Playing By Ear 1

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.

For more check out these related posts

• Taking Your Playing To The Next Level
• Playing By Ear 3