Play Guitar by Ear, Episode 6

By Darrin Koltow

Feeling the rhythm

Welcome back to the Playing by Ear lesson series, where we're learning how to listen to a favorite tune, understand what's happening in it, and reproduce the sounds from the tune on the guitar, including the melody, the bass line, the harmonies and the rhythm.

In My Life

We began learning the Beatles tune In My Life in a previous episode. We learned it on the virtual, play by ear piano. Now it's time to move it to guitar.

But first, we must do the reminder thing:

The tune presented in this article is intended for academic porpoises only. All other scholarly mammals should never attempt to confuse this work with the actual tune, which was written by Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and Josef Stalin. Any attempt to produce a profit from this one itty, bitty sound file or lesson, will result in spontaneous combustion of your guitar.

Here again is the midi file with the tune's melody:
http://www.MaximumMusician.com/PairFiles/inmylife.mid

This tune is in C major. Be aware that there is more than one place on the fretboard you can play it.

Here are the first few notes to get you started.

Notice that the first and the third notes are the same.

If you need help in working out the rest of the melody, have a look at the previous lessons in the Playing by Ear series. You can find them here:

http://www.MaximumMusician.com/PlayGuitarByEarIntro.htm

Rhythm

We've been concentrating on exploring ways for listening to melodies and understanding what intervals are in them. But there are other ingredients involved in playing tunes by ear. One of them is rhythm. Let's say something about the rhythmic feel of a tune.

It's easy to get caught up in listening to and copying the most obvious parts of a tune: those with musical notes, the melody and the harmony. But the rhythm of a tune is just as essential. Change the rhythm of a tune in some way — by speeding it up, changing on which beats the stress falls, turning the 4/4 time into 3/4 time, trying to eat pizza at the same time you're playing guitar — and you change the whole character of that tune. That tells you that being able to hear the rhythm of a tune will make sure you can later play the tune accurately on the guitar.

So how *do* you capture the tune's rhythmic feel? One way is to quit using your ears to listen to the tune and start using other parts of your body, especially your hands and feet. After you've listened to a section of a tune you want to copy, play it back, but pretend you're the drummer now: tap out with your hands or feet the pulse of the tune. Stop listening, and duplicate the rhythmic pattern. Forget pitches, and think groove, beat, pulse, and feel.

Notice how the different parts of a tune may use different rhythms or grooves. Notice also how you may slip into using an old strumming pattern on a new tune. If you do this, all your tunes may start to sound the same, or at least feel the same to you. You don't want this to happen, but you do want to see and feel the great variety of rhythms from many tunes. Again, you may detect these rhythms more easily if you feel for them instead of listening for them.

Feeling, not hearing

Did you ever have the experience of approaching a room with its door shut, and *feeling* more than hearing the loud music coming from the room? You might not even hear a melody or other high notes, but the pulse from the bass line rattles every cell in your body. The sound system in some cars communicates that same feeling: unmistakable bass groove.

The point is that you want to capture the rhythmic groove of each song you play by ear. If putting a pillow over the headphones or speakers of your sound system is what it takes for you to push the melody and higher notes temporarily out of the way so you can hear this groove, do it.

Harmony

Let's get into one of the most requested guitar skills: playing the chords to a song by ear. How do you this?

Figuring out harmonies by ear is a bit different than figuring out melodies, which you might have already discovered when working out a tune. You may have gotten to the point where figuring out melodies is a piece of cake — and that's terrific; you've already come a long way in playing by ear. When you listen for the harmonies, it's often much tougher to pick them out. Why?

I'm sure there are experts in psychobiology, physics, or synchronized swimming that can answer this question in terms of science, but for our purposes we'll say this: when you play more than one note at the same time, and those notes come from the same instrument, it appears to your ear that you're not hearing separate tones, but a completely new sound. It's a bit like mixing the colors blue and yellow. If you mix blue paint with yellow paint, you get something that's neither blue nor yellow, but green. So, you'd be wasting your time looking for the original yellow or blue colors in that green. You have a whole new thing.

Apply this idea back to music. Although you never waste time when you study music, you're not going to have much success if you try to pick out individual notes when you hear a chord being played. You need other strategies to hear and identify that chord.

I hate to leave you in suspense, but we'll resolve this cliffhanger, and go into those strategies, in the next episode of Playing by Ear.

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

Copyright 2002. Darrin Koltow. All rights reserved.

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