Posts from — July 2009

In our last post we confirmed that so many people would love to be able to "play by ear." And we also confirmed that any person can learn this, regardless of being born with "an ear for music" or not. All it takes it learning, through repeated listening, the basic patterns that make up virtually all of contemporary songs in Western music.

Obviously, most piano players would not try to pick out and play classical pieces by ear, as that requires properly reading the exact notes written by the composer. Once you’ve become very good at picking out songs by ear, you probably could also pick out a simple Chopin Waltz, playing some chords in the left hand, and his basic melody in the right. But it wouldn’t sound nearly as beautiful as reading the precise changes he wrote.

But for modern songs, playing by ear is fine. Anything from the 1800s "Oh, Susanna" through the standards, show tunes and popular songs of the 20th Century will sound fine as long as you pick out the correct melody and accompany it with the simple, correct chords. Remember the 3 critical things you must learn in order to do this:

• Learn basic music theory: rhythms & tempos, the cycle of fifths, and the notes in every scale

• Learn the chords built on each note of a scale: The major and minor triads (three-note chords), and the sevenths

• Learn how to hear the patterns of those chords in any song your listening to

Mastering the first of these allows you to master picking out the song’s melody.  Once you’ve learned the notes that make up every scale, you will notice you can hear which notes are used in the melody. You may have to hunt & peck through a lot of trial & error your first few melodies you pick out, but soon you will hear when the melody moves to a note very close to the last note, or when it jumps a larger interval, and you’ll start to find the right notes.

Next, learn the chords built on each note of a scale. So in a song in the key of C major, the first, or 1 chord is made up of C, E and G, the second or 2 chord is D, F and A, the fourth (sub-dominant) chord is F, A and C, the fifth (dominant) chord is G, B and D, and so on. As a beginner, just build each chord on the note that corresponds to its number in the scale. Later, you can invert these chords, that is, use the same three notes, but in different orders as to which is on the top or bottom.

Now play all the chords in the key of C: the 1 chord, the 2 chord, the 3 chord and so on, over and over again, and listen to how they sound. You will begin to form a memory of what each of these chords sound like, and then you are well on your way to picking them out of an actual song.

Start by listening to some simple songs with fairly basic chord structures. Christmas carols are great. So are many of the songs by Elton John, or show tunes like "Memory" and "Music Of The Night" from Andrew Lloyd Weber. Play these songs on any device – CD player, iPod – that allows you to keep pausing. While siting at your piano, listen to just the first few measures of a song, pause it, and try to find the right melody of just that section. Through trial & error, you will find the repetitive melody to the whole song.

Now start the process over, listening to just a few chord changes at a time, trying out one of the only seven chords available by building on each note of the scale. That’s right, if you learned the chords built on each note of any scale, you discovered there’s only seven possibilities. Keeps it simple. Now try those chords, one at a time, with the melody you picked out, until you find the chords that sound exactly like those on the recorded version.

In our next post. we’ll look at the basic chord patterns in a few songs. You’ll see how basic they are, and how you can later embellish on them to add more variety and musical richness.

As mentioned in the last post, many wish they could drastically improve their sight-reading abilities, so they could read any new piece of music they desire quickly, and start playing it fairly well in just a few run-throughs. I hope the instructions provided were helpful.

But many decent sight-readers also yearn for the ability to pickout, by ear, any song they recently heard on the radio, their iPod, or anywhere else…somehow “hear it” again in their head, go over to the piano, and find the right melody notes and matching chords, without need to go out and buy the sheet music. In my travels, I find this skill to be the more rare of the two. Many piano players and students can read music fairly well, but it seems the ability to “play by ear” is granted to only a select few.

I was one of those few. At seven, I heard a song on the radio, “The Look Of Love” by Burt Bacharach, and really liked it. So I went over to my piano and traced the melody with my right hand. I found the correct notes fairly easily. Then I searched through various chords in the left hand till I found ones that sounded like those on the record. There were some odd chord changes (It was Bacharach, after all) but no wierd demolished 5ths or perverted 7ths:), mostly major and minor triads. So I found that I could, by trial and error, find the same chords he used, and voila, I could play a simple version of “The Look Of Love!”

The next day I heard another cherished song, “Going Out Of My Head” by Little Anthony and The Imperials, and repeated the same trial and error note-and-chord finding till I was able to play it fairly well (I later met its songwriter, Teddy Randazzo, who told me he lived entirely off that song’s royalties for a decade!) My Dad was astounded. My mother declared me a gifted prodigy (sorry, Mom.) But the truth is, I was simply clear about three musical basics – basic music theory, basic chords, and common chord patterns – and that’s what enabled me to do it.

