8 ms·

Ask HN: What does it feel like to master playing an instrument by ear?

• upveto 8y ago
  It feels like being able to hear someone say something and repeat it back to them :) Fluency comes from learning theory implicitly. Implicit theory knowledge comes from spending a lot of time listening to music you want to emulate, and then painstakingly emulating it on your instrument. Your mistakes will elucidate the nature of the music. - Jazz Pianist
  • osrec 8y ago
    Interesting, so it's just practice followed by more practice? Something I've recently started is putting on a music video and then trying to play along with it. It's pretty tough, but I manage a few bits here and there...
    • colanderman 8y ago
      It helps a lot to be able to recognize if something is on a standard diatonic scale & chord progression, or uses chromatics and modulations. It greatly reduces the search space if you know the notes and chords you're trying to find are out of 7 choices rather than 12/48+. If you can't recognize that yet, finding tablature or sheet music can help you tell for a given song, before you go banging your head against a wall trying to figure out something that is musically unusual.
  • pattrn 8y ago
    I completely agree with this. Learning music theory helped me play by ear because it helped me associate a feeling with a progression or chord. This made learning by trial and error much easier, since it stuck more (I tried it without much success when I was younger). - Also Jazz Pianist
    • matt_the_bass 8y ago
      For me the theory helps me understand how to execute what I hear in my head.
• dyu- 8y ago
  It took me around 10yrs to be able to identify the notes immediately just by listening. I didn't really had to study it to learn ... it just came naturally for me. It correlates easily to the music theory that you know, which is the main foundation that you need to get acquainted with. I play a lot of instruments but bass is my main instrument.
  • osrec 8y ago
    Interesting. Did you have a particular moment when you just "got it", or was it a gradual build up of ability over the 10 years?
    • throwaway8879 8y ago
      For me, it suddenly clicked after a decade or so. The same thing happened with improvisation and keeping excellent time. I felt like I was always struggling until one day whatever I heard in my head came out my fingers. It's just that the process is very gradual and takes a long time. I suppose the 10k hour rule applies here.
      • dyu- 8y ago
        exactly my thoughts.
    • dyu- 8y ago
      For me it was gradual build up. Also I forgot to mention that I never put that much time into learning music theory. I was too busy with programming (that's why we're here right? haha)
• odessacubbage 8y ago
  i tend to play by ear but it's more of a bad habit with limited usefulness than anything else, there's no real reason to romanticize it. simply spend enough time with any instrument and producing the right sounds will become intuitive. >I want to know what it feels like to be able to play an instrument without needing so much trial and error. then i highly suggest you focus on learning music theory rather than trying to look cool. gaining an understanding of musical structure will help you gain that intuition faster than anything else. you'll still be playing by ear, you just wont be playing in the dark
  • osrec 8y ago
    Thanks. Where do you suggest I start? Are there any beginner books or YouTube videos you can suggest?
    • jlarocco 8y ago
      There are lectures from one of Yale's Music Theory classes on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9LXrs9vCXK56qtyK4qcqwHrbf0em_81r https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9LXrs9vCXK56qtyK4qcq... There's a Kindle version of the textbook on Amazon.
  • anentropic 8y ago
    playing by ear is not just a trick to impress those who have to read the part to learn it, it's closely related to improvisation in any genre which involves improvising with other musicians, it is hard to do that if you can't follow by ear what they are doing all the music theory knowledge in the world won't help you in that situation if you can't hear what the other players are playing
• acconrad 8y ago
  I learned the guitar playing by ear. As a kid I would just lock myself in my bedroom and play along with my CDs until my fingers were raw. It's a lot of screwing up, starting the song over, and trying again until it sounds right. I started doing this about 20 years ago so I've had quite a bit of practice, but at this point it's really a great feeling to listen to a song on YouTube and know pretty much before I pick up the guitar whether I'm capable of playing it within an hour or so. It just takes practice. Lots of it. Lots of trial and error. Lots of screw ups. And just embracing/loving the process. Actually the last part is the most important, because I love playing the guitar. I love music. I play 5 different instruments and music is a deeply important part of my life. My desire to play along to the songs I love trumps wanting to learn it in a more traditional fashion. I could have taken guitar lessons or gotten a teacher to learn proper theory and all of that. But all of that stuff just got in the way of what I wanted to do: play the music I love. Now. So just go out there and fiddle with your instrument and play along to stuff you like!
  • osrec 8y ago
    Thank you! It's pretty much the way I'm trying to learn at the moment. Tbh, I felt my learning process was a bit unstructured, but knowing that you've persevered and got to a high level of proficiency this way gives me a lot of encouragement!
    • ehnto 8y ago
      I learned the same way, however I really wish I learned theory too (and am teaching myself now). The best way I can describe the limitation is that it's like knowing the shapes of the bottles for the ingredients to a recipe, but you don't know the names or the "why" of how it all works. You can't talk to other musicians about music and you can find yourself doodling the same old songs and patterns over and over. It is harder to get out of your box I feel.
