Try singing/whistling the melody while playing it at the same time.
Ask HN: What does it feel like to master playing an instrument by ear?
21–30 of 68 posts
Re: Ask HN: What does it feel like to master playing an instrument by ear?
#22Practice practice practice. It feels like speaking another language. You hear phrases and you play phrases. Practice practice practice. The more you practice, the bigger your phrases become.
Re: Ask HN: What does it feel like to master playing an instrument by ear?
#23It feels like being able to hear someone say something and repeat it back to them :) Fluency comes from learning theory implicitly. Implicit theory knowledge comes from spending a lot of time listening to music you want to emulate, and then painstakingly emulating it on your instrument. Your mistakes will elucidate the nature of the music. - Jazz Pianist
I completely agree with this. Learning music theory helped me play by ear because it helped me associate a feeling with a progression or chord. This made learning by trial and error much easier, since it stuck more (I tried it without much success when I was younger).
- Also Jazz Pianist
Re: Ask HN: What does it feel like to master playing an instrument by ear?
#24Both saxophone and guitar I used to be able to play by ear. One of my favorite experiences was finding two other sax players and playing the "Back in Black" album by AC/DC. Just loved the sound and chords with the depth of the wind instruments. Eventually we met a trumpet and bass player too who could do that.
I could pick up Mario, Zelda and other game songs, idk it was just fun. That level of fluency was actually learning notes first, but doing free form jazz and blues for probably 45 minutes a day (at least) for two to four years.
Once I left junior college and moved to university I dropped all my music. Just bought a house, plan to pick it up again -- need the daily practice.
Re: Ask HN: What does it feel like to master playing an instrument by ear?
#25As a teen I could play 10+ musical instruments - ranging from piano to trumpet, violin, etc. Initially I also played by ear, but I soon tired of the trial and error. So I learnt to read music and a some of music theory. With that framework I was able to understand each instrument better and thus structure my practice better - yes, learning scales, fingerings, etc.
I would write the score for music I heard and then practice from that. It also helped me heaps to write the lyrics against the score to improve the dynamics, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What does it feel like to master playing an instrument by ear?
#26I learned the piano well enough to play for money in college. Close your eyes - it’s all muscle memory. Experiment and learn multiple chords and keys. And it takes about 7 years practicing 3-5 Times a week.
Re: Ask HN: What does it feel like to master playing an instrument by ear?
#27The short answer is it feels effing awesome to have that kind of instinctive ability to hear something, and play it back, instantly and accurately.
However, it's a bit more nuanced than that. Playing the notes accurately is only one aspect of playing music. Playing the notes accurately and expressively is really what you're aiming for.
There are a couple of distinct skills you can build to do this:
1. Training your ear to recognize chords and melody notes. This requires a lot of active listening to music, and learning music theory, so you can recognize what's being played.
2. Building the motor skills on your instrument so you can play many kinds chords and notes, instinctively. This requires hundreds (or thousands) of hours of practice.
Then the trick is putting the two together: listening to music, recognizing the chords and notes being played, and then playing them back yourself on your instrument.
Now the harmonium is a relatively simple and limited instrument consisting of a bellows and a small keyboard (usually 2.5-3.5 octaves). Most of the "chords" on this instrument are actually played with the bellows blowing air over banks of reeds. So you don't really need to build a lot of muscle memory to play chords (as you would on a piano). And melodies on the harmonium are typically played slowly.
So learning to play the harmonium won't take as much practice as say a piano or a guitar would. You could get quite good at the harmonium with say 500 hours of practice, which is not actually that long.
In terms of practical steps, I'd probably watch a lot of harmonium videos on YouTube and try to get your harmonium to sound like what they're playing in the video.
One major difficulty you're going to have is that different harmoniums can sound quite different, depending on how many reed banks a harmonium has, how many octaves its keyboard has, whether various stops are pulled out, etc.
So I don't think it'll be easy to truly sound just like what you're hearing because the variation between your harmonium and the other harmoniums out there is quite big.
Hope this is helpful!
Me: I'm a classically trained pianist and I've owned and played harmoniums in the past.
Re: Ask HN: What does it feel like to master playing an instrument by ear?
#28It feels the same as touch-typing on a keyboard. My brain envisions the pitch I want, and my fingers know where to find it.
