Ways to Learn to Play the Guitar By Ear
Ways to Learn to Play the Guitar By Ear
Ways to Learn to Play the Guitar By Ear
Countless professional musicians whether their style is rock, pop, jazz or country music, spent their early years bent over a half speed recording, either vinyl or tape whilst practicing. I am sure you are wondering what on earth I am talking about. What am I saying? What has this to with learning to play the guitar by ear? As you will discern it has a lot to do with it.
When I say learning by ear, I mean to learn different songs or pieces of music. The first part is to learn the melodies, chords and leads from a recording. To do this you have to slow things down a little.
Most people can't figure out songs by listening to them at a normal speed. There are some people, some really brilliant people who are able to learn slow songs by just listening to them at normal speed. However, even these gifted ones have problems with quicker melodies and have to join us ordinary mortals in needing to slow things down!
Many of us can match a note with voice or guitar when it's the only thing that we hear, but the turmoil starts when lots of notes are all played en masse it's difficult to concentrate and try to copy the notes. So if the song is slowed down, you can separate the notes and play them bit by bit, piece by piece until eventually you have learned the entire song.
It used to be that the best slowing down method was to use a tape recorder at half speed, unfortunately as the music slowed down the pitch would drop. At half speed the pitch dropped a lot. Unfortunately for most of us half speed is still way too fast! For some pieces 1/10 speed would be more comfortable.
Nowadays all across the board has been made a little bit easier, with digital technology you now can slow down the melody as much as you need without the pitch dropping.
Why put so much work into this?
I can hear you saying why bother? Why work it out for yourself, this sounds difficult just buy a book and get on with your life!
You can buy a book. Of course you can, but what usually happens with musical theory books (or any other theory books for that matter!) it will probably end up collecting dust on a bookshelf for a long time.
If you do really want to play the guitar, learning to play by ear this way will really get you immersed in guitar playing and the music process itself. Also you get a great feeling of achievement when you figure out the melodies by yourself.
Of course figuring out each note or melody yourself is the best way to achieve success, consulting a book from time to time can do no harm. Some guitar players recommend a good way to learn is to use a transcription book for the chords then play along with the recording (slow at first) to get the rhythm.
I suggest that you learn to play the guitar by ear simply because this way you get the most fun and playing the guitar should be a fun thing to do. That is why you started to learn in the first place.
However the more time you can put into your practice, and learning by ear allows you to do this at any time, the quicker you will progress your guitar playing skills.
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