Welcome back to the playing by ear lesson series. We continue learning melodies in C major — and take it a little further.
Besides the approach we took last time to learn melodies in C major, here’s another way: an online program. This program plays melodies in C major, which you play back on a simulated keyboard. After you successfully repeat one melody, the next is harder.
Another option is to get a midi file for a simple tune with a clear melody, regardless of what key it’s in, and use the all powerful, free Power Tab (http://power-tab.net) to convert the melody to C major. Check out the Power Tab help file for more on this. Use Google.com to find the midi files.
A guitar scale
Once you feel pretty comfortable with playing melodies in C major on a piano, it’s time to play those melodies on the guitar. To do this, you’ll want to know at least one major scale pattern. The pattern we’re going to make use of in a short bit is this one:
|-----------------|-----1-3-5-3-1---|
|-----------------|-3-5-----------5-|
|-----------2-4-5-|-----------------|
|-----2-3-5-------|-----------------|
|-3-5-------------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-----------------|------|
|-3---------------|-----------------|------|
|---5-4-2---------|-----------------|------|
|---------5-3-2---|-----------------|------|
|---------------5-|-3-2-----------2-|-3----|
|-----------------|-----5-3-1-3-5---|------|
These are all eighth notes except the last, which is a whole note.
Practice this until you can play it smoothly with a metronome. You don’t need a blazingly fast tempo. Any tempo that you could walk comfortably to will be just fine. Do make sure you can play the pattern without reading the
tablature.
Once you can play this pattern, let’s figure out the Noel tune with it. First, here’s another version of the tune. It’s transposed down one octave, to fit the notes we’ve decided to work with. It’s still in C major.
Now, here is where you play the first three notes for the melody.
Begin playing the tune, note by note, on the guitar now. Using the procedure we went over in the last lesson. Here’s a summary of that procedure again:
Listen to the midi file. Sing along several times. Close the midi file, and sing the tune a cappella - just you, no backup. Use the above picture to play the first three notes. Choose the fourth note by answering this question: is the fourth note higher or lower than the third? Use your singing, and your knowledge of the major scale pattern above to find that fourth note. Then, do the same for the remaining notes in the melody.
Remember that the more text you read, the more confusing this simple, easy, joyful process may seem. So, quit reading and start playing.
Thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - November 2, 2007 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.
Welcome back to the playing by ear lesson series. We’re going to continue playing simple melodies by ear this lesson, and we’re going to do it on the guitar.
In the last lesson we learned how to play the familiar Noel Christmas tune by ear on the piano, and saw that it only needed eight different piano keys. We ignored the black piano keys, because the tune stays totally in C major. The white notes on the piano represent all the notes in C major.
Ideas for practice
Playing that one melody by ear feels terrific, but once you can play it smoothly you’re going to want to learn more melodies by ear. Lots more. And you’ll learn each one more quickly than the last, watching your musical ear develop.
If you want to continue using the simulated piano to learn simple melodies by ear, which I strongly encourage you to do before picking up the guitar, you’ll want to keep on working with tunes in C major, at least at first. The reason you want to stick to C major is that it lets you figure out tunes using just the white keys on the piano.
So the question is, where do you find more melodies in C major? Here are a couple of strategies to answer that:
Finding C major melodies
Ask a buddy or someone else who can play by ear, or at least has been studying music for a little while, to transpose a tune for you. Tell your buddy the name of the melody you want to learn, or give him a sound file with the melody. Then, offer to bake him those blue brownies he likes so much in exchange for his transposing the melody to C major for you, and playing it. When your buddy plays, record him. Then, it’s time for you to listen to this melody, which is now in C major, and then play it by ear. Once you have your piano available, go through the same procedure we covered last lesson to play by ear: listen to the recording, sing, and pick out the melody on the piano’s white keys.
Thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - October 15, 2007 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.
We’re continuing our lesson series Playing Guitar by Ear, which is geared to newbies.
Last time out we talked about the helpfulness of learning at least on major scale pattern when you learn melodies by ear. Now let’s talk a bit about major scale patterns in reference to the instrument that’s best suited to learning to play by ear: piano.
