Teach Yourself How To Play A Guitar By Ear
Teaching yourself to play guitar by ear is something all guitarists can train themselves to do. There is no mysterious art to being able to play by ear. In reality, what it takes is practice to build up your ability to differentiate the chords and scales that are being played.
This article has some drills and techniques that I have used over twenty five years to train myself to play by ear.
At a starter level, you should aim to be able to differentiate between major and minor chords. To do this, a simple drill is to record yourself (tape/MP3) playing a group of major chords (for example, A to G). Then record alternate versions of your chord group but this time replace a single major chord with a single minor chord. On playing back the versions, listen closely for the different chords. You should be able differentiate whether each chord is major or minor as it is played.
You can fine tune this by listening to tunes on the radio or TV ads and picking out major or minor chords. Confirm if you are correct by playing your guitar along with the tune or (if its a song, searching for the chords/tab online). If playing along, then start by just playing the bass note (the E-string) to find the main bass note then try playing the major/minor chord from this and decide for yourself how this sounds to your own ears. As an example, the root note could be ‘c’ so play a C-major chord followed by a C-minor chord with the tune and listen out for which sounds closer to the original tune. This is by no means perfect as complex tunes could have complex chord/bass variations (for example a ‘d’ bass note played with an A major chord) or more ‘colorful’ chords (sevenths, diminished, jazz chords, partial chords, etc.).
Once you’ve mastered this you should focus on learning chord sequences/progressions. This is a fun part as you just listen to songs and aim to figure out the chords being played. Most pop/country/rock tunes have simple chord sequences so this can be quite easy to do. Start off with a simple song and break it down into its sections – verses, chorus and bridge. Take each section and try to understand the chords used. You may realise, for example, that verses use 2 or 4 chords for each line of the song or that the chorus repeats 4 chords. Start trying to work out which chords are being played. Play along with the tune to find the chords. You want to build up a mind map of the chords. You can start by writing these out, but ultimately, move to remembering the chords and their sequence.
After some practice playing along with a variety of songs, you will have memorized a number of sequences and will start to see that most songs follow some fairly standard structures or templates in how they combine verse/chorus/bridge and also in how they group chords (major and minor).
The fun part of playing by ear is that you can never stop learning. There is always a new songwriter or musical genre (rap, jazz, metal, etc) that you can analyse and attempt to decipher the chord sequence and chord types. As you improve, you will begin to be able to pick out of a song complex chords (sevenths, diminished chords, jazz chords, etc) to the point that you should be able to play along with most songs after a single listen.
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