For many years I felt the same. After doing the Chris Liepe course and just staying with guitar, I am starting to notice that my ear is a little more interested and starting to tell me when things sound off. So keep with the program and through general learning and playing plus persistent specifics that enable the ear your acuity will develop.
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Nah, don’t be too pessimistic. Try this little experiment in D:
- Play this progression a few times: D - G - A - Bm. Sounds pleasant, right?
- Substitute A with A7. Does it still sound good?
- Now play D - G7 - A - Bm. How does it sound?
- Try to substitute the others chords as well (one at a time) with their dominant 7 version (so Bm becomes B7).
- Try the same in E, i.e. play the same progressions as above but a tone higher. What changed compared to the progressions in D?
Now, if you can pick which progression sounded more pleasant than others, your ears may be at work, after all 
And a little theory will help you understand the musical reason for why a given progression sounds better than another.
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Hi Jozsef,
With A7 I thought it sounded fine.
With G7 it definitely sounded ‘different’. There’s something a little odd going on in there, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was unpleasant.
With D7, it was fine I guess?
With B7 I definitely didn’t like it.
Shifting it up to E, just checking then the progression would be E - A - B - Cm? To my ear E - A - B sounds OK, but then landing on Cm feels a bit weird somehow. Subbing in E7, A7 and B7 didn’t seem to make a lot of difference to how I felt about it – the first 3 chords sounded OK but then the Cm didn’t quite work. Subbing the Cm to a C7 I think might have improved it? But I still didn’t love it.
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In E, you need that C minor to be C# minor
Oh right. Yeah I should have picked up on that. Damn letter notation always confuses me. Thank you for the correction.
I tried it again with E - A - B - C#m. The main thing that changed is that the chords are more physically difficult to play. I never tried to play a C# anything or a B major before this. The difficulty of playing the chords and slow changes might have impeded the ear exercise, but as far as I could tell, it was much the same pattern. I wasn’t bothered by subbing E, A or B out for their 7 version, but subbing C#m for C#7 wasn’t a winner for me.
100% correct!
D - G - A - Bm
In the key of D
D = the I chord (the tonic)
G = the IV chord
A = the V chord
Bm = the vi chord
E - A - B - C#m
In the key of E
E = the I chord (the tonic)
A = the IV chord
B = the V chord
C#m = the vi chord
I think you might be overestimating me here, I didn’t mean “the same pattern” as in I could hear that the chord progression was the same. I very much did not hear that. What I meant was specifically in response to Jozsef’s exercise, that I got about the same results for subbing in the 7 chords one at a time. Subbing the I, IV and V for the 7 seemed to work OK but subbing the vi for 7 sounded worse to me, in both keys. That’s the “pattern” I thought was the same.
And so it should.
In the key of D, A is the V chord, the 'dominant chord, and is often played as its extended version A7.
G7 does not naturally belong in a chord progression in the key of D.
G major does, and if you want to stay playing chords that are in the key but their extended versions, you would need to make this into a Gmaj7 chord, not G7.
Playing it as a G7 will give an unexpected surprise factor to the ear. It is a borrowed chord - borrowed from another key.
Again, in the key of D, D as the tonic chord would naturally extend to D maj7 and not D7.
But, there is something different going on here.
D7 is the dominant V chord in the key of G and because the chord G does follow on after then it will have a good sound to it. but, there is a subtle shift here and the key of the progression is questionable - is it still a progression in the key of D major or has it shifted to key?
D7 - G - A - Bm - D7 - G - A - Bm
That is not a diatonic progression in a single key because the chord A major is not a chord in the key of G.
If you played D7 within a bigger, longer progression such as:
D - G - A - Bm - D - G - A - Bm - D7 - G - A - Bm
then the progression is in the key of D and the single occurrence of D7 is definitely a ‘secondary dominant’ leading to the G chord and is not a key shift, simply one out-of-key chord giving a special movement to the overall sound.
You are playing a minor vi chord as a dominant 7 chord. Definitely very jazz influenced as a chord substitution and a deep hole to fall down. B7 belongs in the key of E. If it sounds bad to you, it is bad.
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Ha, I know that feeling!
My ear is super critical…
“hey, that’s the wrong chord!”
…and super unhelpful…
“OK, so what’s the right chord?’” crickets
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Exactly this. The other thing that grinds my gears is that my hearing is unbelievably sharp when it comes to really cool and valuable information such as
- a dog is barking somewhere within a 200m radius
- somebody is coughing in the same building
- there is an electrical hum coming from that lamp over there
Like, thanks ears. That’s good to know. How about identifying this interval? Nope.
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In the context of this stuff about learning and making mistakes: Older learner? Here's how to learn faster! - YouTube all that’s really needed is your ear being able to tell when you got it wrong, and making those mistakes is a valuable part of the learning process.
The secret is that when you get to the bit of the song where you forget which chord is next, you don’t stop and look it up, you try to keep going and play the chord you think is the right one. Your ear says “nope, not that one” and a bit of learning has happened. When you guess the chord and it’s right, the cool memory making chemicals get released, and you remember it.
It’s easy to think of learning stuff as a binary thing, you either know it or you don’t. But it’s actually quite gradual. You might not remember the chord progression perfectly, but you already know it a lot better than you did when you started trying to learn it, and it won’t take many of those “aha!” moments when you guess the next chord correctly, to make the rest of it stick.
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Nothing comes easy, but believe us when we say it will start to make sense. Your brain will start to hear what chord is likely to come next, and muscle memory will guide you to finger said chord. Sometimes you’ll be wrong, but with practice over many songs you will find you’ll be right most of the time.
I will venture to say you can’t be taught this stuff, you teach yourself over time.
I wanted to loop back to this thread and mention some of the things I have been trying, and what’s been working for me over the last 4 weeks or so.
Writing down the chord sequences by hand, and figuring out where the repeats are: definitely helping.
Practising playing from chord sheets instead of the app: definitely helping
2 minutes of daily “blind chords” practice is helping too. Because I’m getting better at forming the chords by feel, I am also finding it easier to not look at the app while I’m playing. The songs I play often, I’m gradually taking longer and longer stretches where I don’t look at the app. Sometimes I close my eyes, sometimes I just stare off into the distance and disconnect my brain from my eyeballs. Either way, it’s interesting to notice how much more involved my ears get, and how much more attention I am paying to stuff like dynamics and strum patterns, when I’m not looking.
Theory: not sure if it’s helping with the memory piece, but I am having a fun time working out the roman numeral progressions from the chord names.
Ear training: I’m starting from such a low baseline with my ear training, I’m not sure it’s able to support me in remembering much of anything, yet. I’ve got a long way to go on that.
Occasionally just picking up the guitar, without looking at any reference material, and see if I can figure out the sequence from some song that I’ve been practising. A lot of times I can’t do it, but sometimes if I bounce around between a few different chords I can get there. Like “I know this has C, D, Em and G but can’t remember what order they’re in”, try a few different combinations at random and sometimes I can get it to sound right. That seems to help with the memory.
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When I keep yapping about my “horizontal layered” approach to learning songs, I tell people that drawing out the chord structure is a crucial part, a basic foundation.
Formatting your song in a structured way, like @Tbushell showed above is an excellent example on what helps you see and grasp that. You don’t learn endless sequences but you learn to program it with blocks.
Of course, practicing it a lot is the best way to learn it. after a while you will HEAR how a chord sounds and you will expect it. A part of you will move to that exact chord because your brain just EXPECTS you to go there.
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