When you play a tune by ear on the piano, and that tune is in C major without drifting off into other keys, you don’t need to learn any patterns: all you have to do is hit the white keys. If this isn’t the best-kept secret in making music, I don’t know what is. And I sure wish that all guitar teachers would take students who’ve never made music before, and show them how to pick out a melody on a simple keyboard first, before they even lay a finger on the frets or even think the word “theory,” or even crack open a music book.
I want to prove to you how easy it is to play a tune by ear on piano. We’re now going to play a simple Christmas melody, which I’ve arranged to stay within one octave, and within C major. That means you only have to work with seven different notes. These notes occur only on the piano’s white keys, and that means you can ignore the black keys. (To be totally honest, we’ll be using a total of eight white keys: the note C occurs in two different octaves in this melody.)
Here’s the melody.
Obviously, we’re going to need a piano to do this exercise. Don’t worry: if you don’t have a synthesizer, organ, or piano, you can use a simulated piano. There’s one online here.
Once you have the piano in front of you, it’s time to play by ear. Start by listening to the song several times, and singing along with it.
Now that you’ve listened to the tune a couple of times, let’s begin finding its notes on the piano. Remember we only have to play with the white keys, and there are only eight different white keys we’ll make use of. In fact, I’ll show you the specific piano key for the first note of the melody. Here’s an illustration that shows you the starting note.
Now that you have the first note, find the next one. How to do it? Sing the melody again to yourself. Sing slowly. Ask, “is this next note higher or lower than the previous note?” If it’s higher, you’ll try out a white piano key that’s somewhere to the right of the last note you played. If the note sounds lower, that key will be located somewhere to the left of the last note you played. The more text you read about how to do this, the more confusing this truly simple process will seem. If I were sitting next to you showing you how to do this, you’d get it in a second. As Gloria Estefan once observed in that beautiful tune, “The words get in the way.”
So, I’m going to shut up, and let you figure out the tune. Thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - October 1, 2007 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.
We’re continuing our lesson series Playing Guitar by Ear. We started looking at near-rules that help you massively in learning to play guitar by ear, in the last installment. This time, more near-rules.
Almost rule number next: sing. After you listen, and believe you have the melody in your head, sing. You don’t need any instructions to do this: you’ve probably been singing all your life. But what you may not realize is that singing reinforces the music in your head. If all you did was listen, the first time you tried to sing your notes would not match the notes you heard. In other words, your intonation would probably be poor compared to the more precise notes you get when you sing more frequently.
When you’re learning a tune by ear, sing the melody again and again. Isolate parts of the melody you’re not sure of, and repeat those several times. It may also help if you close your eyes when you sing, so whatever your eyes are seeing doesn’t distract your mind from the sounds you’re creating.
Think of how babies learn to speak: they babble to themselves, besides doing other things. That babbling helps them reinforce the sounds they heard mommy and daddy teaching them. If the baby never babbled, and instead tried to learn the language just by thinking about speaking, he wouldn’t get very far.
So, whether you feel certain that you know a melody or not, sing it.
A major scale pattern
Another skill you’ll want to have and almost ought to have: playing at least one major scale pattern.
You don’t absolutely need to know a major scale pattern to play by ear, but it’s a big help. Learning (at least one) major scale pattern is kind of like the employees at a food store organizing the food: you know, you can find the canned peaches together with the canned pineapple chunks in one aisle, and the eggs are in a separate aisle with the cheese.
If the employees at the food store suddenly stopped organizing the food this way, and started putting one carton of eggs with the pasta and another carton of eggs at the other end of the store, you, the food buyer, would have a tough time buying your food. You could find all the food you need, but it would take much longer and you’d get pretty impatient and upset also.
That’s why we have major scale patterns for music: to keep our fingers from having to “think” every time our inner ears told them to play a note. When you organize the major scale into a pattern on the fretboard, your fingers can automatically go to the right note.
We continue learning to play guitar by ear next time. Thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - September 15, 2007 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.
We’re continuing our lesson series Playing Guitar by Ear, which is geared to newbies. Newbies to both guitar and playing by ear. We’re getting ready to actually play a melody by ear - on a piano. Remember from the last issue (Portable Music Maker) that learning to play by ear on the piano is a zillion times easier than guitar and that what you learn on the piano you can transfer to guitar playing. If you don’t have a piano or keyboard, don’t worry: We’ll look at places where you can get a virtual keyboard. This is software that simulates, visually and sonically, an actual piano keyboard.
