I had an interesting conversation with a fellow local musician after a game of soccer. At some point the conversation turned towards having a great ear. I told him that since I could sight read pretty well, I hadn’t developed my ear as much as I wanted to. For some reason, I almost always skip out on learning stuff by ear until fairly recently. I’ve had moderate success with learning by ear and am excited to learn much more. But I do notice that I procrastinate whenever I have the chance.
Start Simple
I’ve wondered why I never tried to learn by ear when I first started playing guitar. I think I was overwhelmed with all the sounds and I never could get it to sound good so I got frustrated. Also, I rarely thought to play along with the album. And when I did it was never in a normal tuning and I couldn’t figure out how to tune to something that was flat. If I had been more interested in songs with simple harmonic structures when I started learning, I believe I would have developed my ear much faster. But since I wanted to play Coltrane jazz without being able to play the blues, I was stumped.
If I could teach my former self what I know now, I could have learned so much stuff so much quicker. But that’s cool. It’s part of the learning process. And I do remember when I decided to start learning by ear. After high school I recorded some of my favorite songs from the radio onto a cassette tape and started learning the songs. Except the song I wanted to learn was Cliffs of Dover. Again not the best place to start. I wish I could say I learned it all but I really only got a little bit through it.
Fast forward to today. I still am really catching up. But I am ready to dedicate some serious time and energy to transcribing solos and learning and memorizing tunes from all different styles. I am also excited to develop my voice which I believe also is part of developing a good ear.
I have learned a fair amount of stuff by ear. And I’ve used Transcribe, a program which slows do the music. It’s not perfect but at least it’s a compromise.
On the other end of things, I still am learning a lot of music from scores. I love written music because I love the designs beautifully printed music makes. And the classical tradition usually is passed on through written music unless you are a supergenius who hears something once and can play it. One of these days I am going to learn some classical music by ear. But it’s just too easy to find the sheet music.
Anyways, I am just writing this to get it off my chest but also because I hope to make a large 10-20 page section on learning music by ear. I just finished a 7 part miniseries on how to read music, so it’s time to take the next step!
If you’re interested, here’s a cool article about how to learn tunes by ear. It’s just an overview, but you might want to check it out. Here’s the basics:
- Listen to the song a lot
- Try to sing along
- Once you’re comfortable with the song, play along with your instrument
- If the song has words, learn the words.
Related Lessons and Articles
- Play what you sing, Sing what you play!
- Learning Songs: Listen, Sing, Play
- Playing what they’re singing
- Singing success – part 1 (Learning to Sing)