
Ask HN: What does it feel like to master playing an instrument by ear? - osrec
I&#x27;m learning the harmonium (a middle Eastern instrument, similar to an accordion). I&#x27;m teaching myself and I want to be able to play by ear. I can play a few tunes, and can slowly work things out by trial and error and <i>some</i> intuition.<p>I want to know what it feels like to be able to play an instrument without needing so much trial and error. How do those that can play &quot;fluently&quot; know which keys to press? How long does it take to get to that level of fluency?<p>I&#x27;m hoping that by understanding the mindset of someone who has achieved that level, I can have something to aim for when I&#x27;m practicing.<p>Thanks :)
======
acconrad
I learned the guitar playing by ear. As a kid I would just lock myself in my
bedroom and play along with my CDs until my fingers were raw.

It's a _lot_ of screwing up, starting the song over, and trying again until it
sounds right. I started doing this about 20 years ago so I've had quite a bit
of practice, but at this point it's really a great feeling to listen to a song
on YouTube and know pretty much before I pick up the guitar whether I'm
capable of playing it within an hour or so.

It just takes practice. Lots of it. Lots of trial and error. Lots of screw
ups. And just embracing/loving the process.

Actually the last part is the most important, because I _love_ playing the
guitar. I love music. I play 5 different instruments and music is a deeply
important part of my life. My desire to play along to the songs I love trumps
wanting to learn it in a more traditional fashion. I could have taken guitar
lessons or gotten a teacher to learn proper theory and all of that. But all of
that stuff just got in the way of what I wanted to do: play the music I love.
Now.

So just go out there and fiddle with your instrument and play along to stuff
you like!

~~~
osrec
Thank you! It's pretty much the way I'm trying to learn at the moment. Tbh, I
felt my learning process was a bit unstructured, but knowing that you've
persevered and got to a high level of proficiency this way gives me a lot of
encouragement!

~~~
ehnto
I learned the same way, however I really wish I learned theory too (and am
teaching myself now).

The best way I can describe the limitation is that it's like knowing the
shapes of the bottles for the ingredients to a recipe, but you don't know the
names or the "why" of how it all works. You can't talk to other musicians
about music and you can find yourself doodling the same old songs and patterns
over and over. It is harder to get out of your box I feel.

~~~
acconrad
Fun fact: I am now learning theory and chord names.

I was in a band in college and I could never play along with the properly
trained. "Can you play that in a C minor pentatonic scale?"

"Yeah!... So what frets are those?"

~~~
donorman
And now days you just browse
[www.fretflip.com]([https://www.fretflip.com/021634424968](https://www.fretflip.com/021634424968))
on your cellphone and booom you got that instantly! Or.. now days you just
know that stuff by heart :-)

~~~
mikestew
Yeah, but this ain’t The Matrix where you just pull it up, and now you know
kung fu. You still need to _practice_ that Cm pentatonic, or you’re just going
to fumble around on the fly. For instance, as an experienced musician, I think
to myself, “oh, C pentatonic, flat the third”. Live, on the fly, and I’ll
probably play a few natural thirds, but hey, we’re jammin’, who cares?

Back to the original question, almost everything music-related comes down to
“practice”. In this case practice discerning intervals between notes (there
are mobile apps). Practice scales. Practice scales with interval jumps (first
to third to fifth, or whatever). Practice scales starting on (say) the third.

But first and foremost, as already mentioned here, get a teacher. Show them
this post. They can set you on the start of your journey. Be forewarned, it
will be a multi-year process of consistent practice. Getting in a hurry will
be your biggest enemy.

How long does it take, OP asks? Depends on how hard and how well you practice.
There probably is some ethereal quality we call “talent” that plays a small
part, but if decades of playing music has taught me anything, it is that your
level of dedication to the instrument is a larger factor than “talent”.
Because the most “talented” musicians I know coincidentally play a _lot_. :-)

~~~
ehnto
Talent can only get your foot in the door I feel. You see a lot of talented
people pick up a topic, do exceedingly well at the basics then just walk away.
It's time, dedication and practice that take you from the clever kid destined
for great things to a capable musician/crafstman/artisan/programmer.