Almost rules
Let’s talk about some skills that are almost required to play by ear, but that you can easily build. I call these skills “almost required” These skills will massively help you play by ear.
One of those almost required skills will probably seem obvious to you, but we need to mention it: listening. You have to listen, with concentrated effort, when you’re learning to play by ear. That means putting on headphones, tuning out all distractions, and imagining yourself crawling inside or surfing on top of the sounds coming from your CD player or computer. Spend time listening without singing. Singing is also important, but listen first, then sing. By doing this, you devote your full attention to the impressions the notes are making on you.
In a sense, you’re listening with your feelings. Music is the kind of thing that directly affects your psyche; it can immediately trigger emotions within you. So, when you listen with concentration to a piece of music, you’re actually listening to your emotional responses to it.
We don’t need to go overboard with this. For instance, when you hear Steve Vai or Yngwie Malmsteen fire off a billion notes in 1 microsecond, you’re not going to be able to identify the emotions that each note - or actually note change - has on you. But, with some training, you will be able to identify the overall feeling that you get from listening to such a dense concentration of notes.
We’ll continue with “almost-rules” next time.
Thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - September 1, 2007 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.
We’re continuing the series of lessons that gets us started playing guitar by ear. Last time, we started talking about why the guitar is not the best instrument to begin learning to play by ear with. And the point of illustrating that is to help you understand that, when you’re struggling to play guitar by ear, you’re not struggling because you can’t do it, but because you’re fighting the instrument.
What’s wrong with the guitar? Understand that it’s designed to be a portable music maker. When you think of something that is portable, that thing is probably more difficult to use than a stationary version that achieves the same thing. Laptops are harder to use than desktop PCs, cell phones are harder to use than regular phones, and “portable” homes like Winnebagos are generally not as comfortable as stationary homes.
Don’t get me wrong. If you try to replace my guitar by moving a baby grand into my living room, with Norah Jones to give me lessons, I will hurt you the second you put your hands on my frets. And I’m against violence and would hate to see Ms. Jones leave. But think about it: when you look at the guitar as you’re playing it, you can’t even see the notes you’re playing because you’re not viewing the fretboard head on, but at an angle. That would be like a painter trying to paint by turning his easel so he was looking along its edge instead of its face.
Everything you learn about playing by ear from spending just a bit of time at the piano will be info you can translate to playing the guitar. In fact, I can almost guarantee you’ll have new insights in your guitar playing from learning a bit of piano playing.
If you are just learning to pick out melodies and play them on a musical instrument, and if those melodies are confined just to C major, you will begin playing melodies on the piano so quickly it will make your head spin. Do you know why? Count out the number of different notes there are in C major (or any major key), within one octave. There are only seven different notes! How far off can you possibly be when trying out a note?
Forget teachers, forget books, forget theory. Just listen to one simple tune, say, a Christmas tune that you know for a fact is in C major. Sing along with it a few times. Then, get yourself a freebie piano keyboard program for your computer — you don’t even need a real keyboard. Then, listen to the tune a few times, sing it a few times, and then get busy finding those notes on the keyboard.
Don’t worry about following these tips now, though. We’re going to expand on this brief procedure in upcoming issues of this newsletter.
Thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - August 15, 2007 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.
We’re continuing the series of lessons that get us started playing guitar by ear. We’re going to begin looking at playing melodies first.
Before we learn a melody by ear, you’ll want to make an observation for yourself about playing by ear on the guitar. As much as I love the guitar, I realize that it is not the best instrument to begin learning to play by ear. The reason is that notes are laid out on the guitar in a way that invites confusion for the player.
Even after you pass the beginner’s stage, you might find yourself spending a lot of time figuring out where to play something on the fretboard, or asking why a chord shape doesn’t look like it logically follows another chord shape, even though it sounds terrific.
If you don’t already know how to play another instrument by ear, learning this skill with the guitar is not your best choice. Learning to play by ear on the guitar is like learning to draw like this: tape the drawing paper to your back; look at mirrors to see what you’re doing; and reach your arm uncomfortably back behind yourself to stab out a couple of hopeful strokes.
