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.
Some quick tips on learning melodies by ear in this issue.
First off, learn scales and play them regularly. Most important: the major scale. Learn at least the five CAGED forms. (Get Fretboard Logic is this term confuses you). But the more forms you know, the more insights you get into how melodies work - when you take the time to learn melodies on those forms.
Also, doodle, noodle, and play. Scat or sing stuff and try to play what you sing. This is easier when you know a melody well.
Make transcribing melodies a habit. Listen, sing, then fret away.
Last tip for this issue: make a game of finding a melody note over the chords you strum to a song. This is a great way of learning how melodies work with chords.
Thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - May 15, 2007 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.
We’re going to continue doing what we call “modeling a melody” in this issue. And that just means figuring out some interesting things our favorite melodies do so *we* can do them, to craft our own melodies. We can use this information in improvisation and in composition.
We explored the idea of SAMES and DIFFERENTS last time. Why are those in capital letters? Isn’t there enough shouting in the world without me shouting at you? The reason for the capitals is to stress the idea. SAMES are things that get repeated in a melody, and you can figure out what DIFFERENTS are based on that.
But melodies in solos, in songs old and new and from every country, use lots of SAMES. They repeat notes. And it’s not because the composer is lazy. It’s because we listeners like lots of SAMEs. Just like we usually don’t prefer waking up in a different house every morning, but want to keep to the SAME home day after day. Same goes for jobs and so many other areas of life.
And the same is true of great art. And movies. Why are there so many super hero movies made? Because we want to see the SAME basic ideas of miraculous powers and happy endings over and over, despite there being different characters involved.
Back to melodies. Just where do we search for SAMES in melodies? Here’s a key observation that will hold true for much of the music you here: many parts of music are organized in units of four and two. Four quarter notes to a measure, for example. If you can get some standard notation of one of your favorite melodies, mark off every four bars to start with. If the notation is busted up with one staff having three bars and the next having five, rewrite or cut and paste so you’re looking at rows of four bars each. Then, even if you can’t read the notation, you can still effectively compare the notes, because standard notation is actually pretty intuitive and visual.
As you look from bar 1 to bar 4, then bar 2 and bar 5, ask yourself “what notes are the same here?” Or, what entire groups of notes are the same? Maybe notes are not duplicated exactly, but the overall *shape* of the line is copied.
We’ll explore melodies more next time. Have fun seeing the SAMES in your favorite melodies. And thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - May 2, 2007 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.
Here is a draft of a method I wrote to understand a nifty melody and produce your own nifty melodies. I hope you find it useful.
What does “modeling a melody” mean? It means “doing what a particular melody does without duplicating the melody.” So we explore a melody, find out why it goes where it goes, and say “how can I do that?” Or, “how can I make more of that stuff? It sounds good.”
Let’s have some steps here, a process.
- Listen to the melody, first of all. Kind of obvious.
What are we listening for? Key idea coming up:
- List the SAMES you hear
- List the DIFFERENTS you hear
Great melodies often use a lot of repetition. For example, what happens in one measure might have been almost exactly what happened in the previous measure, with a few different notes at the end.
- Next step: List Cool Sounds. Especially Cool Sounds that are cool for reasons we don’t yet understand
- Next: Notate (transcribe) the melody. We could write volumes on this. But…not now. Get the melody on paper or your computer. Get a visual representation - in standard notation, not tablature. What’s wrong with tab? Tab does not show (consistently) difference in pitch as immediately as standard notation.
- Print out the melody and repeat above: List the SAMES and DIFFERENTS.
Try the steps just mentioned with a favorite melody, and see if you don’t come up with some insights into how that melody works to sound good. We’ll do more steps to modeling a melody next time.
Thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - April 15, 2007 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.
