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  #1  
Old 09-25-2013, 11:08 AM
BlueBird2 BlueBird2 is offline
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Default How do you play by ears ?

How long does it take before you can start playing a song by ears? What kind of basic guitar skill do you must have first? I have to have a sheet music in order for me to learn a new song and the sheet music has to be simple enough for me as I'm just really a beginner... I wish i could just pick up a guitar and start playing like many people can and does it amazing ly well....
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Old 09-25-2013, 11:19 AM
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Originally Posted by BlueBird2 View Post
...I wish i could just pick up a guitar and start playing like many people can and does it amazing ly well....
Hi BB2...

You can do that. You certainly have our encouragement and permission.

I'm joking a little, but you probably can learn to play simple songs quite easily.

Once you realize that major keys usually are limited to 6 main chords (three major and three minor) and only occasionally do they break away from that, it makes it easy to learn what the chords in at least the keys of C - A - G - E - and D are.

Here's a link to a chart I give students for transposing to other keys, and it lists the keys and their chords for every key except C#m and F#. Feel free to download and print it out for personal use.

Each key listed and it's chords are on a single line. It's easy to learn that the I, IV, V chords are major and ii, iii, & iv are minor (those numbers refer to the scale degree of the chord).

Transpose Chart - CLicK

Six chords is easy to learn for a key, and you will soon be working with less paper in front of you.


Hope this helps...

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Old 09-25-2013, 11:22 AM
stanron stanron is offline
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Perhaps you are mixing up playing ability with listening skills.

The first thing you have to do as a guitarist playing by ear is hear a note and then play it. Try humming two notes and then see if you can find these notes on the guitar. Playing by ear is a development of just this skill. If you can play two notes you hum then try playing a simple melody, nursery rhyme or hymn or some such, that you already know. Keep it simple at first, just the notes of the melody. If this is easy try working out which chords will fit. You will not be able to play by ear at a level above the level you currently play by reading without working at it. Good luck.
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Old 09-25-2013, 11:27 AM
posternutbag posternutbag is offline
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I have two responses to this question. Initially, I would have said that you should start at least attempting to figure out songs from the very beginning of your musical education. Even if you are just picking out "Twinkle, Twinkle" and "You are My Sunshine" on a single string.

I think that this is probably the ideal, but I have begun to wonder whether it is reasonable. I have met lots of beginners who may know the words to simple songs, but they do not know the actual tune. They cannot tell me if the second note/word in "You are my Sunshine" goes up in pitch, down in pitch, or stays the same. They do not yet understand the basic shape of the tune.

I therefore think that there should be an step before trying to blindly learn songs by ear. First learn a very simple tune in a simple key, C or G. Then transcribe that tune and play it in another key. You will already know the basic shape and the intervals between notes, but you still begin to work on ear training and playing what you hear. Once you can do this basic exercise with confidence, you are probably ready to try to pick songs out totally by ear.

And to answer your question, my experience is it always takes people longer than they are willing to admit, and there are lots of people who play guitar (notice that I do not call them musicians) who never learned to do it. Ear training is hard, frustrating, and all to easy to overlook. On the other hand, it pays off down the road.
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Old 09-25-2013, 11:39 AM
Hotspur Hotspur is offline
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No one thing has made as much of a contribution to my improvement as a musician as ear training. It's not going to happen on its own.

I wholeheartedly second the suggestion that you work out simple melodies. This will be frustratingly difficult at first. To go along with this, practice daily with the functional ear trainer (download it from miles.be, it's free). Only 5-10 minutes a day will pay dividends.

Once you've got that down, practice transcribing more difficult things. If you want a structured course in it, you could get a book like Wyatt et al's "Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician" - but I would START with the free resources. They'll give you a solid foundation to start that book with.
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Old 09-25-2013, 11:50 AM
rico47635 rico47635 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ljguitar View Post
Hi BB2...

You can do that. You certainly have our encouragement and permission.

I'm joking a little, but you probably can learn to play simple songs quite easily.

Once you realize that major keys usually are limited to 6 main chords (three major and three minor) and only occasionally do they break away from that, it makes it easy to learn what the chords in at least the keys of C - A - G - E - and D are.

Here's a link to a chart I give students for transposing to other keys, and it lists the keys and their chords for every key except C#m and F#. Feel free to download and print it out for personal use.

