Chord Changes You Must Practice

Learning to hear chord changes, through chordal ear training is one of the best ways to musically develop your ear.

With chordal ear training, you will not only learn to how hear chord qualities, but will also learn how to hear chord changes, how each chord functions in a chord progression, and melodies that go with each chord.

This particular ear training method focuses on your intuitive first, by teaching you how to feel where each chord is going.

After you have determined the chord changes, your intellect then determines the actual names of each chord and their actual function (ie: ii, V, I).

Hundreds Of Chord Changes For Your Ear Training

Here is a website I highly recommend for developing your ear for hearing the chord changes.

Websites are a great tool that can allow you to ear train anywhere with an internet connection!

Practice Chord Changes:

This website houses hundreds of jazz standard chord progressions, where you also have the ability to isolate and hear just the chords!

Effective Ear Training Utilizing SongTrellis

You will need your instrument with this ear training method.

  1. Select a song.
  2. Using your intuition, just start playing with the song. You will make many mistakes at first, but soon will be able to feel where each chord is going. You are learning to hear tension and where that tension has a tendency to resolve.
  3. Keep playing through the same song until you can play the chord changes without any mistake several times.
  4. Now using your intellect, determine the actual names for each chord, and also determine the correct spellings for each chord and transcribe it (write it down). This practice teaches you the exact chord qualities for each chord and how those chord qualities function in functional harmony (music that most people listen to). Transcribing your understanding of what you are hearing commits the sounds of these chords into your memory.
  5. When you can play that song’s chord changes well, move onto another set of chord changes.

This method of ear training simulates the kind of ear training needed during jam sessions, where you need to follow along with a set of chord changes you may have never heard of before!