Teach Yourself How To Play A 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.
I shall detail in this article some techniques and drills which I have used over the last 20 years playing guitar to train myself to play by ear.
At beginner level, you want to start out by being able to differentiate between major and minor chords. A simple drill for starting with this is to record yourself playing a progression of major chords (A up to G). Next, record variations of the chord progression, but replacing a major chord with a single minor chord. Once you play back the variations you should be able to say to yourself whether each chord is major or minor as you hear it.
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 some practice playing along with various songs, you will have internalized several chord sequences and should start seeing that the majority of songs use standard templates for their structure and chord progressions and in how they group chords (major/minor/sevenths/etc.).
The great part about playing by ear is that you can never stop learning. You can always find a new songwriter or genre of music to analyse and decipher the chord progression/chord types and should, with time, be able to play along with the majority of songs after just one listen.
Looking for other ways to teach yourself guitar? Read Ann’s review of the Jamorama online guitar course on the Teach Yourself Guitar the Modern Way website. Covers all skill levels.
