Play Guitar by Ear, Episode 3

By Darrin Koltow

Playing by Ear, Episode 3
- from Piano to Guitar
- ideas for practice
- finding C major melodies
- a guitar scale
- sliding up to E

Welcome back to the playing by ear lesson series. This is Episode Three. 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 the midi 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.

A game with melodies

Besides the approach we took last time to learn melodies in C major, here's another way: an online program at http://www.ababasoft.com/flash_games/music01.html. 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.

This next option for digging up C major melodies is not the best way to spend your time, but you might find something useful from doing a Web search. Go to Google.com and enter terms like this in the search engine: "Easy songs in MIDI." To be honest, I didn't produce any usable files with this, but your experience may be more fruitful.

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.

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.

http://www.MaximumMusician.com/PairFiles/NOEL2.MID

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.

I'm not getting much email from you on these playing by ear lessons, so I'm hoping that you're understanding the material. If you don't understand something, send me an email here, and make sure you put "Play by ear" in the subject line.

Sliding up to E

Let's play Noel transposed to E major. The point of doing this is the same point we've been pursuing: to use your ear again to figure out a tune. Even though you just worked out the tune on the piano keyboard and in the first scale pattern given above, if you continue to play the tune using these same exact patterns, you'll no longer be playing by ear, but by muscle memory. In other words, once you can play a tune in one scale pattern smoothly, your mind gets stuck in a comfort zone: the next time you go to play that tune, your mind will say "Ah. we're going to play that Noel tune again. That means I put this finger here first, and then I put that finger there..."

If we want to learn how to rely on our ears, and feel the greater satisfaction that comes from doing so, we want to avoid this comfort zone. We want our minds to say something like, "Ah. we're going to play that Noel tune again. That means we start on the third of the scale, and then descend step-wise until we hit the tonic. Then we zip back up to the third." You see that there's no language about fingers in here, unlike the first sentence.

You don't want to think about where to put your fingers. You want think about *music,* and that means thinking in terms of *sounds* first — or even the sensations you get from those sounds. It also means thinking in terms of intervals: "Is that a major sixth or a minor seventh?" for instance.

How do you condition your mind to think about music instead of finger locations? One way is to learn a melody in all of the CAGED positions. We're going to pursue this now, by transposing the Noel tune into another CAGED major scale pattern. We just did the A, or number 2, CAGED pattern above. Let's now use CAGED pattern 1.

As before, we'll get a bit familiar with the scale pattern before we play by ear. Here's a scale pattern for CAGED 1. We're playing this in E major, near the middle of the neck:

|-----------------|-------------4-5-|-7----|
|-----------------|-------4-5-7-----|------|
|-----------------|---4-6-----------|------|
|-------------4-6-|-7---------------|------|
|-------4-6-7-----|-----------------|------|
|-4-5-7-----------|-----------------|------|

|-7-5-4-----------|-----------------|------|
|-------7-5-4-----|-----------------|------|
|-------------6-4-|-----------------|------|
|-----------------|-7-6-4-----------|------|
|-----------------|-------7-6-4-----|------|
|-----------------|-------------7-5-|-4----|

Now, play and sing with the Noel 3 midi file:

http://www.MaximumMusician.com/PairFiles/NOEL3.MID

Then, use the scale pattern above to help you locate the notes in the melody. To see the first three notes, look at this figure.

That's all for this episode of the Playing by Ear series. Next time we'll begin learning an essential skill for playing by ear: recognizing melodic intervals.

Click here to go to the next lesson in this series.

Copyright 2002. Darrin Koltow. All rights reserved.

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