Tatersoup says:
1/15/2015 3:05:34 AM

Rich, I'm not sure where you're coming from. It looks like you've been playing since 2010 from your profile.

My best advice for learning to play by ear is to choose a song that you are familiar with.

For example, I chose House of the Rising Sun as a song to learn by ear. I started by figuring out, more or less in this order,

A verse or two of the lyrics
The rhythm
The chord progression
The melody line
Then put the above elements together.

It works. I will say that the chords I "heard" and played were Am, C, Dm, F, Em.

This is in some conflict to the actual written song which has the chords Am, C, D, F, and E.

I played it my way for, gee, over 30 years, and no one ever ridiculed me for it.

BrentSims says:
11/28/2015 3:57:21 PM

I, just this past week, started making noticeable progress in playing by ear. I've long considered myself to be incapable of playing by ear however I'm starting to think that the problem was I was biting off more than I could chew.

Minstrel Mike had made many posts in which he recommends learning banjo by starting with simple songs that you know and strumming them while singing them.

I started doing just that. Being as dense as I am I decided to start with the simplest songs I knew - nursery rhyme tunes. It did not take long before became apparent that a large portion of the melody could be found in the chords themselves. So I started noodling around the chords, clawhammer style, trying to add some semblance of the melody to my bum-ditty strums.

I cannot say that I am setting the world on fire however in the past week I've committed more songs to memory than I have in the past year and all those songs I learned by "ear" though in some cases I did take a peek at a tab just long enough to point me in the right direction and lesson the learning curve a bit.

I'm never going to get rich and famous playing the likes of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" however I am having fun and I am relying on tabs less with each passing day.

Brent

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