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you can play music without using printed music.just by learning some Chords and using your ears can make a difference. Don't waste your time learning to play piano by ear if you don't love music ...Playing piano by ear is a bit misleading, in that, most people who can play piano by ear, actually have more of an understanding of piano chords, ...
There are many websites which claim to teach you to play piano by ear. ... by learning richer chords, re-harmonization and more complicated melodies. ..

First of all, learning to play by ear generally means that you need to be able to hear pitch and gage the quality of chords with your ear. In other words you would need to be able to distinguish the difference between major and minor chords, dominant and diminished etc. The only problem is most people do not possess an ear capable of such distinctions.

I've been playing the piano for 36 years and I often cannot tell the difference between chords. How is someone with no experience supposed to do this? Does this mean that my ear isn't any good? Quite the contrary, I have very good relative pitch and can often hear entire chord progressions but often miss the nuances of each specific chord. Therefore an approach which is solely geared to hearing the changes has its limitations.

The other problem with learning by ear is that you cannot gain a complete understanding of music just by listening. You see, music is like math. It has formative structure derived from centuries of musicians and teachers who have dedicated their lives to the understanding a betterment of each specific musical genre. To discount this process and work around it using just your ear is counter productive.

For example; let's say you're going to learn to play the blues. If you learn by ear that would mean you would have to hear not only the dominant seventh chords, then the melody which is derived from the blues scale, the rhythm which comes from structured meter and the re-harmonization of the chord structure all without understanding the words I just said. It would mean you would have to hear all of this without knowing what its called, how it works and how it all comes together. You would learn by watching someone else play the piano, copy it and repeat it until it sounds the same as what you just hear.

Not only is this a completely inefficient way of learning it is highly limited because you cannot gain an understanding of what it is you're actually doing. Only until you are able to comprehend and dissect

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