There parallels between software and music proficiency are pretty strong in
this regard. There is a big difference between a clever person who can learn
quickly and an experienced programmer with niche domain knowledge earned over
years. In the same way musicianship is more than being able to play an
instrument.

------
hluska
My grandmother could play by ear. I was always amazed that we could go for a
drive, hear a song on the radio, go home and Grandma would play it on her
violin.

One day when I was about 9 or 10, I asked her how she did it and why I
couldn't. She said that the key was to start playing an instrument really
young and then play constantly until you were in your sixties.

Loads and loads of practice is the key to doing it. As far as how it felt, my
Grandma always smiled when she was playing music so I assume it felt pretty
good.

------
binarysolo
Think about how you learned a spoken language and when you were able to spend
time articulating ideas instead of thinking about words and grammar for it.
That's kinda how mastering a music instrument is like.

Basically the first few years of anything (music or not) seems to be about
correct articulation/grammar/vocabulary, and beyond that it's about the
quality of expression.

(former classically trained concert violinist of 10+ years, hobbyist latin
dancer of 10+ years - swapped a musical instrument for a physical one as an
optimization to go along with long periods of desk work)

~~~
osrec
Thanks - that's a very interesting way to look at it!

------
colanderman
It 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.

------
dragonsky67
That's a really interesting question.

My experience is in playing Clarinet since I was about 10 years old,
professionally for a year or two and more sporadically over the last 10 years.
(I'm 50ish)

I can play clarinet (even now) without any difficulty, can (re)play music I've
heard a couple of times (memory is getting worse as I get older) and sight
read music fairly easily as long as it's not too fast or complex.

For the last 20 or so years, I've had access to a piano, and have attempted to
teach myself how to play two handed. I can play melodies by ear, and add some
simple chord accompaniment but have not a hope of reading two handed music to
play.

Most other instruments, as long as I can master the technique for producing a
decent sound and get my hands around the fingering, I can also play fairly
successfully by ear. So I can pick up a guitar and pluck out a melody, pick up
my daughters violin (groan) and squeak out someting that you can recognise. My
technique sucks and I'm prob not doing it correctly. I can also do a pretty
decent job of singing anything I hear.

My experience leads me to suspect that playing by ear is, like singing
something you have heard, the natural way of making music. The only difference
is that you need to have physical mastery of the sound making process, hence
my difficulty with two handed playing piano as I've no experience with making
music with each had playing something different.

------
anentropic
I can play guitar by ear (within reason - it's much easier for idioms I'm
familiar with, and I don't have perfect pitch, so I need a quick exploration
to find the key first).

I had some guitar lessons as a teenager, covering a mix of technique,
vocabulary and theory. But I was not academically schooled in music.

There are two things that help develop this skill I think, extrapolating from
my own experience:

One is, when learning a piece I find it useful to hum or sing the notes I am
trying to learn. i.e. play back a bit of the recording, then pause and hum it
to myself while finding the notes on the instrument. It sounds trivial and
obvious, but it helps build the connections and to hear the music in your
head.

I think part of being able to do it involves "having the instrument in your
head".

The second tip is then to follow on from the first but do it without a
recording and without the instrument in your hands. Hum the notes to yourself
and try to imagine where they are on the "instrument in your head". If you
don't already know the key just choose an arbitrary one. This helps two things
- develop the instrument in your head, also a sense of relative pitch
(intervals) between the individual notes in sequence, and also between each
note and the key centre.

I distinctly remember as a teenager this was something I liked to do while on
my way to and from school - hearing back a guitar solo in my head and trying
to play it, in my head. And then when I got home I could try it out on the
instrument and see how close I was.

------
laurieg
Let me bring in a metaphor that might help.

I grew up monolingual, and only acquired a second language in adulthood. When
I was younger I would ask people what it was like to speak two languages, what
was going on in their heads, what did it feel like and so on. It seemed like
magic.

Then I moved to another country and slowly, over the years I picked up another
language. Each individual step felt small. Nothing magical was happening each
time. But sooner or later I could speak another language fluently. Somewhat
disappointingly, there was no magic in my head. It just felt 'normal'.

I suspect this is what having a great ear for music feels like. You're either
born with it or build it through many many years of practice. Because of this,
it never seems particularly special to the holder.

(An aside: I played trumpet for 4 years in high school and still cannot tell
if a song is in a major key or minor key, and cannot tune an instrument so if
anyone has the secret to gaining a musical ear I'm 'all ears'.)

------
upveto
It 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

