This blog is not intended to teach in detail how I learn a song by hearing , but just to give you a quick idea of what I do. The individual steps are of course more involved, and I’ll go into them in greater detail in other  blogs .

When I learn a song by hearing, I am essentially trying to decipher 5 elements making up its arrangement:

1. the rhythm or ‘beat’;

2. the main melody;

3. the accompanying counter-melodies (if any);

4. the basses;

5. the chords.

My favorite source of songs to learn is YouTube, from which I download the song’s  .flv video file into a folder in my laptop, and then covert that into an .mp3 song file using an easily-available .flv to .mp3 converter program.   I next listen to this  .mp3 song file back and forth, to learn it.

Watch these two videos on how to convert YouTube video to Mp3 song files…

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Wearing a pair of headphones (with good bass) partially on my ears (so I can hear both the music and the keyboard), I first play and listen to the song to determine the key it is in, and also to get a feel of the song structure and arrangement.

If it’s a more challenging key that has lots of flats and sharps (E.g., B, Db, F#) in its scale, I decide whether I’d like to learn this song in a simpler key, like C, F or G, or even D or Eb. This is just a matter of convenience and preference, as these keys are easier to both play in and to teach with. See my blog on figuring out a song’s key and transposing it.

After figuring out the key I’d like to learn the song on, I then commence to learn the entire song in several steps:

STEP 1

I listen to a few notes each time, constantly press ‘pause’ and ‘back’ on the music player, at the same time quickly transcribing what I’ve heard by playing the notes on the keyboard - often humming along as well - them in alphabetical notes (as I don’t read or write conventional music notation) onto my lined exercise book.  I keep doing this until the end of the song when I’ve written the entire melody.

This is not as tedious as it sounds, because often the melody repeats itself with the same notes (i.e. most of the notes in Melody 1 would probably be the same as for Melody 2 in the Song Structure), and you get very quick at doing this after learning many songs.   Of course, should be reasonably familiar with moving around the keyboard, and knowing which notes are the correct ‘high’ or ‘low’ pitch one to press, in order to approximate the notes you are hearing on the song.

STEP 2

After writing the whole Melody of the song, I then replay the song on my music player,  but this time I listen to the basses.

Listening to each bass sound/note accompanying a chord – before it changes to another chord - gives a very good clue as to what that chord actually is.  More about this in another blog.

Furthermore, after learning a lot of songs and being able to recognize the more typical chord progressions, you find yourself able to quite reliably predict what the next chord is going to be for the song by just listening to flow of the melody.

Like the way guitar notes are written, I write these chords just above the melody note where they’re supposed to be held or played.

STEP 3

Finally, I play over the notes and chords that I’ve written in accompaniment with the song.  This is to check for accuracy, and also to match up the timing with original version.

You can write your timing based on your music knowledge, or in my case I just play the notes I’ve written  against the song a few times until I get it about right and use cues in my alphabetical notes to help me as well.  It’s not much different from you singing to a song and knowing when to sing in sync or timing with it.

Depending on its complexity, it takes me anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour to learn and write a song.

Finally, I play the song on the notes I’ve written, re-checking as needed against the original song. The way I decide to perform the song is then a matter of interpretation, touch, and improvisation  (which comes with experience and a lot of hearing to all sorts of music), and I may modify some notes and even chords accordingly.

I then transcribe these roughly-written notes neatly to my final Music Book…and that becomes another addition to the 1000+ songs I have in my repertoire.

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