How To Play Piano By Ear

Hello everyone,

Ever heard a tune and thought “I wish I knew how to play piano by ear.”  Then I could play most any tune I heard and not have to worry about picking the note out of a piece of sheet music.  Can anyone who loves music resist the walking base line of a “boogie woogie” beat?  Wouldn’t it be nice to pick that up by ear?

Think of the tune Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy and hum that, oh so familiar, background base part that sets up the trumpet intro.  You’ll find yourself break out in an involuntary smile, your toe will begin to tap and it’s SHOWTIME.   If ONLY you COULD learn how to play piano by ear!

Click here for Rocket Piano and learn how to play by ear

I grew up with the most natural musician I have ever known!  My dad could sit down at a keyboard and play like Jerry Lee Lewis (yeah he liked old school country) or do a mean version of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy on the piano, and do so convincingly.  In fact, dad could do that with any instrument he put his hands on.  He never had a music lesson in his life!  He had a sixth sense about music.  When he sat down and listened to music you could always tell if he liked it or not….his foot would begin tapping.  Later I came to realize his great feel for music came, in large part, because he grew up and had learned how to play piano by ear.  He would invariably get up and go to the piano and reproduce the very tune we’d just heard.  But only if his foot tapped.  I used to call that my music metric…if dad’s foot tapped it was going to be a good piece.

I, on the other hand, went through traditional approaches to learning music.  I gave up trying to play what I had heard and began to rely exclusively on the music I read off the page.  I fell into the “I can READ music” elitist camp as opposed to the how to play piano by ear approach that my dad had expereinced.  Over time I became so reliant on the written page that I could not play without it…unless I memorized the page. 

One day after I had obtained my music degree from college dad and I were talking about music and he asked “could you show me how to read music?”  I was delighted to do so and I began the instruction with my newly learned music school approach to teaching music .

We selected a simple tune to use to show how the notes fit and worked together to form a tune.  I lectured him on the fact that he needed to disgard his how to play piano by ear approach in lieu of the more academic form of reading music.  How egotistical and arrogant can you be, LOL? 

Dad began to pick out the notes and play the tune….missing notes along the way, which by the way, I NEVER heard him do when he ‘played by ear’.  Then to my amazement, about 15 minutes into my diatribe on flats, sharps, accidentals and key signatures, he stopped me and said, “all this stuff is confusing…I’m so busy thinking about what the note is called and where it is on the keyboard that it blots out what I hear in my head!”  He immediately reverted to his how to play piano by ear method and was ‘romping’ up and down the keyboard with complex chords that I, with a music degree, had difficulty categorizing!  That’s especially significant when you realize that only 5 minutes before he saw his first B-flat.

I stopped him and asked, “how do you do that, how did you learn those complex chords?”  He looked at me with a look of surprise and said, “well, I heard that tune on the radio this morning and now I’m just playing back what I heard.”  He still couldn’t tell A-flat from Z-sharp but he was putting together combinations of notes, none of which he knew the names of, into incredibly complex chords.  What’s more, his chord progressions were classic.  He was constantly in demand for ‘gigs.’  Go figure!

This intrigued me even more so I began to probe into his how to play piano by ear approach and he could do this.  To make a long story short he had grown up in a rather poor household.  The only entertainment they had was the family piano.  He began playing by ‘picking’ out tunes he heard.  Over time, by repeatedly relying on his ear he developed an uncanny ability to hear subtle differences in chords and he had experimented enough with the piano that he could replicate them.  As he learned how to play by ear he soon developed a set of standard patterns that he was able to apply to almost any song.  After that, to him, one song was pretty much like another except that the melody line was different.

I go through my family music history not to bore you but to point out that too many aspiring musicians get so caught up in the technical aspects of making music that they forget to be natural with it.  They don’t trust their ear because they don’t know WHAT to listen for or what they are hearing. 

Not to fear though because there are some tips and tricks that my dad accidently stumbled upon when he learned how to play piano by ear that are available with the right courses.  That sounds all well and good and easy enough but how do you find those courses and distinguish them from those that are basically ‘tone deaf’….sorry couldn’t resist the temptation to throw that little ‘pfunny’ in there.

In my research to find some of these I ran up on some outstanding courses.  Several reviews can be found on the left for different courses but in Rocket Piano you get a module that is very appropriate for this discussion.  It’s a free software package called ‘Perfect Your Pitch Pro’ which not only helps you learn how to play piano by ear but also to transcribe songs and play piano better in the process.  It’s included FREE with the course.  

Once you get into this area you get into the music world my dad occupied.  Music was always fun with him and he played like a pro.

Click here for Rocket Piano and learn how to play piano by ear