Playing By Ear 2

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.

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