Quote:
Originally Posted by BFD
IMHO you're way, WAY overthinking this! To play stuff by ear you need: 1) your ear, & 2) your guitar. And as mentioned, a very useful 3rd tool is your voice.
Probably the easiest & best way is to learn to sing a melody, then teach it to your guitar (as it were). How do you know if your guitar has it right? Your ear will tell you.
Just doing it is how you get good at it. Talking about it won't work. Just do it. Searching websites, trying to gather all the info you can, trying to left-brain it to death won't help much. Just do it. You can try to ear train intervals if you want, it probably won't hurt. Or you can spend that time figuring out real music, assuming that's what you want to play. Most players who are good at it got that way doing the latter. They just did it.
As you tackle more complex melodies and want to figure out other guitar parts, chords etc, start working with recordings and slow-down software.
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I'm only speaking for myself here, not the OP, but "just do it" assumes a great deal of understanding about music that I just flat did not have and I never would have figured out in the time I have left on earth without some information. It seems to me that some people, when they talk about playing by ear, are really saying they listen to something over and over with the instrument in hand and try notes till they find the right ones and then remember what they "figured out". That's a different thing, imo, than knowing how to play a melody you hear because you know the intervals of the melody and also where those intervals are on the guitar. People who can really "play by ear" know how to play a piece without trial and error, as far as I can tell.
People who can also discern pitch are, I think, less common than people who can play the intervals, which is a fairly easily learned skill set.