I’m not kidding: learning how music works, and how to play by ear is actually pretty easy and super fun - but not if you’re learning how to play the guitar at the same time. If you’ve already moved past the beginner’s stage, you will be able to pick out melodies on the guitar, but you might learn even quicker if you used a piano keyboard to do it - even if you’ve never even had a piano lesson. That’s how intuitive playing the piano is.
Thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - August 1, 2007 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.
We continue our exploration of playing guitar by ear. This time out we’re going to look at reasons for playing by ear.
You want to play by ear for this reason above all others: it just feels good. That’s it! That’s why you began playing in the first place, isn’t it? You play because you dig the sounds coming out of your guitar. And that’s the same feeling you’ll get, multiplied by 100 or so, when you first start picking out melodies on the guitar.
When you start figuring out chords and complete songs on the guitar, you get an even bigger rush. When you get to that point you will realize that not only was figuring out chords and tunes not that hard, it was pretty darn fun.
Besides the fun and satisfaction factor, why else would you want to play by ear?
Here’s a good, motivating reason: you’ll save money and time. The next time you hear a tune on the radio or a CD that you’d like to play yourself, instead of spending time digging around for the tab, or spending money to buy the sheet music, you’ll work the tune out for yourself. Besides saving money and time, you’ll also get your fun quota filled for the week. (See the “fun” reason just mentioned.)
Here’s another reason to learn to play by ear: jamming. If you’re getting together with a buddy to make music, you’ll have a much more satisfying time of it if you can hear what he or she is playing and respond to it, whether with chordal accompaniment or a melodic line.
Or, let’s say your jamming buddy is claiming that he’s learned the Stairway to Heaven solo note for note — from tablature. He starts playing, and because you can play by ear, you immediately hear which notes are out of whack. And you diplomatically point out those notes, and again, using your highly attuned ear, point out the right notes to play.
In short, you earn the respect of the musicians you currently play with, when you can play by ear.
Once you begin playing by ear, you’ll be creating a connection between yourself and the great musicians of the past like Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery and others who played only by ear. Wouldn’t it be satisfying to know that, by using your ears, you’re following the same path that some of the most worshiped guitarists before you have followed?
Playing by ear helps you learn new tunes quicker. You’re more able to scope out a tune you’ve never heard before, and learn how to play it and remember it much more easily than if you don’t yet know how to play by ear.
You probably have your own reasons for playing by ear. The list just given is just a sample. Writing down your reasons in a journal is a great way to intensify the feelings those reasons evoke. And doing that will get you to play by ear even more quickly. Now that we know why to play by ear, we’ll begin easing into the how to do it, and what to do with it.
Thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - July 16, 2007 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.
Let’s go into playing guitar by ear. I’ll base the content on the series found on Maximum Musician, but it will be revised here and there as inspiration strikes.
Just what exactly does it mean to play by ear?
When you hear someone say, “He plays by ear” it’s often said with awe, in the same way you might say, “His car has 10-wheel drive and he can parallel park it with his eyes closed while balancing a guitar pick on his nose.”
Unfortunately, when you hear such talk, you think that you, or the average person, can’t play by ear. Talk like this gets you to believe that you can’t hear a simple melody and play it on the guitar or other instrument. And if you believe this, you believe a lie, because everyone with hearing, a bit of desire and a pinch of persistence can play by ear.
To play by ear means to listen to something, and then play it on an instrument - apart from your voice. Recognize first that singing a melody you’ve heard is actually a form of playing by ear. We’re going to focus on playing guitar by ear, but singing will help you do this.
And we need to amend the above statement a bit: playing by ear does mean to translate what you hear into what you play. But, what you hear is affected by what you understand about music. You don’t have to have a music degree or even have read music theory books to build an understanding of how chords fit with melodies, what chords can substitute for each other, and other topics. But, at some level, you can acquire this understanding, just by applying your passion to play, and asking questions like “Why does this sound so cool? How can I make more of this type of sound?” And this understanding comes out when you listen to a tune or piece you want to play by ear. So, the same sound hitting your ears and a novice’s ears can sound very different, because your musical knowledge changes your hearing.
The first thing we’ll learn how to play by ear is a simple, familiar melody. Although the melody is simple, it will still be effective for building the skill of playing by ear. Lots of melodies in popular songs are simple. Some are so simple that they’re not any fun to sing without strumming some chords to accompany them.
We’ll learn more about playing by ear next time. Thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - July 1, 2007 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.
