Teach Yourself To Play Guitar By Ear
Learning to play guitar by ear is a skill all guitar players can accomplish. There is no art to being able to play by ear. All it takes is some practice to coach your capacity to differentiate the scales and chords that are being played in a tune.
This article has some ways for training your ear that I have used over the last 25 years of playing and learning guitar.
Starting out, you want to focus on differentiating major from minor chords. A training drill for this is to record yourself (tape, MP3, to your computer) playing a sequence of major chords (A up to G). Then record the same chord sequence but change a major chord with a single minor chord. Once you play it back, you should be able to say to yourself whether each chord is major or minor when you hear it played.
You can refine this skill when listening to songs on the radio or TV and attempt to pick out the major or minor chords then check if you are correct by playing along with the tune. Start by playing the E string to find the root bass note and then try playing the major and minor chords and decide which chord sounds better to your ears. Alternately, if it is a popular tune then you can search on-line for the chords/tab of the song to confirm if you are correct.
Proceeding on from this you should begin to focus on chord progressions. This simply involves listening to songs and trying to figure out the progression of chords being played. Pick a tune and break it down into its the verses, chorus and bridge. Take each verse/chorus/bridge and try to work out the chords used. You might find that most verses use two/four chords for each line of the song or that the chorus repeats four chords. Playing along with the tune to find the chords and start to build up a map of the chords. You can writing these down at first but move to memorizing the chords and their progression.
With practice, you will have internalized a number of chord progressions and song structures and will begin to see that the majority of songs follow standard structures to combine bridge/verse/chorus components and also in the chords (major, minor, etc.) that are used.
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.
Frustrated with the lack of progress from your current beginner guitar lessons? Read Ann’s review of the Jamorama online guitar course on the Teach Yourself Guitar the Modern Way website. Covers all skill levels.