Musically though, pay attention to the feeling of notes relative to the root of the key you're in (as opposed to in isolation). You can envision a keyboard in your head and map the movement of pitch to movement on the imaginary keyboard. There are only so many notes in a Western major scale; eventually you will find that notes from a melody fall into place on this imaginary keyboard as you hear them, and you can translate that into finger movements.
This won't come overnight. It took me about ten years of being musically active to be able to figure things out by ear; another ten to be able to do so on the first try (i.e. hearing pitches as easily as words in a conversation). These periods were punctuated by a solfege class which I credit with helping me develop the latter ability. If you are still in school take such a class if you can find one.
Re: Ask HN: What does it feel like to master playing an instrument by ear?
#29It feels like being able to hear someone say something and repeat it back to them :) Fluency comes from learning theory implicitly. Implicit theory knowledge comes from spending a lot of time listening to music you want to emulate, and then painstakingly emulating it on your instrument. Your mistakes will elucidate the nature of the music. - Jazz Pianist
Interesting, so it's just practice followed by more practice? Something I've recently started is putting on a music video and then trying to play along with it. It's pretty tough, but I manage a few bits here and there...
It helps a lot to be able to recognize if something is on a standard diatonic scale & chord progression, or uses chromatics and modulations. It greatly reduces the search space if you know the notes and chords you're trying to find are out of 7 choices rather than 12/48+.
If you can't recognize that yet, finding tablature or sheet music can help you tell for a given song, before you go banging your head against a wall trying to figure out something that is musically unusual.
Re: Ask HN: What does it feel like to master playing an instrument by ear?
#30> How do those that can play "fluently" know which keys to press?
There are a lot of possibilities. I'll take a stab at one.
Let's say I want to play The Eagles' Desperado on the piano. Here's what I'm doing in realtime:
* I start singing the melody
* I visualize a piano keyboard and imagine the note where I start the melody
* I play a note on an invisible keyboard in the air with my right hand
* for each note I sing, I move my fingers synchronously to play the corresponding note on the invisible keyboard (right hand only)
* I get comfortable doing this. If my hand goes to a note that I feel uncertain about, I do a quick sanity check to make sure my hand is still playing the correct invisible note to correspond with what I'm singing.
Here's a simplified example of the error correction-- if I'm in C major and I know I'm singing middle C, I make sure my hand is playing an invisible middle C. If it's instead playing a different note then I messed up somewhere along the way. Playing and identifying the pitch "C" when playing in C major is really easy to do, so it makes a good anchor point for beginners. In practice I've got about three types of anchor points that I can track in realtime: the key I'm in, the relationship of the pitch I'm singing to that key, and the relationship of the pitch I'm singing to the chord I'm playing. Those anchors greatly limit the degree to which I can make a mistake, at least in a simple tonal piece like Desperado that doesn't modulate.
* as I do this, I start noticing that I'm singing grace notes so I make my right hand play those invisible grace notes. It goes alright.
* Now I try singing the corny Sax riff from George Michael's "Never Gonna Dance Again" over the B section-- where the lyrics go, "Don't you draw the queen of of diamonds, boy." The riff actually lines up alright and my hand keeps up.
* Now I try singing some hemiolas and some gospel-type melismas. My hand plays some questionable pitches. I go back and analyze the parts I messed up, trying to figure out where my fingers got tangled up. (Also noticing that I messed up due to singing in a very inaccurate manner.)
* Now I add the left hand. C chord, C chord, C 13, C chord, F chord, F minor in first inversion, 16th octaves descending stepwise from Ab down to E. That creates a doubled 3rd in the chord but the right hand melody leaps away... During this I drop the melismas in the right hand and play the melody straight to keep the harmony shared by both hands moving in realtime. Once I dropped the inner voices (i.e., stopped playing them) and just got the bass in octaves and melody...
When I actually sit down at a piano, I'll be more fluid and accurate at playing Desperado. Because the process I just described away from the instrument is essentially the same process that I follow at the instrument.
Now, if I wanted to add some more interesting chord substitutions and develop something like, say, a gospel style in the inner voices and bass patterns, I'd probably be back where you refer to as "trial and error," working out details without being able to play them in realtime at first. That is to say, most people never gain "fluency" in the sense of just sit down and play anything that you hear with ease. So make sure you're having fun guessing and checking now. Because once you improve to your desired level you'll still have the feeling of guessing and checking with new techniques and sounds.