How to Play Music by Ear

Many people ask me, can you learn to play by ear or is it something you’re born with? I personally believe that everyone can improve their ability to play by ear. Some people just have an innate sense that allows them to play by ear without much effort, while others will have to work harder at it; the bottom line is, anyone can learn to do it.

Now there are limits to what you can achieve. If you’re tone deaf you probably won’t get to a level where you can transcribe Charlie Parker solos but you can definitely train your ear and improve.

The single most important thing you must do to train your ears is sing. Last week we talked about Why You MUST Sing Your Music and this topic has parallels. I was very fortunate to study solfeggio, which is sight-singing with the syllables (Do Re Me Fa So La Ti Do). When this is sung correctly it quantifies all the pitches in a scale. But you can do the same thing without having to practice sight-singing for years.

Try and quantify the pitches within a scale. Take a song that you know and try it out. The example I give in the video is Yellow Submarine by the Beatles. If you break down the first note in the song you can begin to construct the other notes around it by simply singing up and down in pitch. For example, take Yellow Submarine in C major so it starts on a G. To find the next note, determine whether the pitch goes up or down (in this case it goes up) and find the next note – which is A. When you get to the next note, it drops dramatically in pitch so it’s a bit more difficult to find. If you had years of theory training you might be able to tell it’s a perfect fifth, but even if you have no training at all you can figure it out by going down step-wise through the scale. Sing the pitch of the note in the song to yourself and then sing the pitches of the scale going down one by one until the pitch matches (which in this case is a D).

With a little bit of practice anyone can learn to interpret and play music by ear. You just need to start singing and testing yourself!

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com