      • acconrad 8y ago
        Fun fact: I am now learning theory and chord names. I was in a band in college and I could never play along with the properly trained. "Can you play that in a C minor pentatonic scale?" "Yeah!... So what frets are those?"
• hluska 8y ago
  My grandmother could play by ear. I was always amazed that we could go for a drive, hear a song on the radio, go home and Grandma would play it on her violin. One day when I was about 9 or 10, I asked her how she did it and why I couldn't. She said that the key was to start playing an instrument really young and then play constantly until you were in your sixties. Loads and loads of practice is the key to doing it. As far as how it felt, my Grandma always smiled when she was playing music so I assume it felt pretty good.
• sverige 8y ago
  I gave up on piano when I was eight, but I have played the tenor sax since I was 10 years old and bass guitar since I was 14. It's been many years since I got to the point where I could play by ear. I guess after enough practice you just get to the point where you hear the song in your mind and play it without thinking. My best analogy for non-musical coders is that it's sort of like touch typing while writing code. Your thoughts just come out through your fingers without thinking about it.
• binarysolo 8y ago
  Think about how you learned a spoken language and when you were able to spend time articulating ideas instead of thinking about words and grammar for it. That's kinda how mastering a music instrument is like. Basically the first few years of anything (music or not) seems to be about correct articulation/grammar/vocabulary, and beyond that it's about the quality of expression. (former classically trained concert violinist of 10+ years, hobbyist latin dancer of 10+ years - swapped a musical instrument for a physical one as an optimization to go along with long periods of desk work)
  • osrec 8y ago
    Thanks - that's a very interesting way to look at it!
• vagab0nd 8y ago
  I started playing the piano around 4 but gave up around 12. I can play by ear pretty easily, meaning listening to a song and just play the main rhythm. It always feels natural to me, so I guess I didn't feel anything special about it. It wasn't until much later did I realize not everybody can do it. An interesting side effect of this, is that whenever I hear a piece of music, I can correlate the notes to the keys on the piano, such that next time I sing that song, it can start at the exact same pitch. (Just looked it up and it's called "Absolute pitch"[0]) 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch
• dragonsky67 8y ago
  That's a really interesting question. My experience is in playing Clarinet since I was about 10 years old, professionally for a year or two and more sporadically over the last 10 years. (I'm 50ish) I can play clarinet (even now) without any difficulty, can (re)play music I've heard a couple of times (memory is getting worse as I get older) and sight read music fairly easily as long as it's not too fast or complex. For the last 20 or so years, I've had access to a piano, and have attempted to teach myself how to play two handed. I can play melodies by ear, and add some simple chord accompaniment but have not a hope of reading two handed music to play. Most other instruments, as long as I can master the technique for producing a decent sound and get my hands around the fingering, I can also play fairly successfully by ear. So I can pick up a guitar and pluck out a melody, pick up my daughters violin (groan) and squeak out someting that you can recognise. My technique sucks and I'm prob not doing it correctly. I can also do a pretty decent job of singing anything I hear. My experience leads me to suspect that playing by ear is, like singing something you have heard, the natural way of making music. The only difference is that you need to have physical mastery of the sound making process, hence my difficulty with two handed playing piano as I've no experience with making music with each had playing something different.
• wemdyjreichert 8y ago
  I never really leaned to read music. Listen to a recording a couple times; maybe slow it down. Perfect or near-perfect, though not an absolute necessity, is helpful. Other than that, TONS of practice.
• zenthn 8y ago
  First, you have to practice listening to music. You have to focus on everything: melody, rhythm, harmony, instrumentation, and dynamics. You also need to study those things so you know exactly what you're listening to. Practice scales, arpegios, and chord progressions and you'll start to recognize them. If you hear a song in a key that you can't even play in, it doesn't matter how good your musical memory is. I started playing piano as an adult and can read music and play by ear. I worked as a dueling piano player for a few years wherr listening to your partner and figuring out what they're playing is a part of the job. I also write music down in various forms. Chords and lyrics, guitar tabs, and sheet music. Everything helps, but you have to practice playing by ear as well. Just put a song on a loop and play along until you get it right.
• meggar 8y ago
  Try singing/whistling the melody while playing it at the same time.
• betenoire 8y ago
  Practice practice practice. It feels like speaking another language. You hear phrases and you play phrases. Practice practice practice. The more you practice, the bigger your phrases become.
• lettergram 8y ago
  Both saxophone and guitar I used to be able to play by ear. One of my favorite experiences was finding two other sax players and playing the "Back in Black" album by AC/DC. Just loved the sound and chords with the depth of the wind instruments. Eventually we met a trumpet and bass player too who could do that. I could pick up Mario, Zelda and other game songs, idk it was just fun. That level of fluency was actually learning notes first, but doing free form jazz and blues for probably 45 minutes a day (at least) for two to four years. Once I left junior college and moved to university I dropped all my music. Just bought a house, plan to pick it up again -- need the daily practice.
