Samiul Bashar Samin
Here’s the scene: A future rock star sits at his record player (or cassette machine) as Mom goes off to work in the morning. Mom returns in the late afternoon and the young rock and roller is still there, learning songs and solos by ear with varying levels of success. Put the needle back and try again. Hit rewind and try again. Trial and error.
Back in the days before the Interwebz – aka, The Stone Age…you know, the 70s and 80s – people learned most music by ear. Sure, there was “sheet music”, but this was often written for keyboard players and singers. If you were a budding rock guitarist, you had to learn most stuff by ear, or from the guy down the block. He learned it by ear also, or from the other guy down the block from him. You get the picture.
Nowadays, there is a proliferation of information at our fingertips. Any guitarist looking for TABs can find plenty of high quality ones for sale in books and magazines as well as tons of mixed-quality TABs – mostly of the very low variety – for free online. The musical casualty of this Information Age – besides the neighborhood record store – is the time-honored art of learning music by ear.
This is a shame, because nothing quite empowers you on your instrument as the ability to decipher a tune, chords, or a riff by ear and then play along with it. And my students who have done this can testify to its power. Transcribing songs by ear is, at minimum, a fun challenge, and for some students, an addiction!
I’ve found that most guitar students, at least initially, have zero confidence in their ability to learn a song by ear. It seems like some sort of magical process, but it’s really not. If you’d like to do it, you CAN do it – just as thousands of musicians before you have done.
Of course, like anything else, transcribing songs takes practice. There will always be a certain amount of trial and error in learning by ear – that’s actually part of the fun – but there are some definite strategies you can use to speed up the process.
One of the biggest names in the music industry, Steve Vai once outlined a method that requires you to imagine yourself playing the song as frequently as possible in order to actually learn it. I thought it was all virtuoistic hogwash, until I realized… IT WORKS! If you’re trying to improve your knowledge and take music seriously, you should try to learn as much theory as possible and most importantly, implement the theories when you are trying to play something.
It goes a long way. As far as guesswork goes, some people have perfect pitches and all so it’s much easier for them to guess the notes and play accordingly, but once overly technical stuff comes around, guesswork just seems to fall short.
Learning music, above all is instinctive. However, when you have a good base of theory behind you, it just hones your abilities and makes you more prone to success. That being said, beyond all this, the most important part about playing music is enjoying it. And once you start enjoying it, you’ve come one step closer to becoming a rockstar.