How To Listen To Music Like A Pro

The most important skill for any music-listener.

Being a good musician requires lots of different skills, but probably the most important is being able to listen to music well. This can range from hearing chord progressions to parsing rhythms, but one skill that often gets overlooked is the skill of orchestral listening. That is, hearing individual components within a larger arrangement. I think it's one of the best ways to enrich your music-listening experience, whether you're making music, analyzing music, or just casually listening to music, but how does it actually work?

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Also, thanks to Jareth Arnold for proofreading the script to make sure this all makes sense hopefully!

[tone]

Some additional thoughts/corrections:

1) I should note that, while to the best of my knowledge most ear training/aural skills courses don't give this nearly as much attention as I think they should, it's something that any serious academic musician is going to pick up on their own at some point, because it's just so useful for so many things.

2) Another tip that didn't really fit in anywhere in the script: Try to work with stereo mixes if you can so you get a bit of free separation just from the panning.

3) I chose to use the guitar part on 6 Inch instead of something subtler mostly because I thought it'd be good to use something whose impact was obvious once you noticed it, and that you could easily go back and listen for if you knew it was there. It's possible I overshot the mark on that and it's too easy to hear for most of y'all, but I suspect that a non-trivial portion of listeners didn't consciously register it on their initial listen.

4) Oh, also! The practice stuff I've described is based on my own experience. It's what worked for me, and hopefully it'll work for you too but it's possible it won't, so if you try this stuff and it doesn't work, maybe scan through the comments, see if anyone else is leaving other advice.

[darleschickens]

I always find it incredible how many layers make up a well-produced, professional studio recording. Stuff you never notice until it is pointed out, and then you can't unhear it.

[tjfunction]

As someone who's spent years behind a soundboard, I can say mixing will definitely send your listening into overdrive. Sometimes when there was a musician in a band that I was amazed by, I would solo that channel out in headphones to really immerse myself in it. But it made me think about something else that wasn't really covered here: Watching. It's not always an available option, and live music is something we're all missing right now, but when you can use your eyes and ears together, it makes picking out lines that are kinda buried in the mix super easy to latch on to. Maybe trying with performance videos right here on Youtube would be a great start!

[NLPaulus]

This is why it helps to learn the basics of an instrument. Ive been practising the drums for a few months now and it opens up a new way of listening to songs.

[mattdeblassmusic]

One of the things that helped me with this is learning more than one instrument. Being able to look at a song from from different perspectives of say, a rhythm player on percussion and a melody player on strings helps me tune in to different parts as well get a sense of the roles they play and how those fit together.
Now I just need to actually get GOOD at one or two of those instruments...

[DucksUpDogsDownCatsSlide]

When I heard that Beyoncé song, I immediately thought of the sample being used in the background.

[seanellis]

This is exactly why doing “barebones” covers of modern songs (just one instrument and a voice) is so difficult to pull off: the amount of layers that make so many modern songs work means that taking so many away strips many songs of what make them unique. That’s why so many songs from the 50s all the way up to even the early 2000s are so much easier to cover: they didn’t focus on layering nearly as much, so it’s not weird when all the layers are missing.
So many modern genres are leaning more and more on layering. Pop, R&B, Indie/Emo, heck even Metal is getting more into modern styles of layering. I’ve personally been saying for a while, layering is by far the most defining aspect of today’s music as compared to the last hundred years

[JonSmithsVoyages]

"You can turn one song you love into dozens of different musical experiences." So true!! There are so many songs I've listened to countless times focusing in on different parts and hearing new nuances. I love the way you interpret and think about music, 12tone!

[Simon_the_Sorcerer_]

Patreon Idea: Upload only the drawings and see if people can reverse engineer the script.

[mbaklor]

I play guitar, and so naturally I seek guitars in songs I listen to. A few years ago a friend of mine - a drummer - and I were talking about Sultans Of Swing, when we both paused on a single point in the song and said "wow that was amazing", however I was talking about the guitar lick, and he was talking about the drum fill. That was the day I discovered orchestral listening. Thank you for this amazing video!

[jasonremy]

A great video series for breaking down songs into parts like this is Rick Beato's "What Makes This Song Great". I've learned so much from that series about close listening to music and how to hear parts.

[AidanMmusic]

The British composer Frank Denyer really inspired me with his level of orchestral listening. As well as correctly distinguishing intervals of a sixth-tone from individual players in a full orchestral passage, his wife would often apologise on the phone if he wasn't available, because he was engaged in "listening sessions" which would last several hours at a time.

[pabloemiliorui]

When advice involves illegal downloaded resources you know it's good

[cowl]

I didn't know this was a skill. I've been doing this my whole life

[sirgermaine]

I find it helpful to listen to something passively a few times before sitting down to analyze it in detail

[anonymousOrangutan]

3:40 a mandelbrot set on mandelbrot's birthday... nice (:

[darleschickens]

One other important thing to mention as well is using decent headphones at the very least. You'd be wasting your time trying to practice orchestral listening with just phone speakers. Pretty much the entire bass frequency spectrum is unavailable on bad speakers/headphones.

[scottblair]

When you said there were some low effort alternatives to transcription, I literally sighed with relief.

[Skizze]

I used to listen to individual parts of a song for fun, when I was a kid- didn't even play music yet.

A great album to practice this skill on is "Pet Sounds". It's so dense that you'll never get bored breaking down each harmony, each instance of an instrument doubling another part- so lovely.

[paddyyyyyyyyyyyy]

Thanks, I think I really needed this!