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Play Guitar By Ear: Don’t Make These Mistakes

By Mike Hayes | June 23, 2010

With the average person on the street walking around with over
five thousand tunes on their iPod and guitar players learning the
latest songs on YouTube it’s easy to be mesmerized by all the
technology, yes, everything is moving faster than ever before
we’re hurtling along at breakneck speed … but where are we
going?

Well, all this stuff must surely make for better, faster, smarter
learning; I disagree, it’s a mistake to think that science and
technology will fix it all for us; history has proven time and
time again that the problems of human existence have never been
answered by the progress we witness in technology and other
sciences. The human being has always had to live with himself or
herself.

It’s a fatal mistake to:

(a) Think that by filling our iPods to the brim with thousands of
songs and swamping our ears with music that we will become more
musical or maybe even become a music expert (too late the world
is full of them already!)

(b) Watch a guitar video copying the ‘instructors’ every move
without the individual spending enough time to develop their own
ear to the point where they could discern if the material they
were ‘learning’ was in fact correct.

Unfortunately, 90% of guitarists fall into the category of
musical fringe dwellers, people who may be quite skillful on their
instrument but musically illiterate, players who do not know how
to speak the language of music who can neither read or write
standard musical notation.

The bulk of guitarists are therefore cut off from the vast blood
bank of accumulated knowledge that the rest of the musical world
benefits from; unable to understand or even care about what they
are doing the fringe dwelling guitarist is drawn like a moth to a
flame to the ‘easy way out solutions’, the fix-it-all-in-five-
minutes style books and the monkey-see-monkey-do videos.

If you don’t know what you are doing why bother doing it!

The truth is: There are no short cuts in music; you have to
practice, study and learn to be patient with your self, but
the rewards are well worth the effort, ear training is one such
area of musical training that gets the ‘rough end of the
pineapple’ when it comes to guitar training.

For the other 10% of the guitar playing community who want to
develop total musicianship as applied to the guitar.

Here’s an easy way to remember the minor third interval.

Step 1: play middle ‘C’ as your reference pitch.

middle ‘C’ = third string; fifth fret

——-
——-
–5—-
——-
——-
——-

Step 2: play the minor third (ascending) interval (Eb)

Eb = second string; fourth fret

——-
–4—-
——-
——-
——-
——-

Please note – there is an interval called the minor third
(descending) interval; in this article I am focusing
exclusively on the minor third (ascending) interval.

Step 3: Play middle ‘C” then slowly and carefully play the minor
third interval (Eb); repeat this process s-l-o-w-l-y then play
both notes at once like a mini-chord to get a ‘feel’ of how this
interval sounds harmonically.

Play the minor third interval as a mini-chord

——-
–4—-
–5—-
——-
——-
——-

Step 4: Use well known tunes to help you remember the sound of
the interval; here’s a few tunes that begin with the minor third
(ascending) interval.

The first two notes in each of these tunes produce the minor
third (ascending) interval.

Tunes that begin with a minor third (ascending) interval

1. Axel F (Beverly Hills Cop)

2 Smoke On The Water

3. Greensleeves

4. Georgia On My Mind

5. Bad (Michael Jackson)

and many more …

Developing your musical ear is an ‘active’ process you must
constantly be asking yourself ‘what is that sound?’ when you are
listening to music try to identify the intervals you are hearing
it takes practice, patience and perseverance but it will
ultimately enable you to accurately play songs ‘by ear’ on the
guitar.

Topics: Ear Training, Guitar Fretboard | No Comments »

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