Play Guitar by Ear, Episode 4

By Darrin Koltow

We're going to cover the following goodies in this episode of the Playing by Ear space opera:

- ideas for practicing playing by ear
- a melody to learn by ear
- intervals: the fundamental skill

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Ideas for practicing

By now you have a good start on figuring out simple melodies by ear. From the previous lessons in this series you understand how easy it is to learn melodies that stay in the key of C major — especially when you learn those melodies first on the piano. After you can play the melody smoothly on the piano, then learn it on the guitar.

At this point, I encourage you to play melodies by ear or by memory every day. Make a list of the ones you can play, and review them every so often. Make another list of the tunes you want to learn by ear. Remember that the most important determinant of your success in playing by ear is *not* "natural talent" or being "gifted," but your *desire* to make the music.

If you can't stand rock music but like classical, and your teacher tells you to learn the melody to Led Zeppelin's Misty Mountain Hop by ear, you're not going to enjoy learning. Learn what you like first. Then, if you want to challenge yourself, start listening to melodies of tunes that you *could* like, or tunes that intrigue you, or catch your interest in some way.

If this lesson series is moving too slowly for you and you're already playing melodies on the guitar, that's terrific! Show someone else how to play by ear; and, if you're waiting for us to cover putting chords to a melody, hang in there. We will get there in a subsequent lesson. In the meantime, get into the habit of learning more melodies every day. Use whatever process feels most comfortable or enjoyable to you.

How to practice

Here's a note about how to practice, once you're committed to playing by ears on a regular basis. Once you learn a melody in one CAGED, learn it in another. Remember that the more times you play a particular melody using one CAGED position or fingering, the less you will be relying on your ears to play, and the more you will be using your muscle memory. This is not a bad thing, just how our minds work to remember things. But, do not let yourself get too comfortable playing one melody in one way. Once you can play a melody smoothly with one pattern, do not continue to practice it every day; let it slip for a few days. When you return to playing it again, you'll be forced more to rely on your ears again.

Easy melodies to practice

Here's a brief list of tunes or sources of tune that have appealing and familiar melodies you might want to learn. Be aware that some of these tunes will have key changes, which you will handle with ease the more you practice learning melodies by ear:

- Beatles tunes, especially their early stuff: I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Hard Day's Night
- tunes by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Their melodies are great for learning by ear because they're catchy and simple. Their harmonies are pretty easy, too. Bad Moon Rising, Proud Mary, and Have you Ever Seen the Rain can get you started.
- Patriotic songs. America the Beautiful and You're a Grand Ol' Flag, for example
- themes to movies: Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Disney movies

Basically, any tune that you believe you can sing pretty well and that you *enjoy* singing is a good candidate for practicing.

A Beatles tune

Let's get into some action by learning the melody to a popular Beatles tune by ear. The melody of this tune is in C major. Before we dive in and listen, we need to do the disclaimer thing:

The following represents my interpretation of the song, and not necessarily the same interpretation as that in the original recording. This music notation is to be used only for purposes of learning. The original tune was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Let's dive in and listen:

http://www.MaximumMusician.com/PairFiles/inmylife.mid

As we did with the first melody we learned, we're going to work out this tune on a piano before we learn it on the guitar. If you have a Windows system, you can download the Maximum Musician virtual piano here:

http://www.MaximumMusician.com/PairFiles/PlayByEarPiano.exe

And, almost any system with Internet access, a browser, a sound card and a slice of pizza with anchovies can use this other, simulated piano:

http://www.frontiernet.net/~imaging/play_a_piano.html

Also, I've made some enhancements to the Maximum Musician virtual piano, including adding more keys. So, even if you downloaded it to learn the melody from previous lessons, I encourage you to download this newer, enhanced version.

Here are the first three notes of the opening lick.

Remember that you can play this by using just the white keys on the piano. If I see you playing any black keys, I'm going to rap your knuckles with my metronome.

Now, here are the first few notes of the main part of the tune.

Okay, it's time for me to come clean. I made a tiny lie: there's one note that occurs later in the melody that's not in C major. It's a Blues note: Eb. And no, I'm not going to tell you where it is on the piano. But it's easy to figure out: it's one of the black keys, and it's really close to the white E key.

The fundamental skill

We just worked out the melody for In My Life on piano. Before we learn it on guitar, I want to mix things up a bit for a variety. Let's go into the fundamental skill of playing melodies by ear: singing and recognizing melodic intervals.

What does this mean? Here's an example: I play for you a C note and then say, "Sing a major third above that note." Once you have the skill of singing any melodic interval, you'll respond by singing an E above that C note. Let's do an example for the other skill: I play for you a Db, and then an F below that. I say, "Tell me what interval that was." Once you know how to recognize melodic intervals, you'll be able to respond by saying, "That's a descending minor sixth."

Once you have these two skills, figuring out any melody, even new, unfamiliar ones, becomes much easier than the trial and error process you might be using now. And keep this in mind: you can already, *right now*, probably recognize many intervals by ear and reproduce them by singing them.

I'll prove it to you: Sing the first two notes of the Happy Birthday song. You know, "Ha-ppy Birth-day..." If you sang it correctly, and you probably did, you just sang two intervals: an ascending major second, in going from Happy to "Birth-," and then a descending major second in returning: singing "Birth-" to "-day." So chalk up two out of the 24 intervals you'll want to know. (That breaks down to 12 ascending and 12 descending.)

Here are some other intervals you can probably already sing *and* recognize by ear:

An ascending major third: Sing the first two notes in When the Saints Come Marching In.

A descending minor third: Sing the first two notes in the United States National Anthem: "O-oh say can..."

Ascending perfect fourth: The theme to the TV show Jeopardy.

Do you see how well you already understand how music works? Reading about how well *other* people can play something by ear, or what a genius Mozart or Hendrix was can sometimes make your forget your own musical abilities.

Now that you see that you can recognize and sing many intervals, how do you build this skill so you can recognize *all* and any interval? And how do you do it in a way that's not boring or meaningless but engaging? We'll go into that in the next lesson.

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

Click here for software that can help you play by ear. Use it for 30 days for free.

Guitar Chords (GC) builds your chops and helps you identify the most important chords by ear. GC shows you how to substitute and combine chords; play Jazz, Rock and Blues progressions; transpose songs; put chords to a melody; apply fingerpicking, alternating bass, arpeggios, and much more.

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