The bad news is that I can’t walk around claiming to be musically gifted or prodigious. That’s tough. Perhaps my only gift was “getting” these three connections at a very early age. The good news is, anybody can master these three elements and learn to play songs by ear, just like me.

You see, Western music, especially the simple, short and repetitive motifs of popular songs, aren’t very complcated. Almost all popular songs written since the late 1800s follow very similar simple patterns, in both their structure and their chord progressions.

If you are already a piano player, even a relative beginner, you already have some training in basic music theory. You need to understand all the notes of any scale in any key, all the basic types of chords – major, minor, 7th, diminshed, etc.- that can be built on each note of the scale, and their relative relationships to each other. Learn the cycle of fifths if you haven’t already.

Next, understand that all popular songs are built around  the root, dominant and subdominant chords, or the 3-note chords built on the 1st, 5th and 4th note of any scale, respectively. Many songs have just these three chords in them – “Silent Night” for example -  while most add just a few others – the 7th, and minor chords built on the 3rd and 6th note of the scale.

In our next post, we’ll go through this more thoroughly.

Sight Reading and Playing By Ear

As a player, tuner and technician, I talk to people everywhere, every day, about their own piano playing…what genre of music they like to play, what level they can play at, what types of playing they cannot currently do well, but hope to eventually acheive. By far, the biggest topic that comes up is not whether they can improve their playing skills overall – they all know that with more practice they’ll play much better – but how to effectively improve either their sight-reading or their ability to “play by ear.” We’ll discuss these in the next two posts

Sight-reading, just like it sounds, is the ability to read the music notation on the page with the same quickness & fluidity one could read the words of any book. Specifically, sight-reading refers to being able to read a formerly-unseen piece of music so fluidly that you never need to stop the flow of your playing in order to “figure out what note that is” or “what these symbols mean,” you just keep playing without pause. Many players can do this with very elementary-level songs (like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,) but fall apart when a piece with lots of quick-succeeding notes for both hands is placed before them (like a Chopin Waltz or a Bach Invention.) They feel they must pick the piece apart, one note at a time, so they get bored, frustrated, and give up.

But the solution to painlessly increasing anyone’s sight-reading ability is fairly simple.

When you were young, there was a point where reading the words in a book was just as tedious. You had to sound-out each letter, put it together with the other sylables, and make an intelligible word and sentence out of each line. Now you don’t even pause for a second when reading. How did that transformation happen? Simple – you built your reading level S-L-O-W-L-Y.

The problem is, many are enamored with certain lovely but difficult pieces of music and want to be able to play them NOW. It’s only natural. I wanted to be able to read through and play Chopin’s “Fantasie Impromptu” since I first heard it, at age 8. It’s stunningly beautiful (hear it soon if you haven’t) but quite challenging – lots of fast moving notes and long stretches in both hands, lots of “accidentals” (extra shaprs & flats.) The first few times I tried it, well, I just flat out gave up.

Here’s what I had to do, and what you must also do. Get a metronome that will keep any speed of timing you set. Now get some books of pieces you’ve never seen or played before, from really easy-to-play levels (Grade 1 – 3) up to the more difficult pieces. Start playing the easiest pieces, at the indicated metronome speed, without looking down at your hands…just keep your eyes on the music. If you find you pause or drop out of playing at that speed, because you can’t recognize the notes fast enough, that’s your current highest level of sightreading. Important: if you do recognize the notes but simply made a few mistakes in playing, don’t stop, keep playing; that’s still acceptable sight-reading.

The trick is pick pieces at just the level where you can keep your eyes on the music, not look down at your hands, and keep going without pause, at a speed close to the piece’s recommended speed. Once you can do that fairly well with Level 1 pieces, try Level 2, set the metronome a little slower, and keep going even when you make a mistake or even drop out on of your hands for a full measure or two.

So let’s say you can read through Grade 2 pieces at full speed,  with no pause or glance at your fingers, but you start to pause and stumble with Grade 3 pieces. Simply spend 20-30 minutes a day playing only Grade 3 pieces, slowing the metronome down just to the point where you won’t pause or drop out. Soon you’ll be able to read all Grade 3 pieces at full speed. Now go onto the next grade level and repeat the process. It will take several months, perhaps more than a year, but soon you will find you read through even the most densley-packed, full of 8th and 16th note two handed pieces, that you’ve never seen before, at speed or nearly up to speed, with virtually no drop outs or mistakes. Now you are a very good sightreader, which vastly increases your music choices and level of enoyment!