Article - Playing by ear

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Playing music by ear.

Playing music by ear is a natural process. You did not need to learn to read and write before you could speak. You learned to speak by listening and emulating what you heard and could probably hold an interesting conversation before you even began to learn your ABCs. Music is much the same. You can learn by copying something you hear.

Perfect Pitch.

Not many people are blessed with perfect pitch so don't be put off if you cannot identify the exact pitch of any note. It is a skill you can develop but even if you never achieve it you will still be able to play any melody by ear with a bit of practice.

A helpful guide at the beginning is to train yourself to recognise at least one note. This will be called your 'guide' note, sometimes referred to as the anchor.

My guide note is C simply because it is the first note of the scale of C.

If you play the note C every day repeatedly and sing the note as you sound it you will eventually engrave this sound in you mind so deeply that you will always be able to name this note when you hear it. So you have taught yourself perfect pitch for one note...Hey it's a start!

This is your first important exercise because once you can identify the sound of C you can figure out some of the other notes in the scale of C. Is the note you hear one tone up or down from C? Is it two tones up or down from C? Or at the very least you will know if it is higher or lower than C by some degree.

Tones and Semi-tones.

I mentioned the word 'tone' in the above paragraph so now would be a good time to explain what a 'tone' is. The space or distance in sound between two notes such as C and D is a whole tone and you will notice that there is a black key between C and D. This is a half tone or semi-tone. It falls half way between C and D. There is another whole tone between D and E and the black key is a semi-tone or half way between D and E. Now you will notice a change because there is no black key between E and F. That is because the space or tonal distance between E and F is in fact only a half tone or semi-tone.

In any scale - and we are currently concerning ourselves only with the scale of C - the tonal space or distance between each note in the scale follows the same pattern of tone - tone - semi-tone - tone - tone - tone - semi-tone. Play the scale of C which is - C D E F G A B C - while watching for the tonal spacing to prove this for yourself.

We go into this in more detail in the course supplement 'Play Keyboard By Ear'.

This article is by Stephen Parry, author of the keyboard tutorials 'Learn To Play Keybord' and 'Play Keyboard By Ear'

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