• CyberFonic 8y ago
  As a teen I could play 10+ musical instruments - ranging from piano to trumpet, violin, etc. Initially I also played by ear, but I soon tired of the trial and error. So I learnt to read music and a some of music theory. With that framework I was able to understand each instrument better and thus structure my practice better - yes, learning scales, fingerings, etc. I would write the score for music I heard and then practice from that. It also helped me heaps to write the lyrics against the score to improve the dynamics, etc.
• billwear 8y ago
  I learned the piano well enough to play for money in college. Close your eyes - it’s all muscle memory. Experiment and learn multiple chords and keys. And it takes about 7 years practicing 3-5 Times a week.
• pizzicato7 8y ago
  The short answer is it feels effing awesome to have that kind of instinctive ability to hear something, and play it back, instantly and accurately. However, it's a bit more nuanced than that. Playing the notes accurately is only one aspect of playing music. Playing the notes accurately and expressively is really what you're aiming for. There are a couple of distinct skills you can build to do this: 1. Training your ear to recognize chords and melody notes. This requires a lot of active listening to music, and learning music theory, so you can recognize what's being played. 2. Building the motor skills on your instrument so you can play many kinds chords and notes, instinctively. This requires hundreds (or thousands) of hours of practice. Then the trick is putting the two together: listening to music, recognizing the chords and notes being played, and then playing them back yourself on your instrument. Now the harmonium is a relatively simple and limited instrument consisting of a bellows and a small keyboard (usually 2.5-3.5 octaves). Most of the "chords" on this instrument are actually played with the bellows blowing air over banks of reeds. So you don't really need to build a lot of muscle memory to play chords (as you would on a piano). And melodies on the harmonium are typically played slowly. So learning to play the harmonium won't take as much practice as say a piano or a guitar would. You could get quite good at the harmonium with say 500 hours of practice, which is not actually that long. In terms of practical steps, I'd probably watch a lot of harmonium videos on YouTube and try to get your harmonium to sound like what they're playing in the video. One major difficulty you're going to have is that different harmoniums can sound quite different, depending on how many reed banks a harmonium has, how many octaves its keyboard has, whether various stops are pulled out, etc. So I don't think it'll be easy to truly sound just like what you're hearing because the variation between your harmonium and the other harmoniums out there is quite big. Hope this is helpful! Me: I'm a classically trained pianist and I've owned and played harmoniums in the past.
• colanderman 8y ago
  It feels the same as touch-typing on a keyboard. My brain envisions the pitch I want, and my fingers know where to find it. Musically though, pay attention to the feeling of notes relative to the root of the key you're in (as opposed to in isolation). You can envision a keyboard in your head and map the movement of pitch to movement on the imaginary keyboard. There are only so many notes in a Western major scale; eventually you will find that notes from a melody fall into place on this imaginary keyboard as you hear them, and you can translate that into finger movements. This won't come overnight. It took me about ten years of being musically active to be able to figure things out by ear; another ten to be able to do so on the first try (i.e. hearing pitches as easily as words in a conversation). These periods were punctuated by a solfege class which I credit with helping me develop the latter ability. If you are still in school take such a class if you can find one.
• jancsika 8y ago
  > How do those that can play "fluently" know which keys to press? There are a lot of possibilities. I'll take a stab at one. Let's say I want to play The Eagles' Desperado on the piano. Here's what I'm doing in realtime: * I start singing the melody * I visualize a piano keyboard and imagine the note where I start the melody * I play a note on an invisible keyboard in the air with my right hand * for each note I sing, I move my fingers synchronously to play the corresponding note on the invisible keyboard (right hand only) * I get comfortable doing this. If my hand goes to a note that I feel uncertain about, I do a quick sanity check to make sure my hand is still playing the correct invisible note to correspond with what I'm singing. Here's a simplified example of the error correction-- if I'm in C major and I know I'm singing middle C, I make sure my hand is playing an invisible middle C. If it's instead playing a different note then I messed up somewhere along the way. Playing and identifying the pitch "C" when playing in C major is really easy to do, so it makes a good anchor point for beginners. In practice I've got about three types of anchor points that I can track in realtime: the key I'm in, the relationship of the pitch I'm singing to that key, and the relationship of the pitch I'm singing to the chord I'm playing. Those anchors greatly limit the degree to which I can make a mistake, at least in a simple tonal piece like Desperado that doesn't modulate. * as I do this, I start noticing that I'm singing grace notes so I make my right hand play those invisible grace notes. It goes alright. * Now I try singing the corny Sax riff from George Michael's "Never Gonna Dance Again" over the B section-- where the lyrics go, "Don't you draw the queen of of diamonds, boy." The riff actually lines up alright and my hand keeps up. * Now I try singing some hemiolas and some gospel-type melismas. My hand plays some questionable pitches. I go back and analyze the parts I messed up, trying to figure out where my fingers got tangled up. (Also noticing that I messed up due to singing in a very inaccurate manner.) * Now I add the left hand. C chord, C chord, C 13, C chord, F chord, F minor in first inversion, 16th octaves descending stepwise from Ab down to E. That creates a doubled 3rd in the chord but the right hand melody leaps away... During this I drop the melismas in the right hand and play the melody straight to keep the harmony shared by both hands moving in realtime. Once I dropped the inner voices (i.e., stopped playing them) and just got the bass in octaves and melody... When I actually sit down at a piano, I'll be more fluid and accurate at playing Desperado. Because the process I just described away from the instrument is essentially the same process that I follow at the instrument. Now, if I wanted to add some more interesting chord substitutions and develop something like, say, a gospel style in the inner voices and bass patterns, I'd probably be back where you refer to as "trial and error," working out details without being able to play them in realtime at first. That is to say, most people never gain "fluency" in the sense of just sit down and play anything that you hear with ease. So make sure you're having fun guessing and checking now. Because once you improve to your desired level you'll still have the feeling of guessing and checking with new techniques and sounds.
