playing by ear

[Bird]

My eldest son has perfect pitch- I have never seen him caught out.

That would be handy, it's quite rare. I'll just keep at it with the headphones  :(

[Searcher]

 :D My wife is like that too, great ear, except she whistles everything and it can get pretty fancy.  :lol: Her brother has a great ear for figuring stuff out too, must be genetics.

Maybe it's something to do with how cold it gets here?  :lol:  It does something to your ears.

Hey, Beatle, there's a girl here I know who, as far as we can tell, has never sung a bum note, ever.  These people are freaks!  ;)

[HJM]

I used to have a music teacher with perfect pitch and pretty much a photographic memory....listen to a piece of music he could play it or notate it and read a piece of music once and that was there for good - he used to do entire works from memory(Bachs St. Mathew Passion for one!)

[Skybone]

I always find my glasses get in the way.

[carlaz]

I can barely play except by ear!  I mean, I can read music, sort of, in that I understand what the symbols mean in an intellectual sense.  But I suck most egregiously at sight-reading! :oops:

This is especially true on guitar for me, since I have no idea what notes are represented by most positions on the fretboard.  This comes of teaching myself to play by turning on the tape player and plinking along as best I can, that best slowly getting better (but never actually that good, you know! ;)).

[_tom_]

I used to have a music teacher with perfect pitch and pretty much a photographic memory....listen to a piece of music he could play it or notate it and read a piece of music once and that was there for good - he used to do entire works from memory(Bachs St. Mathew Passion for one!)

I wish I could do that. It'd be so great to listen to a song once and be able to work it all out just like that.

[rinse_master]

I am VERY slow at reading and writing music, but I can do it just about.

I find that if I know a song well I can pretty much learn it instantly, once I know what something should sound like it's not too hard.

[maxingwell]

I remember seeing an interview with Satch years ago where he said he learnt to play by ear by spending hours learning what all the different intervals sounded like, ie. 2nd, minior 3rd, 4th, 7th etc.... in each key then he identified what interval was used between notes in solos he was learning.
Sounds like quite a hard way of doing it but it must have been effective.

[clivey]

The best way I've found to do ear training is to vocalise all the different intervals: play a note on your guitar and sing intervals above and below the note.  You can do it randomly all over the guitar neck, or you can move up through a chromatic scale - as long as you sing the interval correctly, and name the notes as you sing them, it really locks your ear into the sound of the different intervals. Start off with say, major thirds, and as you get better, add in more and more.
  Also, sing scales and arpeggios as you practice them - another great thing to do is play a chord and sing each note you can hear.  The more complex and atonal the chord the better, cause it trains you to listen to a chord as a group of intervals, rather than just a wall of sound.
If your interested, look out for The Relative Ear Training Supercourse - a whole bunch of cds with loads of drills and exercises, where I found all this from - it's incridibly thourough, and takes you from recognising individual intervals to immediately naming complex chords and recognising melody lines straight away. I'm only midway through the first section of cds, but it's deffinately already improved my interval recognition. Bit expensive, but worth a look!