Each key listed and it's chords are on a single line. It's easy to learn that the I, IV, V chords are major and ii, iii, & iv are minor (those numbers refer to the scale degree of the chord).

Transpose Chart - CLicK

Six chords is easy to learn for a key, and you will soon be working with less paper in front of you.


Hope this helps...

You seem like a good instructor. I saw your videos on learning how to barre, and they were easy to understand. And you give good tips and advice to those of us around here with questions. Have you every considered creating your own series of video lessons? Who knows? That may be your ticket to fame and fortune.
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  #7  
Old 09-25-2013, 12:13 PM
JonPR JonPR is offline
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Originally Posted by posternutbag View Post
I therefore think that there should be an step before trying to blindly learn songs by ear. First learn a very simple tune in a simple key, C or G. Then transcribe that tune and play it in another key. You will already know the basic shape and the intervals between notes, but you still begin to work on ear training and playing what you hear. Once you can do this basic exercise with confidence, you are probably ready to try to pick songs out totally by ear.
Agree totally.

For the OP, I suggest "Twinkle Twinkle and "Happy Birthday" for starters. You can either sing the tune and try and find the notes you're singing on the guitar. Or just try and find notes that sound right on the guitar. The latter may be better because you might find yourself singing (unawares) in a strange key, and just not recognise the notes you're finding.

One tip, if you're really not used to singing, is that the intervals between notes can be bigger than you're expecting. The first jump in Twinkle Twinkle is big, but eventually it comes back down the scale to where it started.
In Happy Birthday, there is an even bigger jump at the beginning of the 3rd line, which most people underestimate.

Major pentatonic tunes are also worth trying to find (and are often easy to sing): such as Amazing Grace, Auld Lang Syne, Swing Low Sweet Chariot. (If you know you only have a 5-note scale to work from, that limits the options!)
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Old 09-25-2013, 03:12 PM
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Another thing that is important is to begin to learn to hear the difference in voices between the six strings at various points around the neck. Once you develop that skill you can begin to hear the string voices within the fingerings, or at least be able to hear something played and be able to compare it to the tonal result of your own fingerings.

I started back in the '70s when there were either no books of sheet or inaccurate transcriptions done by piano players. There also were very few videos. If you lived anywhere but New York or LA and were lucky, you might see a song you liked played on a TV show or in a concert ONCE during the decade. Necessity was the mother of strange bedfellows, or something like that. You had no other choice. Exact tempo-synchronized delay and tap-tempo weren't really available far later but I learned to manually set my delay by ear and knob as well. Does anyone remember "China Grove?"

Bob
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Old 09-25-2013, 03:42 PM
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Originally Posted by Bob Womack View Post
Another thing that is important is to begin to learn to hear the difference in voices between the six strings at various points around the neck. Bob
This sounds like a good game plane

At the risk of sounding verbose

It helps to understand some basic theory about scales and chord structure.
Google basic theory for guitars. Find the sites that you find are good for your learning style.

Learn about major scales played with single notes and played with chords. if you can connect the math to the sound this would be an amazing accomplishment. (This can take a lot of time so be patient

For example, Most of us can hear if it is a 1, 4, 5 progression. Learn and play other progressions (1, minor-6th or 1, minor 3rd, Start with these)
And try to sing the intervals. (This is probably not articulated as well as others might be able to say it.)

If you do this a little every day You will eventually be able to hear the intervals.




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Old 09-26-2013, 04:57 AM
TomiPaldanius TomiPaldanius is offline
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Good points here for beginners. Individual melodies are almost always more difficult to play out from chord harmony. That is why I teach ear training little different way.

Students who transcribe melodies and take that approach are usually much slower song learners than the ones who understand harmony/song structure.

First priority for every musician should be able to sing the music they play. If you cannot sing it, how you can hear or play it well?
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Old 09-26-2013, 07:54 AM
mr. beaumont mr. beaumont is offline
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For me, the big things, outside of hearing and finding melodies, were:

Learning to hear basslines and highest notes in chords

Learning to hear "chord quality" major, minor, dominant, half-diminished, etc.

Hearing stable or moving voices within chords

Hearing "articulations" (slurs, slides, guitaristc techniques)

Learning common movements in music that can be anticipated
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Old 09-26-2013, 08:13 AM
Bikewer Bikewer is offline
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I may be a little off-center with my approach. I've never really had "good" ears: hearing loss as a child, tinnitus due to shooting, etc.

