chord progression?
As student of mine asked me exactly that he had already a decent ear in transcribing melody, so single note things. But he had no idea how to go about understanding chords and transcribing those, and this is the answer I gave it.
Speaker 1 1:06
I find it very difficult to pick up harmony by ear. So if it's like simple barre chords, or open chords, try it major and minor, then I can figure it out, but it still takes a lot of trial and error. But if it's like arpeggiated chords or the timbre is different, like overdrive or other instrument, it's a lot harder. So I want to be able to do that very quickly.
And I want to be able to figure out the exact voicing of the chord I like, sometimes when I'm transcribing by ear, I thought that it was a major chord later on, when I looked it up, I found that it was actually assessed for us as to Yes.
Tommaso Zillio 1:43
So it's, it's very normal, right?
Speaker 1 1:45
I want to be, like, super fluent at this.
Tommaso Zillio 1:49
It's gonna take a little bit of time. If not say no, there's more than one possible approach to this. Okay. And it doesn't depends how you go about this. But from what you're saying. And the way you phrase these, and from what you're saying right now. You're pretty much first finding the general chord progression.
So essentially, the bass of the chord, and then you're trying to build up the upper structure, in your mind, at least that's what I got. I gather, it's a corrector. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, right. Yeah. Pretty good level, because even just picking up the bass line, okay, or picking up the roots of the chord in general, it's pretty difficult. If you can do that. You're at a good level already. Okay, we just need to specify more. Now.
The problem with that is you cannot transcribe chords that you cannot play yourself or generate yourself, because you never hear them. You never played them. Okay? You cannot just rely on somebody else to play them for you and then learn them.
Okay? So you have to go the opposite direction is going to sound like a roundabout way but it's actually the fastest way and the idea is you want to transcribe either just the bass line or just a melody, and then reconstruct the rest of the thing starting from scratch, forgetting about the real song and just thinking how will I harmonize that? Okay, if the bass line is bass line, you're thinking alpha that when is that that will probably these days. Okay, in detail.
Speaker 2 3:33
A major chord major chord in first inversion, another major chord and another major chord, but
Tommaso Zillio 3:38
avoiding the parallel motion. You want that? Yeah, what I just played, okay. I go to different things, of course. The bass different melodies. You want to think just the bass, forget about the song, make it an exercise and harmonize it and to find cause that work with the bass line and maybe find more than one solution to that.
Okay, this is where you're going to build up vocabulary in a sense, like if this bass line, so it sounds if I do this, right, let's have a sound if I do it the other way, then just the melody and from the melody, reconstruct the chords a bass line and try different bass line that fit that melody and see what happens. So the point is, you cannot just transcribe I mean, you can if you have a great ear just transcribe everything by listening to it, but it's easy to transcribe the thinking like, this piece of music has been composed by somebody if I learn to think like a composer, it's easier for me to transcribe.
And in the process of learning to think like a composer harmonizing the melodies and bass line you're playing a lot of chords, lots of different position in invert different inversions, etc. And so you start recognizing the sound of those chords. If you never To play a melody and harmonize it with suspended second chord, it is very hard and to recognize the suspended second chord when it happens in a real song. Because when we remember, you know the sound in isolation, when it happens in the song, it's hard to recognize, see what I mean. So you have to build it the other way. Like a composer, it is not that hard to do.
And in fact, a lot of fun. Okay, the good news, okay. And indeed, one great exercise you can do especially again, if you're trying, serving a specific song is just take the song, every harmonize it, which CC is another regional harmony, you are just harmonizing. Okay, but try different thing and you are going to stumble on some of the original harmonization. Like I was saying, Before, I was creating an arrangement for a specific song, I didn't even go and listen to the original version, I remembered the melody.
And just put in the chord of that felt more natural to me, the result the original cause and they live the day, but I could have done something different, I would have worked anyway. But by doing it this way you learn learn to lead to to to recreate the rest of the song listening to only one element. If the rest of the song is exactly what it will reconstruct after you get this experience, and you know what it is? And if it's not, then you can start with the new you can go and listen with more attention and make a difference from where you are.
Speaker 1 6:31
What it is what you're saying. I remember it as an it wasn't an exercise in one or more of the sessions of the moment. God mastery. Yes. Something similar. Yeah, yes.
Tommaso Zillio 6:41
I mean, you learn a lot doing that. Okay. Take a melody impulse Simple Metal cameras on the couch, I suppose memorization replaying for some of that it's in G major right now. So first chord in first inversion. And I'm going to play a minor seven, E minor seven. So six chord we're going to play the leaf of one, three to five to one I can also do cycle first, in the key of the fourth, okay, but I can also do the chord in root position actually not anticipated.
Anticipate the second bar before, substitution, okay. And then you start applying all these procedures to the melody. So when it happens in real life, you recognize it. You know the sounds, you've heard the sounds, but you will never thought that's a 251 in the key of the subdominant. Unless you did it by yourself, because it just comes out of the blue, like strange chord from where it comes from.
Okay. But if you've learned to recognize, for instance, the five the one, you can recognize that, okay, that's actually how I started doing ear training. I learned to recognize whenever I could hear a five to one in major and minor keys. And then that was my starting point. And then recognize recognize recognize the 251 or the 451. Okay, it's at the center, and then gradually everything else but I just do something that was really recognizable. And learn to recognize that.
Speaker 1 9:20
Is it okay, if you associate a certain sound with a certain song. So like, you're playing secondary dominants, right? Yeah. When I hear that sound, I think of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Sure, because I can associate that sound with that song.
Tommaso Zillio 9:32
You can it's useful, but it's better if you have more than one song because the melody note changes. And so the same chord progression can sound in several different ways if you change the melody note or if you play different inversions in it. Okay? Make sense? Yep. Okay, so make it make sure you have more than one example. Right, but that's it. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.