Hiya!
Whether you’ve never picked up a guitar before, or you’re a seasoned specialist of the six-stringed-sword, there is no skill more impressive than picking up a song on the spot and playing it by ear.
Many evenings during my childhood were spent labouring over memorizing open chords, committing major scale shapes to muscle memory, and blindly following tabs without understanding the music. Don’t get me wrong, doing these things did a lot to improve my playing, but I was limited to a small vocabulary of songs, stuck within a narrow understanding of my potential as a musician, and felt I was approaching a plateau to my learning.
I wanted to be able to play the songs that were on my ‘Recently Played’ playlist on my iPod. I wanted to be able to hear a song at a party then pick up a nearby guitar and impress all the surrounding females. I wanted the instrument to do the work for me.
Something had to give, then I came up with the Jimi Method. It works, and it’s scary how quickly it will make all your hard work and frustration with the guitar suddenly ‘click’.
Part 1: Ear Training – Why the Root Note is King, and how to find it.
The most important skill that a guitarist can have is an adept ear. Don’t let this intimidate you, because everyone has the potential to develop this skill. Let me put your concern to rest right now: no, you are not tone deaf. The most simple test to determine if you are actually clinically tone deaf is to pick up your cellphone, go to the keypad, and call home. If you can distinguish that the notes have different tones, then you can do this. I guarantee it.
- The Root Note: What is it? Simply put, it is the lowest note in a chord that defines the name of the chord. For example, the root note in the classic cowboy G-Major chord is G, and is located on the third fret of the low E-string. There exists chords where the root note changes in the chord, but this isn’t necessary knowledge to beginning learning songs by ear.
- Finding the Root Note: Where one begins their lifelong journey of training their ear. Let’s take a simple example that is known across most demographics: Jason Mraz’s I’m Yours. What’s the first chord? Hum it. Stop. Hold that note, and keep humming it. Lost it? Start the song over and find it again. Hum it and imprint the tone in your mind like it was a meditation mantra (you do meditate, right?). THIS is the root note, and it is the single most important first-step towards learning any new song by ear.
- Find the Root Note of every chord in the progression: if this sounds like music-theory jargon, don’t worry. Simply repeat the process above for the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th chord. Sticking with I’m Yours, let’s consider the second chord.
- “Well, you done done me…” = The FIRST chord (i.e., the first root note you discovered from before).
- “I tried to be chill…” = the SECOND chord = stop and hum the bass note to this chord. That will be the root note for the second chord. So far, we’ve discovered the root notes of two chords. We don’t know how to interpret this information yet, don’t worry.
- “I fell right through the cracks” = the THIRD chord.
- “Now I’m trying to get back” = the FOURTH chord.
- NOTE: If you haven’t already noticed, the ‘progression’ or ‘pattern of chords’ repeats itself after the fourth chord, and returns back to the first chord’s root note.
So what have we accomplished, how does this help us?
If you’ve followed the above lesson, you should have 4 notes in your head. At first this may seem like a lesson on how to play a Jason Mraz song, but I encourage you to take this method and apply it to a song that YOU enjoy and want to learn.
Once you’re confident that you can find the root notes of chords within a progession, you can proceed to Part Two of this series, where I discuss how to use this information within the framework of major and minor chords.
Stick with me, it’ll all ‘click’ soon.
John Caldwell 