anyone learn songs by ear?

[Hope Mikaelson]

ive been playing guitar for 7 years off and on but i just recently have ben learning songs by ear for the first time in my life the past couple weeks. been learning the melody line and the chords by ear. its amazing, ive figured out taylor swift, shawn mendes, shakira, justin bieber, katy perry, sabrina carpenter, and selena gomez songs by ear! I didn't know I have this skill, until my voice teacher encouraged me to start learning songs by ear to improve my sense of pitch. i also have had high frequency hearing loss since i was young so i didnt think i could ever do this!

 

[Hope Mikaelson]

despite my hearing loss i can still hear the mids and lows in the music just fine.

 

[Brother-Mike]

Cool! Likewise I play piano but only by ear.

 

[Hope Mikaelson]

Cool! Likewise I play piano but only by ear.

That’s great! How long have you been playing? Do you play a piano or a keyboard? I almost bought an 1800 dollar keyboard this week, but I ended up ordering a MIDI controller for 180 dollars instead so I can just use it to play piano through the different programs on the PC and I can run the signal through an amp.

 

[Brother-Mike]

I've been playing since I was a little lad able to climb up on my grandparent's piano bench. I've got a (now ancient) Korg X3 Music Workstation, but most of the time I'm just playing with it's piano, tuned just right with reverb/echo to my ear.

Yeah, today all you need I think is a good MIDI controller keyboard and everything else you can do in software

 

[ElCamino]

I've been doing that since I was a teen. Other people often think it's a sort of super power.

When I started playing with bands in my teens (late 90s), we still didn't have the option of downloading the tabs for any song we wanted from the Internet; so I'd usually do the transcriptions for the songs we wanted to cover.

 

[Brother-Mike]

I've been doing that since I was a teen. Other people often think it's a sort of super power.

When I started playing with bands in my teens (late 90s), we still didn't have the option of downloading the tabs for any song we wanted from the Internet; so I'd usually do the transcriptions for the songs we wanted to cover.

Funny you mention about “super power”. This was to me always something that seemed very natural. I was always more perplexed that anyone CAN’T do it

 

[Hope Mikaelson]

i did figure out a simple piano riff by ear once around 11 or 12 and shocked everyone. but i never actually made a concerted effort to improve my musical ear and learn entire songs by ear until the last couple weeks

 

[Davy]

I used to play guitar, being a child of the 70's and classic Rock.

And it's not fair, because today one can buy a digital phrase recorder to figure out solos and parts when in the 70's we had to keep moving the record player needle back and forth. I scratched a bunch... of good LPs back then learning Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jimi Hendrix riffs and chords.

I found that to get the chord structure of a song by ear, I'd follow the bass notes. Once I had that then it was just a matter of time to figure out what chord type was being played. I didn't get into heavy metal, so I didn't have to bother with their power chord stuff which most of the time was only a 2-note interval simulating a chord. With a lot of distortion, 2 notes can sound like a full chord.