by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 16, 2009   Last Updated: May 24, 2009

When I was four years old, I played "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on my grandmother's piano. I'd never seen the music - and if I had, I wouldn't even have known how to read it. So how did I do it? I'd noticed that going down the three white keys played the first three notes of the song - and that going back up produced the next two. (There's a reason why "Mary Had a Little Lamb" is one of the first songs that people are taught - its melody is really simple!) I'd also inadvertently learned the most important lesson about playing by ear. It helps to start when you're young.

Some people are just born with the talent, but it's a skill that it's also possible to learn. Hearing a song in your head is relatively easy. "Playing by ear" involves recreating that same melody on a musical instrument.

But the methodology is always the same - the musician associates certain sounds with specific motions. Obviously to play songs on an instrument, you need to learn how to play that instrument. In many cases, "playing by ear" after that simply means identifying the correct chords by trial and error. For popular music, this is surprisingly easy, since the vast majority of songs use the same basic chords. One songwriter joked that "All you need to write a song is three chords and the truth."

Learning to play in different keys can be helpful if you're planning to play along with a recording, or with singers or musicians who expect you to join in. (There's no guarantee that they're always going to start in the easiest keys, like C or G!) The most important things to listen for is the "home" chord, which identifies the key that the song is in. Most songs will begin and end with this chord - and knowing that makes it easier to guess which chords are most likely to follow.

The hardest trick is identifying a chord's "root" note while the melody is doing something different. But the melody would be discordant if it wasn't hitting one of the three notes in the root chord - so usually you can identify the chord just by imagining that the melody's note is the top note of a familiar "triad," and then imagining your way down to the bottom note. (And if that doesn't work, try again using the melody note as the middle note of a triad.)

Making music by ear is a lot of fun - and you don't even need an instrument to do it. I like to play a game called "the fifth Beatle." I'll listen to a Beatles song, and figure out which note isn't being sung in one of their chords - and then I'll sing it myself!

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