The Fastest Way to Learn How to Play Music By Ear

Play Your Favorite Songs, Jot Down the Music in Your Head, Be a Hit at Parties

Musicians who play music by ear are huge hits at parties and on social media, but they also have a huge advantage when it comes to composing music or accompanying themselves while they sing.

They can identify the tonal center of a song just by listening, figure out the specific intervals of the melody, find the correct chords that accompany the melody, see how the bass line interacts with melody and harmony, play it with the appropriate rhythm and meter, and do it all in a short moment.

It’s even more impressive when you line it up like that.

Most people believe that these incredibly gifted musicians were just born with this ability. Prodigies, perhaps, but most musicians with the ability to play music by ear studied each of these concepts on their own before putting them together into practice. When starting at a young age, it can take years for these concepts to take hold in their minds and practice, especially as they don’t see the end goal.

When you, a mentally independent human being, seek to develop your ear-playing skills, it won’t take as long, especially if you have a guide (like this course!) to teach you each independent skill and to continually point that toward the final goal of playing an entire song by ear.

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What Will You Do with Your Newfound Abilities to Play Music by Ear?

One of my favorite parts about Christmas time is how families and friends join together in song. It’s one of the only times of the year when people who generally don’t sing suddenly do.

What you can do with your ability to play by ear is accompany the group! A cappella music is lovely on its own, but when you can add some piano or any other instrument behind it, it adds another timbre to the mix.

You can also develop the musical ideas that have been locked in your head for an eternity into full songs and pieces. When you can write down or see the notes on your instrument, you unlock the ability to think more about the phrases or chords in terms of the big picture of the final product: the full song.

One of the most rewarding experiences for a musician is when you finish writing a song. Learning a song is an accomplishment, but writing one from scratch? That’s something you created. That’s some form of goodness, self-expression, and potential to connect deeply with others that you have put into the world. It’s the light you get to share.

Learning to play by ear unlocks that gift for you.

With Such Big Benefits to Playing by Ear, Why Don’t More people do it?

Playing by ear involves a wide range of smaller skills, all which fall under the umbrella of aural skills. In most traditional lessons or online courses, aural skills are not a focus, they fall to the side, so you may train only one at a time over longs periods, so you can prioritize healthy technique and musicality.

These skills include: hearing the tonal center of a song, figuring out the interval (distance) between two notes in a melody, building chords, identifying chord progressions, hearing specific voices (Bass versus melody and accompaniment), and understanding rhythm and meter.

If you have sheet music in front of you, you don’t need to hear the tonal center of a song to identify it, so that skill often gets overlooked in lessons. The other skills are often overlooked for the same reason that lessons are traditionally taught from a sheet-music first philosophy.

This isn’t a bad or wrong thing, but the focus is just different than when your goal is to play by ear.

Play Music by Ear is Designed to Fill Those Gaps as Efficiently as Possible

Because this course focuses on only the skills required to play music by ear, the other myriad parts of musicianship won’t get in the way of your singular goal to play by ear. Play Music by Ear boils down the skills into 10-days’ worth of lessons and exercises, which means that you’ll be a musician who plays by ear in as few as 10 days.

You begin with basic intervals, learning how to accurately figure a melody out by ear before even touching your instrument or notation software. This is much more efficient that picking out one note of a melody at a time (and then forgetting it once you figure out the next 3 notes).

You’ll learn basics of chord building and harmony, so you can understand how to parse out chords by ear, which is one of the hardest parameters to hear and reproduce. You don’t need prior knowledge of chord building; this course includes a comprehensive look at chord building. You’ll be able to easily tell the difference between major and minor chords without batting an eye.

Next, you’ll look at how harmony interacts with the melody: what are the most likely chords to line up with parts of the melody? Since you can already hear the difference between major and minor chords, you’ll be picking out chords in time with hardly a thought.

Finally, you’ll line these parts of the song up with rhythm and meter. You will look at the two categories of meter – simple and compound – and identify which is happening in the song you of your choice.

Additionally, throughout this entire process, you’ll practice your skills with exercises that give you immediate feedback. Need more practice on interval practice? There’s an interactive exercise that’s infinitely long that gives you immediate feedback on whether your answer was right or wrong.

Need more practice on hearing the difference between major and minor chords? There’s also an infinitely long exercise for that.

Play Music by Ear is built to give you the strongest, most efficient foundation in playing music by ear, so you can get to making the music you’ve always wanted to without the hassle of going note by note or getting overly frustrated when it doesn’t sound right.