Better Guitar Playing

Teaching yourself to play guitar by ear is something all guitarists can train themselves to do. There is no mysterious art to being able to play by ear. In reality, what it takes is practice to build up your ability to differentiate the chords and scales that are being played.

I shall detail in this article some techniques and drills which I have used over the last 20 years playing guitar to train myself to play by ear.

Starting out, you want to focus on differentiating major from minor chords. A training drill for this is to record yourself (tape, MP3, to your computer) playing a sequence of major chords (A up to G). Then record the same chord sequence but change a major chord with a single minor chord. Once you play it back, you should be able to say to yourself whether each chord is major or minor when you hear it played.

You can refine this by listening to songs on the radio or advertisement jingles on TV and picking out the major or minor chords. You can check if you are correct by playing your guitar along with the tune. Start by just playing the bass note (E string) to find the root note then try playing the major and minor chords and decide which sounds better to your ears. For example, the root note could be ‘g’ so play a G-major followed by a G-minor along with the tune and see which fits better. This is not perfect as complex tunes could have bass to chord variation (for example a ‘g’ bass note played with a C major chord).

Proceeding on from this you should begin to focus on chord progressions. This simply involves listening to songs and trying to figure out the progression of chords being played. Pick a tune and break it down into its the verses, chorus and bridge. Take each verse/chorus/bridge and try to work out the chords used. You might find that most verses use two/four chords for each line of the song or that the chorus repeats four chords. Playing along with the tune to find the chords and start to build up a map of the chords. You can writing these down at first but move to memorizing the chords and their progression.

With some practice playing along with various songs, you will have internalized several chord sequences and should start seeing that the majority of songs use standard templates for their structure and chord progressions and in how they group chords (major/minor/sevenths/etc.).

The fun part of playing by ear is that you can never stop learning. There is always a new songwriter or musical genre (rap, jazz, metal, etc) that you can analyse and attempt to decipher the chord sequence and chord types. As you improve, you will begin to be able to pick out of a song complex chords (sevenths, diminished chords, jazz chords, etc) to the point that you should be able to play along with most songs after a single listen.

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