Have you ever seen someone sit down to the piano without any music and start playing?  My mom was like that.  I remember how she used to hear a song on the radio, then go sit at the piano and begin playing it!  This is called “playing by ear” and is the ability to play a song just by listening to it.  I know my friends were amazed when they happened to be around to see it.  Some of them were taking piano lessons themselves and couldn’t believe it came so easily to her.

Watching their reactions fueled me.  I started taking piano lessons when I was 7 years old, and became pretty good.  I won awards at contests and played solos at recitals.  But the ability to play any song I heard by ear after I heard it eluded me.  I was in my 30’s before I really learned how to do it.

But here’s the amazing part – You can do it, too!  If you spend time listening to music, playing music and paying attention to it, you’ll start to recognize the patterns it contains.  Chords start to become familiar.  You start to recognize the melodies that will match up to the chords.  You’ll start to recognize and learn chord progressions, the fundamental building blocks of playing by ear.

Pretty soon you’ll be using these chord progressions to work out the music you hear.  By playing the piano along with recorded music, you’ll quickly start “hearing” differently.  Notes will become chords and chords will progress in one of several standard ways.  Soon you’ll be recognizing these patterns accurately and be able to reproduce them at the keyboard with only your memory of the song to assist you.

Most of us who learned to play the piano the old-fashioned way were taught how to read music and relate it to the piano keys first.  Then we moved on to playing simple, then more and more complex music.  But no one really taught us that skill of playing without the written music.  Or if we were, it by memorization, not playing by ear.  We never experienced the joy of just sitting down and playing what we heard, or blending in with a group of other musicians without the benefit of sheet music.

Gaining that knowledge and feeling for chord progressions is the way to start.  If you’re a music lover, you already know more than you think you do!  You know what sounds right.  Now you need to use that knowledge of sound to play the chords that go together. 

 First find an easy song you want to learn how to play.  By “easy”, I mean make sure there aren’t too many chord changes in it.  When you first start out it will take a while and you’ll need patience.  Experiment by playing along with the music.  When you’ve learned one song, try another.  Give yourself time to learn to play by ear.  The more practice you have, the better you’ll get at it.  After a while it will come naturally.  You’ll be able to play any song you hear!

If you have a true love of music, listen to a lot of it, and enjoy playing along, you can learn to play by ear.

Kim Brockman is the publisher of The Interactive Internet, a monthly newsletter about the Internet and computers.

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