Guitar Lesson - How To Figure Out Chords Of A Song From Recordings By Ear

Have you been surfing all over the internet looking for guitar chords and tabs for your favorite songs? There are indeed a lot of these resources out there contributed by guitar enthusiasts and this can be very helpful for beginning guitar players. Most of these guitar chords and tabs are figured out by ear, which is a great skill to possess and you can acquire the same skill by going through the method below.

Before anything else, make sure you have these two things sorted out first:

1. Make sure you know how to play all the basic primary guitar chords and also the 'Power' chords version of it as they are movable.
2. Know the name of the notes on all frets for the 6th and the 5th string(so you know what chord you are playing).

The method:

1. Pick a song to work with (it's good to start with a slow song and if there's vocal in it, prepare the lyrics in front of you as well)


2. As the song began to play and the verse part comes up, play along by moving your finger along the 6th string until you find the bass note that matches the chord. You may need to pause and rewind that section over and over to get it and this is a normal process especially if you're doing it for the first time. As your hearing develop, you will no longer have to rewind that often.


3. When you find the note that matches the chord for that section, stop the recording and write it down above the lyric at that moment. Continue with the process while writing down each bass note changes along the way.


4. When you're done, you can transform all the bass notes that you wrote down into power chords and this should be enough if you want the simplest way to accompany your self while singing(just don't use distortion unless the song needs it). The neat thing about power chord is that, it can be use in place of any major, minor or dominant chords. To get the full sounding chords, try transforming these power chords into 'Barre' chords or the open position chords. When doing this, you may need to alternate between the Major, Minor and Dominant chords until it matches the sound of the chord that you're hearing in the recording. By the way, this is a good way to train your ears to identify the different type of chords in songs.

I would also suggest that you use a playback device that you can easily rewind (as in a computer audio player). I found that using my computer audio player is easier to use as I can simply drag the slider to go to any section of a song that I want to listen to. This is far easier that using a CD player.

Mastering this skill will require lots of practice and patients, the more you do it the more your ears become accustom to hearing how the different tones and chords fits in with one another. As time goes by, you will find it easier to figure out the chords to a song by ear.