How to Analyze a Song by Ear

By now you have almost every tool in the course: you can count a tempo, recognize a scale, name a chord, follow a bassline and describe a timbre. What's left is using them in the right order, in front of a real song. That's what producers who improve quickly do: they listen to the tracks they love the way a mechanic looks at an engine, one part at a time. This lesson gives you a method for doing that without getting lost.

Six steps, always in the same order

The method goes from the broadest to the finest. We start with what's easiest to hear, the tempo, and we finish with what takes the most attention, the details of the sounds. Each step builds on the one before: knowing the key cuts down the number of possible chords enormously, and knowing the chords helps you hear the bass.

1. You find the tempo, and you check whether it feels normal or half-time.
2. You find the key: the note that feels like home, then the mode, major or minor.
3. You work out the chords, in Roman numerals and as chord symbols, and how fast they change.
4. You transcribe the bassline, note by note.
5. You split the structure into sections and count their bars.
6. You describe the sounds one by one, using the words from the part of the course on timbre.

Before the first step, import the song into an audio track in your DAW, for your own personal use, and listen to it once all the way through without writing anything down. Just let a general impression come to you: dark or bright, calm or tense, dense or airy. That first impression will help you check your conclusions at the end.

Step one: the tempo

Start the song and tap a key on every beat, the way you'd nod your head. Most DAWs have a tap tempo function, and the metronome below has one too. Tap for at least eight beats: the first few taps are always a little hesitant.

The classic trap here is half-time, which you met in the lesson on tempo. Listen to the next pattern: the clap hits only once per bar, on the third beat, while the hi-hats race along.

If you tapped around 70, you're not wrong: that's how your body feels this rhythm. But the pattern is written at 140, and that's the number to type into your DAW, or your fast hi-hats will be impossible to place on the grid. Automatic tempo detection often makes the opposite mistake and suggests double or half the right number. So always write down both: the written tempo and the felt tempo.

Step two: the key

For the rest of this lesson, we'll work on a study track: an original four-bar loop with the chord names hidden. Listen to it several times. Your first job is to find the note the music seems to rest on, the one you could hum all the way through without it clashing.

Hum a held note while the loop plays, then look for it on the keyboard by going up and down, as in the lesson on finding a note you hear. A second clue comes from the bass: the lowest note on the very first beat of the loop is very often the tonic. Here, both clues point to D. To tell whether we're in major or minor, compare the next two chords with the loop.

The version with F, the minor third, blends into the loop; the one with F♯ clashes. So the track is in D minor (Dm). If an automatic tool tells you F major, don't be surprised: these two relative keys share the same notes, and only your ear knows which one feels like home. The key finder below shows you that reasoning: enter the notes you hear, and it offers you both readings.

Step three: the chords

Knowing the key changes everything, because you no longer have twelve possible chords on each note, just seven candidates, the ones in the scale. In D minor, they are Dm (i), E° (ii°), F (III), Gm (iv), Am (v), Bb (VI) and C (VII). Now listen to the bass at each chord change: it almost always plays the root. In our loop, it goes through D, B♭, F and then C.

Over each bass note, try the chord from the key that carries that name: over B♭, that's B flat major; over F, F major; over C, C major. Play your version along with the original. If nothing clashes, you've found it.

Also write down the harmonic rhythm: here, one chord per bar. When a chord won't give itself up, it's often because it has an added seventh, or because the bass isn't playing its root. In that case, start with the closest three-note chord, then look for the missing note.

Step four: the bass

The bass is often the hardest part to hear, because the ear struggles to tell pitches apart down low. Two tricks help a lot. The first is to transpose the song up an octave in your DAW while you listen: the line keeps its notes, but it becomes much easier to follow. The second is to start with the note on the first beat of each bar, which you already know from the chords, and then fill in the rest.

Look at how it's built. Each bar starts on the root of the chord, jumps to the octave, comes back, then sets up the next bar: C steps down a whole step to the B♭ that follows, and F, the fifth of Bb, announces the F chord. Transcribing a bassline means finding this kind of logic, not just a string of notes.

Step five: the structure

Drop a marker in your DAW every time something changes, then count the bars between two markers. Write down what comes in and what goes out: the kick, the bass, the melody, a new effect. Here's what the structure sheet might look like for a track built on our loop.

Two things jump out. First, every section lasts 8 or 16 bars, and that's no accident: electronic music is very often built in blocks of that size. If you count a section of 15 or 17 bars, count again, or look for the transition bar you put on the wrong side. Second, each section is defined mostly by what it takes away or adds, just as in the lesson on arrangement.

Step six: the sounds

For each sound, ask yourself four questions. What register does it play in: sub, bass, mids or highs? Is its attack sharp or gradual, and is its note short or held? Is it bright, full of harmonics, or dark and filtered? What effects can you hear around it, a long reverb, a delay synced to the tempo? Listen to the same D minor chord played by three different timbres.

The notes are identical, but the pad settles in slowly, the pluck dies away quickly, and the sawtooth, richer in harmonics, sounds much brighter. You don't need to find the exact preset: describing a sound with these words is enough to build one that plays the same role.

Your analysis notebook

None of this does you much good if you've forgotten it by next week. Keep a notebook, on paper or on screen, with one page per song you analyze. After ten or fifteen pages, you'll see habits appear, the habits of a genre or a style you love, and you'll be able to reuse them on purpose.

• Write the title, the date of your analysis and your first impression in a few words.
• Note the written tempo and the felt tempo, the key, and the clue that helped you find it.
• Copy out the chords as symbols and in Roman numerals, with how long each one lasts.
• Sum up the structure in sections and numbers of bars.
• Describe each sound in one sentence, and write down the idea you want to remember.

Recreate to learn, not to copy

The best way to check an analysis is to rebuild the loop in your DAW and compare it with the original. It's a workshop exercise, like practicing a scale: it trains your ear and your hands. What you keep for your own tracks afterward are the principles: a tempo, a type of chord progression, a way of building a bassline, a structure. Those tools belong to everyone.

Now you know how to take a song apart. In the next lesson, we'll go the other way: start from a simple eight-bar loop and grow it into a complete track.