Learning to play guitar by ear is a skill all guitar players can accomplish. There is no art to being able to play by ear. All it takes is some practice to coach your capacity to differentiate the scales and chords that are being played in a tune.
This article has some drills and techniques that I have used over twenty five years to train myself to play by ear.
At a starter level, you should aim to be able to differentiate between major and minor chords. To do this, a simple drill is to record yourself (tape/MP3) playing a group of major chords (for example, A to G). Then record alternate versions of your chord group but this time replace a single major chord with a single minor chord. On playing back the versions, listen closely for the different chords. You should be able differentiate whether each chord is major or minor as it is played.
You can fine tune this by listening to tunes on the radio or TV ads and picking out major or minor chords. Confirm if you are correct by playing your guitar along with the tune or (if its a song, searching for the chords/tab online). If playing along, then start by just playing the bass note (the E-string) to find the main bass note then try playing the major/minor chord from this and decide for yourself how this sounds to your own ears. As an example, the root note could be ‘c’ so play a C-major chord followed by a C-minor chord with the tune and listen out for which sounds closer to the original tune. This is by no means perfect as complex tunes could have complex chord/bass variations (for example a ‘d’ bass note played with an A major chord) or more ‘colorful’ chords (sevenths, diminished, jazz chords, partial chords, etc.).
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.
After some practice playing along with a variety of songs, you will have memorized a number of sequences and will start to see that most songs follow some fairly standard structures or templates in how they combine verse/chorus/bridge and also in how they group chords (major and minor).
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.
Teach yourself acoustic guitar by jamming along with recognisable tunes. Ann reviewed Jamorama’s online course which shows you how to play a guitar by simply jamming along. Covers all skill levels.
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