• kbob 8y ago
  I started playing the sax in fourth grade (age 9). I took lessons and played in school band. By ninth grade, I could usually play back what I heard. When I heard a melody, I heard specific notes and intervals. I think learning to hear that way was harder than learning to subconsciously play notes. The skill transferred to the bassoon and piano, though I don't play piano as well. Years later, I picked up the sax again as an adult. This time, my emphasis was on jazz and improvisation. I still took lessons and played in bands occasionally. My drills were playing the same tune in all 12 keys and improvising on chord progressions in all 12 keys. The transposition came more or less easily -- less than a year of practice. When playing a drill around the circle of fifths (repeat a phrase in the keys of C, G, D, A, etc all the way around), I'd know what it should sound like and my fingers would find the notes. I wasn't always conscious of which key I was in. When I improvised, sometimes I heard specific notes in my head and played them, and sometimes I thought about the chords/scales and let my fingers wander within those scales -- I didn't know what I was playing until I heard it. (I also didn't know about modes as much then.) I don't know that I was ever good at improvising, but I enjoyed it.
• asplake 8y ago
  "What key to press" isn't the best way to think about it. Music is full of patterns, idioms, and so on, and we practice those too. That's why beginners are taught scales and arpeggios, and to get into rock or jazz, you learn their chords, progressions, etc. In terms of what it's like to be able to do it, I'm a competent church musician, and generally I prefer to pick up songs from recordings than from sheet music – I can generally listen 2 or 3 times and then sit down at the piano and do a decent enough rendition. When I'm very familiar with a song, I quite like to rearrange, reharmonise, etc. This has required both study and deliberate practice – I look for opportunities to use particular reharmonisation tricks, for example. Start with stuff you like, and play along to recordings. Choose a level of difficulty that stretches you a little, and keep practising until it both sounds and feels good. Have fun!
• adrianmonk 8y ago
  What does it feel like? A lot like hearing a song on the radio and singing along with it. Most people can relate to that, even if some are better than others. It feels very natural with your voice because you've been making sounds with your vocal cords for your whole life, so it is second nature. I think the main reason a musical instrument feels less natural isn't that it's a unique and different category of thinking. It's just that you have way less practice. If you can work things out slowly and you have any amount of intuitive feel for it, I'd say you probably just need more practice. Though ear training ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear_training https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear_training ) can be really helpful. You can get software to drill you on intervals. And some people find it helpful to remember the sound of intervals by famous songs they occur in ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition#Reference_songs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition#Reference... ). For me, it has been a gradual process. At first it was nearly all trial and error. Then I could pick out 1 note in a lot fewer tries than random chance. Then I could play little segments of melodies once I had figured out the keys. Then I could play the whole melody in near real time. Now finally after gradually getting more comfortable over the years, I can guess chord progressions reasonably well. All these things came months or years apart depending on how big of a jump it was and how much I practiced. Incidentally, I am an amateur pianist, and I have virtually no natural talent. When I started, I could not play anything at all by ear. If I can do it, anybody can.
• kamaal 8y ago
  I can play harmonica(chromatic), by the ear. I play mostly Hindi Bollywood Music. To be frank before I 'cracked it' it largely felt like magic. After I cracked it, it largely felt like the time I learned to ride a bicycle without training wheels. It felt magical. But on a whole lot, not having to look at a piece of paper, sight read and then play is a huge convenience. You also begin to thing in terms of sound, than sight. Which is basically the whole point of music. I think the first person who needs to enjoy your music is you. If you have to look at piece of paper to play a song, you sort of get too busy to enjoy it yourself. Harmonica is a very enjoyable instrument, its portable, you can carry it anywhere, and play it at your convenience. You can play a wide variety of genres on it. Other big part of playing the harmonica is its in your mouth, so you can't exactly see the keys, like you see on the Piano or the Guitar. I've seen many people think of it largely as magic. Music is the closest to Magic, I've gotten after code. To manipulate emotions, purely by thinking in terms of thoughts and sounds is just Magical. Not just to those listening, but to you yourself. You feel yourself creating art in real time.
