Q: learnin piano. I can solfège my way through figuring out the melody of a song based on my experience as a vocalist, but cannot figure out the chords of a song at all. there are just too many notes playing at once, but I would like to learn how to learn songs by ear. any advice? sorry if this has been asked before, you know how it is
A: go through about 50 of your favorite songs, and identify each chord with brute force. quickly unpause/pause (or nowadays you can edit to loop a tiny fraction of audio very quickly) and just pick it out note by note and put it together. write down all the chords to a song (in time, with bar lines, etc.)..... once you do this for about 30 or 40 songs, i think you will find that you don't have to search for the individual notes anymore. ... maybe not even pause it at all. After about 100 more songs, you probably won't even have to listen to the song, you will be able to do it from memory. after about 1000 songs, you will probably be able to hear someone singing the melody for a song you have never heard before, without hearing the chords, and figure out what the chords should be. after 10,000 songs, you should be able to play chords along with them on the first try, never having heard the song before, and have them think you already knew the song