[Music] [Applause] [Music] Being able to figure out a melody by ear alone is a very powerful skill to develop for anyone looking to play, compose, or improvise. eyes [Music] music. I'm going to walk you through my own process for this today, step by step, and I encourage you to participate. Uh, pause the video to reflect on things and try stuff on your own whenever needed, and then resume when you're ready. Now, in order to do this effectively, you need to understand what scale degrees are. If you don't, check the description for more information. [Music] Step one is to simply memorize the melody. If you're not familiar with this melody or any other one you're working with already, you need to internalize it because we're going to be using our memory of the melody to work it out. So, ideally, you should be singing or humming the melody in whatever way you please. You don't need to be perfect. You just need to be close enough to recognize it. If this is difficult for you, like it was for me, then I highly, highly recommend you work on this skill. Being able to sing back pitches and melodies effortlessly will serve you for the rest of your life, even if you're not a singer. I'm not a singer, but I use this all the time in every facet of my musical life. Really, it's true. So, pause the video now and try to sing the melody back to yourself. Close your eyes, remember the shape, remember the sound, sing it back to yourself. If you can't listen again, repeat, and then move on once you're ready. [Applause] [Music] For step two, we need to create a mental or physical map of the melody, which depicts how the notes relate to each other pitch-wise through time. Consider whether each note moves up or down in relation to the previous note, and by how much. Is it by step, by leap, by large leap? You don't need to be perfect, but you want to get the general shape of the melody. We're not looking for specific note names. We're not even looking for the scale degree numbers right now. We're just mapping the contour of the melody. If this way of visualizing melodies as a contour is new to you, it can really help to draw it out physically on some paper, just pause the video now, take 30 seconds, and give it a shot. Now that we have the melodic contour and the melody memorized, step three is about slowly singing the melody, lingering on each tone without rhythm. looking to identify any scale degrees as we go. In particular, we're looking to identify the tonic, which is the home note, the resolving or most stable note of the key. D. Try this yourself very slowly and feel into each note. Can you recognize the feeling state of any of them? If you can, note it down on your diagram of the contour. And in particular, are any of these the tonic? If the concept of recognizing scale degrees by how they feel is new to you, check out some of my other videos or my app Sonop, which I'll link below to help develop the skill. Although it's highly likely that the tonic is contained somewhere in your melody, there's no guarantee of that. So, if you recognize any scale degrees, pencil them in as potential candidates because you can infer the tonic if you know any of the other degrees. In step four, we're going to try to fill in the rest of the scale degrees that we're unclear about by using a combination of scale degree recognition, which we've just done, and music theory to deduce what the other degrees must be. Look at your contour and the degrees that you've already got filled in, and then try to calculate what the other degrees must be based on where they sit in the contour relative to the ones that you do know or think you know. Once you've got guesses for every degree in the contour, sing the melody slowly again and ask yourself, do they match? Do the feeling states that I experience when I sing this match the degrees that I have listed? It's easy to trick yourself because there are certain degrees which are confusing because they have similar harmonic characteristics to each other. So, if you're confident in your answers and everything feels right to you, now it's time in step five to grab a real instrument and check your work. Sing the note you think is the tonic, play a random note on your instrument, and then attempt to identify which scale degree that random note is. If you're able to identify the degree that you're playing, you can easily just look at the pitch of that note and then calculate what the real tonic must be. Remember to take your time with this. This is an essential part of ear training. So, don't just skip it and mash a bunch of keys. Sing the tonic, play the note, repeat, repeat, repeat. If you still can't get it, change the note. Which degree is that? Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. If you still can't get it, change the note. Just do this until you find it. Don't take a shortcut. Sing the tonic. Play the note. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Change until you can get it. [Music] If A is two, then G must be one. Think about the G major scale. Once you've determined the tonic, all you need to do is take your contour map of scale degrees and apply it to that tonic. And then you can play the melody in the correct key and ask yourself, does it match? Does it sound [Music] right? If when you play your melody in the key, it works and it sounds right and it feels right and it matches the song and everything's good, then awesome, you're the best. And if not, you're still the best. But you need to analyze your mistakes. There's a lot of gold to be found in this and it's a very humbling process. Take the time to look into what went wrong, what degree did you mistake for another one, and how did the whole process unfold. There's a lot of learning to be had in that, believe me. So, finally, once you've got everything done, you've got all the scale degrees correct, you can play it in the right key, it's all good. We need to now make an association between the sounds in the real music, the feeling states of the real music, and the intellectual knowledge of what's going on. So, you want to listen back to the real music with the knowledge of what scale degrees you're hearing in the melody and keep track of it as you listen. Spend time alternating between just listening while keeping degrees in mind, just singing while keeping degrees in mind, and singing along with the real music while keeping degrees in mind. Because the more times you do this in isolation and in context, the stronger the connections are going to become for how these scale degree feelings, how the labels, which are the numbers, and how the sound of the real music, all relate. Of course, as you practice this more, the amount of guess work needed, the amount of mistakes you make, the amount of time it takes, the number of steps you have to take, all become smaller and smaller, and you're able to get to the answer faster and faster until you can actually identify melodic scale degrees in real time as they're going. You don't need to pause anything. You don't need to sing anything. You can just hear it and know it. Now, if you want to try this with a new song right now, just check the description. I'm going to leave a song down there with a link to it timestamped with where the melody is as well as a link to the answer key to a filled out melodic contour. So you listen to the song, try it on your own and then check your answers against my provided contour and then once again listen to the song repeatedly with the knowledge in mind making the associations. So that's it for now. Hope you enjoyed it. Talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Bye. [Music]