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Playing By Ear

Can You Do It?

There comes a time in all guitar players lives where we must move beyond having others teach us songs or reading tab and begin to play by ear. So what exactly is playing by ear? Basically you are simply listening to a piece of recorded music and playing it back exactly as you've heard it. Simple, huh? Well actually, sometimes it is. And sometimes the simplest sounding songs are the hardest to figure out by ear. In order to get you started I'm going to give you some tips on playing by ear Start off with just guitar recordings and then add bass and drums to make it a little more difficult. The more instruments in the mix, the harder it will be for you to figure out the guitar parts. We'll start with the basics:

One Thing At a Time

Our first instinct is to put on a recording and just start plowing away with figuring out the chords. While some of us can do this rather quickly, must of us need to use some sort of methodical approach. So you need to know what to do first. And you shouldn't waste time trying to work on every part of the song at once. Playing the whole song from start to finish while banging away on your guitar is fun but it will just take you that much longer to figure the song out. And if you think you have a part right and you are wrong you may not realize it because all you are hearing is your own guitar. So take things one step at a time.

Not all songs will require as much time as others. There are some songs that can be figured out in a matter of minutes and others that will require weeks of pulling you hair out trying to figure out. Just because a song sounds simple doesn't mean it is. So if your first attempts at playing by ear don't go so well try another song. And another. And another. You will find that you will get better at this as time goes on. So what to do first?

Listen

Number one mistake that I see being made is the player does not hear what is on the recording because they have not taken the time to really listen to the guitar parts in the song. Put your guitar down, and listen to the guitar parts. Are they playing just chords? Individual notes? High or low? Can you tell from the tonal quality where on the neck they might be playing? Is there more than one guitar playing different parts? (This will kill you sometimes!). Are you hearing the guitar and not the bass? Does it sound like there are open strings being played?

You get the idea. Taking the time to inventory what you are hearing will always save you time. And our goal is to get you to play the song as quickly as possible.

Find a Chord

First thing I usually do is to find that one chord that seems to stick out among the rest. And I usually use barre chords to do this. Starting at the middle of the neck, I finger a major barre chord and move it around as I listen to what I think is the main chord of the song until I find a match. Once you have found at least one chord in the song that you are sure is right it is not very hard to find more.

Find the Key

Determining the key of a song is crucial to figuring out the entire song. The 'Key' of the song is the root note of the scale that the song is written from. This is of course based on how many flats or sharps there are. The chord scale is derived from the major scale of the 'Key'. Keep in mind that in each key we have 7 chords based on the major scale of that key. 3 major chords, 3 minor chords and a diminished chord. Very rarely will you even come across the diminished chord, so this really gives you 6 chords to work from. Very often, in fact more often than not; the first or last chord of a song is the I Major chord of the key. And if it isn't then it almost always is the IV or V major chord in that key. So if you find that a G major is the first chord, we would first search based on the idea that the key is 'G'. If that doesn't pan out then we should try 'C' or 'D' since the G major is the V and IV major chords in those keys respectively.

There's another tidbit of info for you. The root major chord in a key is the V chord in it's IV's chord's key and the IV chord in it's V chord's key. So taking the G Major scale, we find that G major is the V chord in the key of 'C' and the IV chord in the key of 'D'.

So if you have a 3 chord song and you've successfully determined that G major is one of the chords then the other two are most likely either C major and D major (key of 'G'); C major and F major (key of 'C'); or D major and A major (key of 'D'). Of course in music as in all things it's never really that simple is it? Outside of 1950's style rock and roll and some traditional country, there really aren't a lot of songs that follow this convenient 3 chord ( I, IV and V) system. But there are plenty that begin that way.

Once you think that you've determined the key by finding the 3 major chords, you can use the chords based on the scale discussed in the chord section as a base to find the other chords. It sometimes is a matter of listening over and over again and trying out those chords one by one at each part of the song until you have a pretty good handle on the basic chord structure. This can be very tedious and sometimes very frustrating when we have chords in a song that no chord in our scale seems to fit with. Then it's time to use the root.

Using the bass notes.

Before you get too frustrated with a song that you just can't seem to get, relax and use a technique that I frequently use to find the chords. Make things simpler by just searching for the root notes of the chords. You do this by listening to the bass guitar and trying to match it note for note first. By only trying to match one note at a time instead of a 3 note chord you have a one in 12 chance of getting the note right. From here it is very easy to narrow things down to the scale of the key the song is in. Once you find the bass notes you can build you chord structures upon these by trying major or minor chords over the recording based on the bass notes you have found, Quite simply put, try the major of the root note. If that doesn't sound quite right ,then try the minor chord. Once you've determined which is closer and it still doesn't sound quite right, you'll need to try the 7th of the chord's root or the minor 7th.

I've found the bass note but I can't find the right chord!

Listening for the bass notes can have a drawback: walking bass lines. A walking bass line is when the bass plays the other notes in a chord in addition to the root or "walks" through the notes of one chord to get to the root of the next chord. Sometimes this means that the guitar chord stays the same while the bass changes notes. Here's where taking the time to really listen to what the guitar is doing in a song will pay off in saved time. If you listen to piano based songs you will hear a lot of these walking bass lines while the rest of the chords change a lot less. Listening is of course the most important thing to determine whether we are on the right path or not. After all, we're playing by 'ear'.

Another problem you will run into is when a walking bass will play either the 3rd or 5th note in a chord rather then the root.

The chords to this next song are as follows:

Guitar       G     A      D           G

Bass         G     A      D    F#     G