Songs to recognise different chord types by ear

This video is sponsored by the completely free ear training app Open Ear Being able to identify the quality of a

chord

, whether it's major or minor, augmented or whatever, by ear is a really valuable skill that you may have already discovered for detecting the right note. root of a

chord

, but then identify beyond that whether it's a major triad or a minor triad or has a suspended fourth or something like that. That's some really useful information that will help you play the music, help you learn music faster, and help you with just your general musical intuition, so today we're going to go over a whole range of very common chord

types

and give you some very well-known

songs

. , some really famous

songs

that you can use as examples in your head to remember the quality of that chord. how it sounds, so let's start with the most obvious of all major chords, the major triad.

Hopefully this is already something that's pretty easy for you to identify, but if you need an example, there's this song, do you recognize it? It's Mr Blue Sky Mr. blue sky by elo just opened with an F major triad played like this, so the next most common type of chord you'll find is the minor triad and I think, again, this is the type chord that is quite easy to identify by ear, but I have an example for it and the example is this, do you recognize it? It's still dr dre drained and the opening chord is a B flat minor triad, so our next chord type is a major seventh, a major triad with the major seventh interval. added at the top and the main example I have for this is this guy is in love with you and he became famous for producing herbs.

It starts with this pivot between two major seven chords D flat major seven and G flat major seven and if you thought that song sounded strangely familiar, it's probably because oasis borrowed it for their song on the other side of the world, the only difference with their song is that they only use the major seven chord on the second chord in the F progression in this example, so that was the major seven, but now let's look at a

different

seven, let's look at the minor seven, so this is a minor triad with the seventh degree flattened on top.

The minor seventh degree sounds like this. This is a G minor seven chord and you might already be able to guess the example just from Listening to this, the example is Rocket Man by Elton John, which starts with seven G minor chords last night, so we had our major seven and our minor seven and the other type of seven that we're going to talk about today. is the dominant seven, the seven, which is probably the most common type of major triad, but with the flattened seventh on top and this is such a common type of seven that we don't even have to say dominant seven if we just write E flat seven. seven, for example, then it's supposed to be a dominant seven and the example we have for this is David Bowie's Let's Dance, which starts by stacking a dominant seven chord like this and you can feel that characteristic dominant seven tension coming in. for the 7th note creating a tritone within the chord, that's why we have that tension there in the dominant 7th chord, so now let's talk about some slightly less common triad chords, i.e. the diminished triad, this is like a minor chord, for example C minor, but the highest note of the chord, the G fifth has been flattened, giving us our C diminished triad effectively a stacked minor third of a minor third and a song that begins by going up diminished triads like this is a ghost town according to the specials, so that was our diminished triad where we take a minor chord and lower the fifth, the augmented triad is pretty much the opposite of a minor chord, we start with a major chord and in Instead of lowering the fifth, we raise the fifth, resulting in a similar type of dissonance. but a very

different

chord now we have two major thirds stacked on top of each other and the example for this is o darling by the beatles which opens with an augmented e triad like that, so next we'll talk about the suspended four chord which a It is sometimes simply called a sus chord, a suspended chord, it is exactly the same as a major chord, but the third has been suspended over the fourth, which creates this tension, this suspension that wants to resolve again in the major chord and this is the context in which you almost always find chords of its spores because that is only the usefulness of being tense and then releasing that tension and that is how we hear it in the two examples that I am going to show you, the first is pinball magician of the who who for its iconic riff it moves between a sus 4 chord and resolves to the normal major chord and the second example of the sus 4 chord that I have acts in a very similar way this time it is a crazy little thing called love by queen that opens with a d major chord but it keeps changing to d sus4, so you get that bit of movement, that bit of tension that is quickly resolved by going back to the major chord, so it was sus4 where we took a major chord and moved the third.

Up to the fourth degree there is another type of suspension that we can make another type of sus chord which is the sus 2 where we simply do the same thing but in the opposite direction we take a major chord once again but we move the third down. I think the second scale degree is now significantly less common because it doesn't have the same utility of having that satisfying resolution from the suspended chord to the sus2 major chord resolving the major chord isn't exactly the same type of resolution but there are examples that you can find of this chord perhaps the most notable example I could find is the opening guitar riff of simon garfunkel's sound of silence which arpeggiates a triad in e flat sus2 hello darkness smile the next chord is the chord type That's almost a little dated Now, it's more associated, I think, with music from the '40s, '50s, and maybe '60s.

You don't really see this chord as much now and it's the sixth chord, which is really just a major triad, but we added the sixth degree. . to the scale and that results in a little friction between the fifth and the sith, which are just one tone away from each other, it's not necessarily dissonant, you're not a semitone away, but it introduces a little bit of friction and, as I said, this is a bit of an old-fashioned sound, I associate it with songs like Baby Just Cares for Me by Nina Simone, where the opening chord of that chord is a major six chord, but the main example I want you to hold on to is a song that I think was actually, inspired by that era of music, is Fall on the Hill, that opening chord is a six chord, although one of the main differences is that the sixth and fifth degree are not expressed one side by side, they're actually voiced an octave apart, which sort of spreads out a little bit of the tension that you'd normally get from that chord if it were instead voiced with them together it sounds like this, you get more of that signature grind. there day after day, so our next chord is what you might call a five chord, but it's more commonly known as a power chord.

This is a chord that literally has two notes in this example, f and c, which is f5. Now power chords will often be voiced with the root note doubled and up an octave, giving you three notes total, which many people would do. consider the minimum for a chord, otherwise it's just an interval. Now you hear them more often on the guitar. They work very, very well with distorted guitar music. Anything, like "You Really Got Me by the Kinks," relies on power chords, for example, reeks of teen spirit. power chord based but for a piano based power chord example let's go with this song this is all from me by john legend and the first chord in that riff is f5 just f and c.

He has added another f to the bottom of the base. that's a really clear and crisp example of a power chord on the piano, so here's another chord that's more associated with the guitar than the keyboard. This is an E7 sharp nine chord, an E dominant seven chord with the sharp ninth degree added on top, which effectively means we have the major third, the G sharp on the bottom, and the minor third on the top, which gives a really crunchy sound and this chord is widely known as the Hendrix chord because Jimi Hendrix used it a lot, you can hear it. for example at the beginning of purple haze now it's not just hendrix that uses this so called hendrix chord, another example of this chord is the second chord in michelle's verse from the beatles, it opens quite cleanly on a chord of F major, but then the second chord in the progression is a B flat seven sharp nine chord and that brings us to the last chord for today, which is this one, it's an E minor major nine in other words, it's an E triad. minor with the major seven added above and the ninth. degree, resulting in a peculiar name e minor major nine, but that the major part actually refers to the seven, not the nine, because regardless of whether the chords are minor or major, the ninth degree will remain the same if you want learn more about So check out my previous video on chord symbols, but this chord is a very common, almost cliched way to have a bit of mystery and is very much associated with James Bond.

Not only was it used in the original James Bond theme, but it has also been quoted. indeed in many of the other James Bond songs that have been written over the years. If you want to put what we've learned today to the test, you can do so with today's sponsor, which is Open Ear Open Ear is a free ear training app where you can develop and test your skills in identifying chords by ear you can practice recognizing chords. scale degrees chord functions intervals inversions or as we saw today chord type openair is also an open source project, which means that not only can anyone contribute to the app, but it will remain free to use forever, so considering that It's totally free and they have supported the channel by sponsoring this video, try it out for yourself, the links to download it are below you.