How to learn a song by ear with a loop

The reason working out a song by ear feels hard is rarely the ear. It is the overhead: rewinding, missing the spot, hearing three seconds, rewinding again. By the time you are back at the phrase you have lost the memory of what you were listening for. Remove that overhead and the same task becomes ordinary work.

The procedure

1. 01

   Loop four bars, not the song

   Find the first section you cannot already play and mark A and B around it. Four bars is usually right: long enough to hear the phrase as a phrase, short enough that the repeat comes back before you have forgotten it.

2. 02

   Drop to a speed where you hear detail

   Somewhere between 0.5× and 0.75×. You are listening for the things that go past too quickly at full speed — a passing note, whether a chord is major or minor, where the bass actually lands.

3. 03

   Find the bass first

   The lowest note of each chord is the easiest thing to hear and it tells you most of what you need. Sing it back before you try to find it on the instrument; if you cannot sing it, you have not heard it yet.

4. 04

   Add the chord quality, then the top

   With the root known, there are only a few possibilities left. Try the obvious one and listen for what does not match. Melody last — it is the part your ear already remembers.

5. 05

   Save the section and move on

   Press S to keep the range. When you reach a passage that will not come, you can jump back to the earlier one with a number key rather than hunting for it on the timeline.

Why the bass line first

Chords are ambiguous in the middle and clear at the bottom. The lowest sounding note is usually the root, it moves less often than anything else, and it is separated in frequency from the parts competing for your attention. Once you have a bass note, the number of chords it is likely to be has dropped from twelve to about three.

The test for whether you have really heard it is whether you can sing it. Playing a note on an instrument and asking “is that it?” is a much weaker signal — you will talk yourself into a wrong answer. Singing forces the pitch to exist in your head first.

When a passage will not come

Three things to try, in order:

• Shorten the loop. Cut it to the single beat that is unclear. Use Shift with the arrow keys on a marker to trim in hundredths until the loop contains only the sound in question.
• Change what you are listening for. If you cannot name the chord, ask a smaller question instead: is it major or minor? Is the top note moving up or down? Is there a note that is not in the key?
• Move on and come back. Later sections often reveal earlier ones. A progression that made no sense in bar 5 becomes obvious once you have heard where it goes in bar 13.

Keeping the work

A transcription session that has to be rebuilt from scratch tomorrow is half wasted. Save each section as you settle it — press S — and give it a name that means something later: intro riff, chorus 2 turnaround, the bit with the weird chord. Next time you open the video they are all waiting, with the speed you were using saved alongside each one.

If you work across two devices, export your sections from the settings panel and import the file on the other one.

Questions people ask

Related

• Practising a solo phrase by phrase — what to do once you know the notes.
• Slowing a video down — fine speed control and the ramp.