Improving Play-By-Ear with Melodies

[LNW]

I've been playing piano, playing guitar, singing throughout most of my life. I have a pretty good grasp of music theory, musical styles, hearing things by ear and so forth.

But the thing I - to this day - am still not that great at is trying to play the individual notes of some song's melody and not botching several notes throughout the course of the song because I just simply play the wrong note in places. I can't think that fast to think, "Ok, this song melody here sounds like going from a I to a VI note in the key, so there I'll play this next note" for every single note of the melody.

But surely there's got to be some way of improving this ability. It seems some people have a talent for just sitting down and playing simple song melodies without hitting a wrong note on the guitar or piano or whatever. (And I don't mean wrong note as in a note outside of that scale, but just not the correct next note.)

Any suggestions?

[rick-slo]

Bet you would do pretty good with "Joy To The World".

Know the root note and whether in a major or minor key.
Run through the notes of the key scale in your head.
Plot the intervals. Practice with some melodies. Good luck
doing things perfectly.

[mattbn73]

Originally Posted by LNW

I've been playing piano, playing guitar, singing throughout most of my life. I have a pretty good grasp of music theory, musical styles, hearing things by ear and so forth.

But the thing I - to this day - am still not that great at is trying to play the individual notes of some song's melody and not botching several notes throughout the course of the song because I just simply play the wrong note in places. I can't think that fast to think, "Ok, this song melody here sounds like going from a I to a VI note in the key, so there I'll play this next note" for every single note of the melody.

But surely there's got to be some way of improving this ability. It seems some people have a talent for just sitting down and playing simple song melodies without hitting a wrong note on the guitar or piano or whatever. (And I don't mean wrong note as in a note outside of that scale, but just not the correct next note.)

Any suggestions?

Learn to play melodies to tunes by rote cold in a couple of fingering patterns which are very familiar. Eventually, make it five positions for each melody you learn. Learn each tune until you don't have to think about it. Always have a "next tune". Start with really easy, basic – like Christmas tunes or children's songs etc.

I think too often we focus on trying to play by ear, before we can even play by rote. We mostly learned play by ear by first playing by rote a good bit. Thoughtless repetition is okay at a certain point and for certain period of your learning process. Playing by ear more on-the-fly is a later evolution of the same thing.