• anotheryou 8y ago
  i can only speak for melody, but with harmonic instruments it will be similar. limit yourself to a few tones and improvise. that will get you to the core of that feeling quickly. start with 3 notes of a cord, see what you can do with it, maybe try a 4th. than learn a scale you like and improvise within that.
• cyberjunkie 8y ago
  Really cool to hear the insights here. I've always wanted to learn things by myself, and so I picked up the guitar ages ago. I wish I spent a lot more time on it. I can read guitar tablature from Ultimate-guitar.com and once upon a time (OLGA). I'm afraid I'm very robotic because I need to see where I'm going to play it. And because of that, there's no melody, and I can't remember chords and notes or know what scales and notes to play when. I think I have reasonable finger motion, even to the point where I don't need to look at the fretboard at all. Like I said, amazing to hear from the experts. I envy!
• cybervegan 8y ago
  After about 5 or 6 years of abusing an electric guitar, learning from tab, you tube tutorials, general messing round etc. what it feels like to me is that now can guess from a note I hear, roughly where that will appear on the fretboard, and how it was struck - picked, finger, palm muting, and so on. I can listen to a riff and if I can get the first note or chord, I can work from there as I know a bit about what "next" note or chord will or won't work. You start out with a very generalised idea of where the high and low notes are, but it takes time before you internalise that, and then later you begin to be able to relate the sound of another musician playing to how you might play the same. I'm still crap, though.
• neverminder 8y ago
  I've been told I have a perfect pitch (by people in music business). I learned violin since the age of 7 by ear. I went to after school classes for that and technically I was supposed to learn from notes and the fact that I would just throw them out and learn a piece by ear in no time annoyed my teachers and peers quite a bit. They would ask me to tune their instruments before concerts though. Later I learned keyboards, some other instruments and eventually acoustic guitar (finger style) the same way (I have a Taylor 414ce-R collecting dust in a closet). I wrote a few songs as well. In my opinion based on many years of experience at the very least relative pitch is a necessary learning an instrument by ear and essential for instruments without fixed tone positions, such as violin which has no frets unlike a guitar. I can't speak from the perspective of someone who may have no pitch, because for me the technique was the hard part, not melody, chords or finding the right notes.
  • anentropic 8y ago
    yes I think developing a sense of relative pitch is somewhat necessary for what the OP asks, otherwise you will be stuck in trial and error forever
• laurieg 8y ago
  Let me bring in a metaphor that might help. I grew up monolingual, and only acquired a second language in adulthood. When I was younger I would ask people what it was like to speak two languages, what was going on in their heads, what did it feel like and so on. It seemed like magic. Then I moved to another country and slowly, over the years I picked up another language. Each individual step felt small. Nothing magical was happening each time. But sooner or later I could speak another language fluently. Somewhat disappointingly, there was no magic in my head. It just felt 'normal'. I suspect this is what having a great ear for music feels like. You're either born with it or build it through many many years of practice. Because of this, it never seems particularly special to the holder. (An aside: I played trumpet for 4 years in high school and still cannot tell if a song is in a major key or minor key, and cannot tune an instrument so if anyone has the secret to gaining a musical ear I'm 'all ears'.)
• berkoab 8y ago
  It would help tremendously to learn some music theory. I play the piano and I can play any song in any key. It's not all trial and error, there's actually a science to it all. Learn your scales. Practice, practice, practice and you'll eventually get it.
• segmondy 8y ago
  It's like typing without looking at the keyboard or speaking a foreign language like a native speaker, you gotta practice tons and it takes time
• skosch 8y ago
  On a polyphonic instrument like the harmonium, "playing by ear" really refers to three separate but related skills. One is the ability to hear and predict, Markov-chain style, the chord progressions in a song. This actually isn't very difficult, once you realize that 1) all songs make use of exactly the same handful of existing chord-to-chord transitions, just shifted depending on the root chord (key) the sheet music is written in, 2) some chord transitions are vastly more common than others, and 3) each transition has a distinct feel, which your brain soon learns to appreciate with an intuition similar to that you have for language. Thus, it helps to re-write each piece of sheet music into C before you play it ("normalization", if you will), so you can see and hear the essence of e.g. C→G across the context of different pieces. Later, go around the circle of fifths, so you can see the patterns reappear in keys other than C. Music theory textbooks use tables of Roman numerals for this, but those only make sense to people who already have the intuition anyway. But there are good videos on this, like https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8qv5hZppyGQbe9laVKwg3w https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8qv5hZppyGQbe9laVKwg3w. Playing chords by ear is a very satisfying feeling, because it gives you the illusion that you're 80% there with 20% of the effort. It also translates easily to other instruments. Second is the ability to hear and play back melodies. This comes with practice. Trial and error, hit and miss ... until your miss rate goes down, which it will, slowly, over time, asymptotically approaching zero. As you practice your intuition for chords, however, you will soon know what certain intervals (especially 3, 4, 5) sound like, and that will often help you find the right next note. When you hit a plateau, read up on different types of scales – knowing "this part of the melody is mixolydian" will prune the search tree for you. Being able to pick out the right note without thinking will turn the instrument into an extension of yourself, just as you sing or whistle without thinking. However, you may well be a proficient amateur harmonium player long before you can reproduce any complex melody completely error-free, so I don't know that it's something worth obsessing about. Third is the ability to play more than just simple triads and monophonic melodies, but to add patterns and rhythms and chord inversions and "crunchy" notes (sus, dim, maj, 6, 9, 13, etc.) and improvisations on the melody. Those aren't self-contained skills, but rather a repertoire of tricks that you acquire as you play and analyze other people's music, and there are lots of textbooks and videos on them. Those don't do that much for your perceived level of "fluency", but they do make you feel "eloquent" and they're great for your ego.