Also, I never had much notion to "learn" a tune exactly as whoever was doing it.

So, when I hear a tune I'd like to learn, I'll play it enough to get the basic melody and structure down in my head. Then I'll try to either figure out the chord structure or just look it up on the 'net.

Sometimes you have to do some looking to find an arrangement you can work with.
Then... I just sit down and figure out how I'm going to play it. I don't try to emulate the original, I know my limitations pretty well by now (I'm 67...) so it's mostly a matter of figuring out how to play the thing in a way that I like and that I can manage.
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Old 09-26-2013, 08:30 AM
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Just practice doing it and it will become easier (doesn't just about everything else?).

The ease of learning a song by ear is partially mixed up with technical ability, i.e. knowing chord shapes, barres, etc. and getting to them quickly and cleanly. Learning by ear you need to get to hand positions fairly fast.

You can learn song skeletons (outlines) filling in your own ad lib material, or you can go for note by note - that choice may depend on the type of song and your aims for that song.
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Last edited by rick-slo; 09-26-2013 at 08:47 AM.
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Old 09-27-2013, 09:38 PM
Monk of Funk Monk of Funk is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BlueBird2 View Post
How long does it take before you can start playing a song by ears? What kind of basic guitar skill do you must have first? I have to have a sheet music in order for me to learn a new song and the sheet music has to be simple enough for me as I'm just really a beginner... I wish i could just pick up a guitar and start playing like many people can and does it amazing ly well....
It takes 5 seconds to be able to play by ear. It depends on how good you want to be by playing by ear.

If you listen to something of single notes, that's obviously the easiest. Then for chords, you can play stuff over and over and try to ear out that way kind of trial and error, but that's quite long. I used to do that, listening to the chord, and earing out every individual note and finding that note, and layering it on top. That was maybe a good exercise, but there is a better and faster way.

Really, the game changer to playing by ear, and actually to reading standard notation also, though I don't do that, is "the pattern".

The pattern is the major scale. It is also the minor scale, and all 5 other modes. A mode is just that same pattern with a different tonic. There are 7 notes in the scale, and so 7 modes, one of which is major, and the other is minor.

Most conventional songs stick to that pattern quite well. Jazz is a bit more all over the place. Even conventional songs tend to use one or two notes outside of the pattern, and will sometimes change key as well, which means the pattern moves to a different spot.

Once you know the pattern, you will learn roles the chords tend to take. This will mean that when you hear a chord playing a role in a song, you will start being able to know which chord it is in the pattern. Like, if it is a V7 or a vi7 or what have you.

This takes a little bit longer, but makes earing out chords much much easier.

Also, knowing the pattern makes finding chords of a song much easier because it kind of narrows down the possibilities.

If you want to be able to do this, then my recommendation is to learn songs you want to learn, but don't just learn the song, take note of the pattern, and where those chords fit into the pattern, and it will start making a lot of sense to you.

There are resources you can look at as well that will help with that from a theory standpoint, but I find that if you really want to play by ear, then it is better to rely on your ears for recognizing stuff, than on theory.


Also, learn the pattern inside and out. Learn it as single notes, as a scale, and as chords in all 3 major chord positions. So, the power chord like the low E chord, the power chord like the D near the neck, and the power chord like the B or A near the neck.

Good songs for learning that are Alicia keys' If I ain't got you and Bill Withers' Lean on me.

These are good for that, because they play the chords in the order they are in the scale.

To me, earing out a song, is not playing it the same note for note, but figuring out the chord progression, and rhythm, sometimes a song will need a certain chord inversion in order to sound right, but I prefer to take a song and play with it with some freestyle, so I don't usually worry too much about getting it exactly right as it is on a given recording.

Last edited by Monk of Funk; 09-27-2013 at 09:46 PM.
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Old 09-30-2013, 04:12 PM
oldhippiegal oldhippiegal is offline
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Ear training (Justin has some lessons) helps, practice helps a lot, but for guessing right on the chords, theory helps, too. If you know what chord progressions are most common, and about chord substitution (wiki that), and for more advanced work, about key transitions to the relative minor, parallel minor, and dominant, you'll know what's likely to come next in 95% of pop songs. To learn theory faster, a keyboard helps a lot.
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