Author: Steve Epstein
Date: 2007-05-19 20:48
There are people for whom playing by ear is a natural process. They just do it, and the more they do it, the better they get at doing it. I know musicians to whom if I play a tune, they will play it right back to me, with the same ease that I can sight-read it. It's as if they have a skill you might call "ear-reading".
I have no doubt about two things: Sight reading and ear playing are skills that 1) can be learned, but 2) people have different natural abilities. If you do not have a lot of natural ability with one or the other, you can learn with hard work but you will never be as good as someone else with considerably more natural ability who does not work nearly so hard at it. It may be so hard to learn one or the other that for practical purposes you really can't learn it; there isn't enough time.
Reading predominates of course in classical music and if you are a poor reader you will have trouble playing with other musicians, even on an amateur level. But playing by ear is the basis of folk and pop and a lack of sufficient ear playing skill closes much of this world off to you, as I can personally attest. Jazz uses both, and requires both to participate in the full range of jazz activities, but a good ear player / poor reader can do a heck of a lot more small combo-wise than the other way around, once the ear player develops his "repertoire" and also uses his ear for improv.
Some other opinions of mine:
Memorizing and playing by ear are two different things.
Being able to improvise to chord changes, even w/o the written music in front of you, is different than being able to learn a melody by ear note for note.
I don't play any instruments other than clarinet and sax, but know enough about tune structure, e.g., I - V, I - IV progressions, that if I played guitar or piano I could probably deduce the chords to tunes that followed simple progressions.
Many ear players use other clues: Guitar players, in particular, watch other guitar players' hand positions to pick up tunes.
You can have any mix and match of the above-mentioned skills in terms of natural ability.
It always amazes me when a good ear player has to ask, "What's the key?" When you're a good ear player you should be able to hear that. I'm a poor ear player but can always find the key or the root.
If you are deficient in either ear playing or reading, don't feel so bad. There are people who are deficient at both. Those folks are truly bad players, because there's no way they can actually play.
My $0.02
Steve Epstein
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