• gg5ever 8y ago
  I can play violin by ear, meaning that if someone plays me a melody I can generally play it back note-for-note fairly quickly. I also can hear most common chord progressions. I do not have perfect pitch, so I struggle with series of random notes and note clusters. What does it feel like? It feels the same as how you can just sing happy birthday without having to do any calculation about what note or lyric comes next. You can hear the song in your head and sing it. I also feel that the notes map into a grid and I will have songs mapped out by intervals. If you want to become better at playing by ear, you can improve rapidly with rigorous training. This is how I like to learn. I think it's much faster than just plunking around with your instrument and rediscovering everything for yourself, but may be less fun for you. Ultimately, you should do what you enjoy and avoid burning yourself out. I spend about 30% of my time on technical mastery of my instrument. Right and left hand technique, scales, arpeggios, chords, speed. Another 30% is spent working on repertoire. These are songs where I already have all the notes worked out or written down. This is where you learn to polish your work to the point where it can be performed. The remaining 40% is consists mostly of transcription and improvisation. I do some ear training as well. Transcription is very painful for most beginners, but you quickly improve at it. I cannot stress how invaluable transcription is for improving your ear. You say you "slowly work things out by trial and error". This will pay HUGE dividends if you keep it up! For improvisation, I suggest recording a backing track playing simple chords very slowly and attempting to improvise. I try to have some guiding idea, like trying to arpeggiate over all the chords, or only move in half or whole steps but always land on a chord tone, or always land on the third of the chord. As you get better, you can speed up your backing tracks and work on more complex chord progressions. Knowing your scales and arpeggios will really help here. The more comfortable you are with the layout of your instrument, the easier improvising will be. I'll stop with this piece of advice -- plan your practice sessions! It doesn't matter how you break them up, as long as you are consciously working on something specific. Staying organized and having a plan will ensure that you continue to improve and help combat the plateau that many amateur musicians encounter.
• anentropic 8y ago
  I can play guitar by ear (within reason - it's much easier for idioms I'm familiar with, and I don't have perfect pitch, so I need a quick exploration to find the key first). I had some guitar lessons as a teenager, covering a mix of technique, vocabulary and theory. But I was not academically schooled in music. There are two things that help develop this skill I think, extrapolating from my own experience: One is, when learning a piece I find it useful to hum or sing the notes I am trying to learn. i.e. play back a bit of the recording, then pause and hum it to myself while finding the notes on the instrument. It sounds trivial and obvious, but it helps build the connections and to hear the music in your head. I think part of being able to do it involves "having the instrument in your head". The second tip is then to follow on from the first but do it without a recording and without the instrument in your hands. Hum the notes to yourself and try to imagine where they are on the "instrument in your head". If you don't already know the key just choose an arbitrary one. This helps two things - develop the instrument in your head, also a sense of relative pitch (intervals) between the individual notes in sequence, and also between each note and the key centre. I distinctly remember as a teenager this was something I liked to do while on my way to and from school - hearing back a guitar solo in my head and trying to play it, in my head. And then when I got home I could try it out on the instrument and see how close I was.
