Most people learning an instrument are watching, not listening. They watch a hand on a screen, copy the shape, and hope the sound follows. It usually does, for that one song. Then the next song arrives and nothing carries over.

Start with songs you already know

Pick something you have heard hundreds of times. Familiarity does half the work for you, because your ear already knows what is coming even if you have never tried to name it.

Play it and do nothing except notice the moment the chord changes. Not which chord. Just when. Tap your knee on each change if that helps.

Then notice the direction

Once the timing is easy, listen for whether the change feels like it is going up or coming home. You do not need any theory for this. Almost everyone can hear the difference between a chord that lifts and a chord that settles.

The skill is not naming chords. It is noticing that something changed, and having an opinion about what it did.

A ten minute routine

• Two minutes: one song, tapping every chord change
• Three minutes: the same song, deciding whether each change lifts or settles
• Five minutes: at the instrument, finding just the first chord of the song

Do this for a fortnight and something shifts. You stop hearing a wall of sound and start hearing separate events. That is the point at which working songs out yourself becomes possible.