How To Practice

Now that you’re familiar with the Play-By-Ear Process, let’s look at a number of activities you can use to practice this process and move yourself along the play-by-ear spectrum.

1. Echo-back singing and playing

A big stumbling block for the aspiring by-ear player is to jump straight to their favourite song and trying to play it by ear. That can be an interesting thing to try (if approached with a Growth Mindset!) but hopefully you can see from our exploration of the Play-By-Ear Process how much of a leap that is, to attempt as a first step!

To give ourselves a chance to gradually develop our play-by-ear skills, we want to be able to work with short, simple, isolated melodies to begin with. From there we can expand to longer, more complex, and more fully-arranged music.

In our training modules at Musical U we provide sample melodies to practice with and you’ll find some provided inside the Additional Resources.

However, there’s actually a source of simple melodies already available to you, which provides ultimate flexibility to match your current abilities and allow gradual progress… you!

In this exercise we are merging Listen and Engage, and simplifying the Express stage, but it’s a great way to start easing into the Play-By-Ear Process and still developing some essential skills. In Chapter 15: Improvisation we’ll explore this same idea in more depth, as the “Play-Listen/Listen-Play” feedback loop.

If you like, you can adapt this exercise from “echo back” to call-and-response, by letting what you play back on your instrument be a musical “reply” to the first phrase rather than an exact repetition. This is a great stepping stone to Improvisation!

This exercise may seem like “cheating” in Playing By Ear, since you already know the notes featured, but:

1. A. It is still very effective for connecting Hearing and Hands, and
2. You can employ the same extension as in our Part II exercises: record yourself doing this exercise, and later return to the recording. Now you will need to find the notes yourself! To make this one notch easier, you might like to speak the name of the tonic note you choose each time.

The exercise can also be a great way to practice that “translation” from a Relative Pitch representation into a certain key, by challenging yourself to echo back the phrase in a series of different keys, rather than only the one you heard.

2. Example Songs

In Chapter 9: Solfa we provide a set of Starter Songs, and you’ll find recordings in the Additional Resources. These provide a range of simple melodies, with some known constraints (using particular scale degrees and rhythmic building blocks), and so are great ones to practice Playing By Ear with.

Remember that anything you happen to know about these songs already isn’t “cheating” but can be more usefully considered a “stepping stone” in your learning journey.

3. Your Music Library

We said above that jumping straight to trying to play your favourite song by ear would likely be too big a leap, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still make great use of your own music library to practice Playing By Ear.

The two important things to keep in mind are:

1. Focus on a certain prominent part, for example the vocal melody or the bassline, for just a short section of the song at a time.
2. Give yourself a lot of grace! Remember “Trial and Improvement”, and how much your skills will develop through the process of figuring it out.

4. Combine with Improvisation

If you are developing your Improvisation skills too, you will be producing a rich catalog of musical examples in every practice session! And one big advantage is that you will necessarily be playing a range and complexity of music which is comfortable for you.

Simply record your improv practice, and then return to the recording later, pausing after each phrase you improvised, to try to play it back by ear.

This can become a very powerful combination for you, letting you move both your Improvisation and Playing By Ear skills forwards in tandem, sharing all the Head, Hearing, Hands and Heart abilities and connections across two quite different (but related) activities.

This has the added benefit of giving you the opportunity to do what Next Level coach Andy Portas refers to as “mining for diamonds”. What did you play during last week’s improv practice that really stood out to you now and inspired you to more creativity when you played it again? Taking on this role of the engaged listener gives you a whole new (and likely more appreciative!) perspective on your own creativity.

5. Playing Full Arrangements By Ear

Depending on your instrument, your play-by-ear goal may be to play full arrangements of songs rather than the isolated melodies we’ve focused on above. In particular, piano and keyboard players who come to us at Musical U typically want to be able to play solo piano renditions, where the listener would tend to expect a full harmonised arrangement played with both hands, rather than an unaccompanied melody alone!

From the chapter so far you will understand that this is a continuation of the same skillset, and that full arrangement can be approached piece by piece.

Your goal may be to replicate the original source arrangement note-for-note, or it may be to replicate the melody and provide some musically-satisfying accompaniment. In both cases you can use a combination of:

1. The melody-by-ear skills covered so far,
2. The Chord Progression building blocks covered in Part II,
3. Active Listening to determine the Texture and Form,
4. Ideas from the chapters on Improvisation and Songwriting to inform your own creative accompaniment

Remember our analogy of “painting a picture bit by bit” and the helpful Express activity of transcribing, so that you can gradually assemble your own version in a relaxed way.

It’s also worth noting that technique and vocabulary, in your Head and Hands, will be invaluable here. For example, familiarising yourself with common left-hand chording patterns and chord voicings on piano can provide a larger kind of “building block” for you to recognise or select, rather than just playing chords as block Triad chords.

As always, it’s important to keep your Big Picture Vision in mind. Don’t assume that unless you can replicate a complex piano arrangement note-for-note, you “can’t play piano by ear”. You may find that getting to a decent level with playing melodies by ear and harmonising them with a variety of patterns lets you play the music you love by ear in a way that fully meets your musical goals.