• summerchild11 8y ago
  I'll echo what most have already said - it feels like singing your favorite song after you've learned all the words and you've memorized all the pauses and breaths and long runs. It feels like driving home after not being there for years; those familiar roads from your childhood never leaving your mind. The intuition will come, after countless hours getting to know your instrument and your music. The easiest way for me to start was to practice with songs that I already knew. It's easier to train your fingers when you aren't worried about training your ears at the same time. Learning a new song on top of a new instrument is double the work for a beginner. I'll also highly recommend trying to learn scales and arpeggios by ear. Scales being your "do re mi fa sol la ti do", and arpeggios being the thirds of those scales. There are lots of youtube videos of musicians playing scales and arpeggios, look those up and try on your own instrument. This will help you build muscle memory and allow your brain to make more intuitive aural decisions. No one LIKES practicing the basics, but there is a reason why they are drilled into musicians at even the highest of level of conservatories. As you play songs you know, you will start to notice things like the "steps" between notes, and what those "steps" sound like. Oh those notes sound just like the notes from that other song, I'll bet this is a 5th too. This melody is just a drawn out descending scale, I know how to play that. Lastly, have fun. It is normal to get frustrated or have "off" days when practicing. Mistakes are NORMAL, and mistakes can be good! Try to push through those moments and end your practice sessions on a high note (heh). Come down off of a particularly difficult practice session by going through scales again, or playing a song that you know. We want POSITIVE associations with music, not grumpy ones. If you are having an off day, don't force it. Come back the next day ready to bang out some tunes.
• kstenerud 8y ago
  Get a teacher. Learning on your own will get you at best to 70% of your potential, at which point you'll hit a wall because of all the bad habits you've developed which impair "effortless" play style. You'll get tired faster, injure yourself more, and you'll be so tense or badly positioned that some things will simply be impossible for you. From there, it's nearly impossible to fix things because you'll have to deconstruct almost everything and start afresh. Put in the work & effort. There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it again.
• cranjice 8y ago
  Knowing which keys to press translates loosely into an understanding of theory (even at a very simple level) Think of the piano keys (chromatic scale) as the alphabet, and theory as the language that makes words from it. Tbh a little theory goes a long way. It’s all related and your understanding will build over time. You’ll start to see patterns. Just start off learning how to play a simple song. Then, try to think about what key is this song in? What chords make up that key? What intervals am I playing? How would I transpose this song into a different key? Etc. You can teach yourself, but a teacher or good course will accelerate the process.
• Timpy 8y ago
  Learning to play the instrument by ear is a completely different thing from learning to play a song by ear. My bachelor's is in classical guitar performance, but I've been playing all sorts of instruments my whole life. If I hear something "new" and play it by ear it's because it sounds similar to another thing that I've learned to play before. Learn a whole bunch of songs, and eventually you'll hear something "new" and say, "wait a minute that's not new to me, that's only a little different from the last song I learned." I recommend that you learn using every resource available to you, build a vocabulary of music you can draw on while you're at the harmonium, and then go about discovering music by ear. Forcing yourself to learn the skill of harmonium playing only by trial and error is an unnecessary constraint, and it will take you much longer to play fluently by ear.
• matt_the_bass 8y ago
  The simple answer is practice... A lot of it. There is no quick fix. I think some basic theory and ability to read music helps. The best way to get better is to play with other musicians who are better than you This can be stressful and it might not last long since they may get tired of playing with someone below their level. However being humble and honest about your abilities (with them) goes a long way. For me, the feeling is a lot like coming home from a great first date: you can’t stop thinking about it and your willing to sacrifice other parts of your life to schedule it again as soon as possible. Good luck!
• chairmanmow 8y ago
  I'd say the trick to "playing by ear" is to learn to improvise over things keeping in mind the key you're playing in. I think there's this misconception that "playing by ear" means you hear a song once and then you play it note for note. In theory, this can work if you have a great memory, but really the trick there isn't some musicianship skill, it just means you can remember how the song goes better than other people, then when you sit at your instrument, you kind of have an idea of where it starts and finishes and go from there. I have a terrible time remembering songs by rote memorization, but as long as I can remember where it starts, goes and ends I can probably pick it back up, just by remembering the chord the song starts on. It's because I've improvised a ton in different keys and I know my pallet of notes to choose from. I'm familiar with what chord colorations are available and I know how melodies tend to move. Do I hit wrong notes? Sometimes, but I guess if I know they're wrong and correct them I'm still playing by ear, but I'm also playing a little bit by theory too, the theory kinda shrinks the constraints of playing by ear. If I see a chord progression, let's say G-C-D, I don't remember it that way. I remember it as a I-IV-V progression in the key of G. It helps.
