How To Play Songs By Ear And Learn Them On Your Own

A really skilled and talented musician is one who knows how to play songs by ear. Many hobbies and activities can be done on your own, just like playing songs by ear. Below are some guidelines you could use if trying to achieve this goal.

Establish Good Relationship With Your Instrument

Playing a guitar by ear or any instrument for this matter needs you to have a deep connection and familiarity with your instrument. This also helps in developing muscle memory. Begin by simply holding your guitar each day and play with it so your fingers will be familiar on its strings, its fretboard, etc. Be familiar as well with each sound that each string you pluck will produce. This way, everytime you hear the same sound from a song, you will know immediately which string or fret to work on in order to reproduce the sound.

Experiment With Note Lengths And Articulations

Articulations refer to note beginnings. You could determine these by learning to pluck strings using your major hand. Find out what plucking can produce sharp and short beginnings or what actions performed on the instrument could generate notes that have subtler and softer beginnings. You could also learn how you could dampen or stop the ringing sound of a plucked string or note using your minor hand.

Learn To Reproduce Rhythms

As you listen to the song, tap your finger or foot according to the song's beat. You could start with just one note and then recreate sounds of a note length and note timing without considering the pitch.

Start Simple

Begin learning some simple tunes first. Choosing a more complex song when you are still a novice at playing by ear could immensely overwhelm you. Thus, you need to choose simple pieces first such as nursery rhymes or songs. Simple tunes are those containing simple rhythms and fewer notes. These pieces will help familiarize yourself with using your ears to search and find the intervals of the piece.

Listen Well To The Song

When you listen to a song, you need to be very particular in identifying parts of it that are repeated. This will help you discover the structure of the song. Suppose it has a structure of an opening, a verse, a chorus, a repeated verse and the chorus again; this means you have three distinct parts to study. Familiarization with the song structure is important and helpful because there could be a single chord progression or riff used in the entire musical piece. You should also know that there are some songs that have no chorus.

Learn Chord Theory

With this, you could practically know what key the piece is made of. Afterward, you could start applying some musical principles for getting the correct chords. Most of the songs use major scales where successive chords with seven scale intervals tend to use the notes on that particular scale and key. These are the same notes to apply the chord form of 1-3-5 onto every scale interval. Knowing the theory of chord making will greatly help.

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