Having learned well over a thousand songs by hearing, I can say with confidence that most contemporary songs are structured with the following sequential elements -

INTRO - An introduction to a song is provided by an instrument, orchestra, or even sung by a singer. It often duplicates a part of the main melody, but could also have its own unique tune.

MELODY 1 - The main melody of the song , which usually ends with an ‘unresolved’ phrasing in order to lead you on to the next melody section

MELODY 2 - This second part melody – usually with a little more emphasis - is typically a repeat of Melody 1, but its last few notes will typically bring the melody section (1 and 2) to a close.

CHORUS - This part sounds is totally different and deviates from the main melody. It’s almost like the singer wants to ‘explain’ or ‘elaborate’ on what was said (sung) in Melodies 1 and 2.

MELODY 2 - This is just to bring back and remind the listener of the main tune again, and then it’s over next to someone else for a different voice/sound or improvisation (usually based on the same chords flowing in the melody).

SOLO or ADLIB - This part offers a variation from the above tunes, so that…

Transposing is the converting of one or more notes or chords from one key into another - lower or higher in pitch - using a constant interval of note spacing.

For instance, a key of the original song may be in Ab, but - for any of the possible reasons given below -  you may want to change it to say, the key of F. This would therefore mean transposing all of the melody notes and chords to F.

The reasons for transposing keys include:

- when accompanying a singer on the piano, he or she may feel more comfortable with singing in a different key from the one you had learned the song in, so you may need to transpose the notes of the song for this purpose;

- when learning a song by hearing, the piece may be in one of the more difficult keys (like Db, F#, B or even Ab), where you will encounter and likely stumble on a lot of black notes. This tends to make playing uncomfortable and more error-prone… especially if you are not well-seasoned in playing in all keys. In this case, it’s better to transpose the song to an easier key;

- a song that you’re playing could be made more interesting…

When you are about to start learning a song by hearing, the first thing you may want to determine is the key of the song.

This is to see if it’s likely to have more black notes in its melody and chords, and therefore be a little more uncomfortable to learn and play (especially if you’re still just starting off on the piano). If so, you may decide whether you need to transpose the song before (using an electronic piano’s transposer), or after you learn it (manually transposing the notes).

As you can imagine, finding out what a key is in a song is not an easy thing to teach, let alone write about. The simplest two methods I can think of are:

(i) listening to the starting bass and chord of the main melody, and

(ii) playing some notes of the main melody to try and determine the scale, and hence the key.

Method 1 – Hear the Home Chord

In the first method, you would first listen closely to try and find out what the primary or ‘home’ chord of the song is.

To do this, you listen to Melody 1 (see Song Structure), which usually comes after the Introduction (Do not use the Introduction to figure out the…

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