• yesenadam 8y ago
  Lots of great comments here already. I realized I didn't really know what 'playing by ear' means! (Jazz pianist here) I've almost never heard musicians saying that. Like people have written, it means many different things. Such as, playing a song with other people when you don't know it. Some jazz musicians I've known are legendary for that, seeming to not need to rehearse like mere mortals, they turn up to the gig and play perfectly. What does it feel like? Like talking, walking. Something you can do without thinking about it. Well, sometimes I notice my fingers are playing music (on a table, wall, my legs, I can hear it on the 'piano in my head') and I didn't realize! I don't know who that was playing. Any time I hear music (unless it's super-fast, or using strange tuning etc) I can see every note being played on the piano in my head. The instant I hear a chord, I already know what it is. (I guess perfect pitch helps with that; I don't know how people manage without it) And transcribing helps with learning rhythms, so you just know what a rhythm is (i.e. how you would write it down) when you hear it. Some very famous musicians e.g. Hendrix, Erroll Garner, Sinatra apparently couldn't read/write music, but I don't think it's been much studied exactly what they knew or how they thought about music. In jazz anyway, most of what you know (about melody, rhythm, harmony etc) is never put into words - you learn it from the music - and it would be useless trying to put it into words. I can teach in an hour most of the 'official' music theory. Everyone should have their own ideas about, say, what scale to play over a minor chord, because what sounds good is different for everyone. People learn jazz by listening, and by transcribing tunes, solos, arrangements (if they're complex enough that you can't learn by playing along, which is most things.) and playing them yourself. By imitation. So maybe learn to read/write music, then you can write complex things out. Although, hell, I don't know, maybe it's better training your ear and never transcribing. But that would take soo long. Learning stuff that is really fast is pretty much impossible to hear/learn without writing it out. 'Which keys to press' is like 'How do you know what computer keys to type?' - when you learn a language, or anything, your brain puts things together in bigger and bigger chunks, so eventually you can think in units of sentences or paragraphs or whole speeches. Or in music, you think 8 or 16 bars at a time, or a whole phrase, or chord progression etc. Or apparently in chess, masters just have better chunks than the rest of us; they can do much more useful thinking with the same number of thoughts. Exactly like a high-level programming language! ps Speaking of which, I can't help mentioning that the guy who invented restricted Boltzmann machines (a type of neaural net), Paul Smolensky, called them Harmoniums! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restricted_Boltzmann_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restricted_Boltzmann_machine
• rssmllr 8y ago
  Playing an instrument by ear requires a well-trained ear. You should strive to gain perfect "relative pitch", because "absolute pitch" is not realistic for most people unless you acquire it at very young age. The free app, Functional Ear Trainer (iOS and Android), has been an immense help for me and people I know. Use it for 10 minutes a day and sing along with the notes. Soon you should be able to recognize and sing certain intervals with 100% confidence, regardless of the key. The most important intervals for songs in a major key are: Octave, Perfect 5th, Major 3rd, and Perfect 4th It helps to learn songs that you can associate with each interval (going up and going down). Just google "songs for each interval" and find songs that work for you. Training your ear is the first step. Then learn how to reliably find each of those intervals on your instrument.
• djmips 8y ago
  It feels like talking.
• vinayms 8y ago
  I haven't achieved mastery, but was able to play songs on the guitar by ear fairly well, though slowly, both songs that I heard and the ones that I composed in my head. I am rusty now. Its a simple process with two parts to it. 1. identifying the notes in the song. 2. playing the notes on the instrument of your choice, including your own voice. The second part is all about knowing your instrument inside out - which key, which fret etc map to which note. The hard one is the first part. Loosely, the second is akin to coding and the first akin to developing the algorithm/design. The only way around it is to develop an ear(mind?) for the notes by abstracting songs - listen to a song as a sequence of notes rather than a "song". Its easier said than done. For this task, learning theory is not useful. Surely, it can help identify the key with only a few notes which lets you fill out the rest of the notes, but, more often than not, real world songs, unless specifically designed to train students, don't follow the key bookishly and will always have an exception here and there, which means identifying the notes by the ear is still the key(ha!).
• dmitripopov 8y ago
  This is why they teach you solfeggio lessons in a classical music school. Once you are familiar with common harmonies you can extract song meta information by ear and then apply it to the instrument of your choice (where your playing technique comes in play). Learning music is a lot, A LOT more than learning how to play an instrument.
• spurgu 8y ago
  There is simply an infinite amount of levels to it. You might start off by just being able to recognize the difference between a minor and a major third. Then you expand that further. And to recognize what note it is relative to the scale. At some point children's tunes become easy. At another you recognize the specific chords in children's tunes. Then you expand that to be able to identify the notes in more complicated tunes. At one point you might pick up jazz... The point being that at any point in time during your development you will feel mastery of some level of melodies/chords/harmonies but feel utterly confused (tone deaf) by more complex ones. It's an infinite journey and the key is enjoying it, there is no final destination.
• b4hand 8y ago
  Some people mentioned learning absolute pitch, but I've played an instrument for many years without achieving what I would call absolute pitch. However, I'd say you can learn relative pitch in a much shorter time if you learn some basic music theory. Just making this stat up on the spot, but probably 90+% of traditional Western music is played in either a major or minor scale or some combination of both. Being able to identify major and minor is fairly simple and can probably be learned in a few hours and refined over a few weeks. This will let you categorize much of the music you hear into two buckets. From there you can learn about intervals. The majority of music is in a major scale, so you can start with those. Play scales and play the various intervals. Play them slowly and repeatedly. With practice you can easily identify the intervals and this will help you identify the jumps between notes in songs. Then it's quite easy to fine tune to the exact scale and octave by simple comparison between a recording and what you're playing. With more practice you'll begin to identify common scales for categories of songs.