~~~
pattrn
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

~~~
matt_the_bass
For me the theory helps me understand how to execute what I hear in my head.

------
vagab0nd
I started playing the piano around 4 but gave up around 12. I can play by ear
pretty easily, meaning listening to a song and just play the main rhythm. It
always feels natural to me, so I guess I didn't feel anything special about
it. It wasn't until much later did I realize not everybody can do it.

An interesting side effect of this, is that whenever I hear a piece of music,
I can correlate the notes to the keys on the piano, such that next time I sing
that song, it can start at the exact same pitch. (Just looked it up and it's
called "Absolute pitch"[0])

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch)

------
b4hand
Some people mentioned learning absolute pitch, but I've played an instrument
for many years without achieving what I would call absolute pitch. However,
I'd say you can learn relative pitch in a much shorter time if you learn some
basic music theory.

Just making this stat up on the spot, but probably 90+% of traditional Western
music is played in either a major or minor scale or some combination of both.
Being able to identify major and minor is fairly simple and can probably be
learned in a few hours and refined over a few weeks. This will let you
categorize much of the music you hear into two buckets. From there you can
learn about intervals. The majority of music is in a major scale, so you can
start with those. Play scales and play the various intervals. Play them slowly
and repeatedly. With practice you can easily identify the intervals and this
will help you identify the jumps between notes in songs. Then it's quite easy
to fine tune to the exact scale and octave by simple comparison between a
recording and what you're playing. With more practice you'll begin to identify
common scales for categories of songs.

------
matt_the_bass
The simple answer is practice... A lot of it. There is no quick fix.

I think some basic theory and ability to read music helps.

The best way to get better is to play with other musicians who are better than
you This can be stressful and it might not last long since they may get tired
of playing with someone below their level. However being humble and honest
about your abilities (with them) goes a long way.

For me, the feeling is a lot like coming home from a great first date: you
can’t stop thinking about it and your willing to sacrifice other parts of your
life to schedule it again as soon as possible.

Good luck!

------
odessacubbage
i tend to play by ear but it's more of a bad habit with limited usefulness
than anything else, there's no real reason to romanticize it. simply spend
enough time with any instrument and producing the right sounds will become
intuitive.

>I want to know what it feels like to be able to play an instrument without
needing so much trial and error.

then i highly suggest you focus on learning music theory rather than trying to
look cool. gaining an understanding of musical structure will help you gain
that intuition faster than anything else. you'll still be playing by ear, you
just wont be playing in the dark

~~~
osrec
Thanks. Where do you suggest I start? Are there any beginner books or YouTube
videos you can suggest?

~~~
jlarocco
There are lectures from one of Yale's Music Theory classes on YouTube here:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9LXrs9vCXK56qtyK4qcq...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9LXrs9vCXK56qtyK4qcqwHrbf0em_81r)

There's a Kindle version of the textbook on Amazon.

------
chairmanmow
I'd say the trick to "playing by ear" is to learn to improvise over things
keeping in mind the key you're playing in. I think there's this misconception
that "playing by ear" means you hear a song once and then you play it note for
note. In theory, this can work if you have a great memory, but really the
trick there isn't some musicianship skill, it just means you can remember how
the song goes better than other people, then when you sit at your instrument,
you kind of have an idea of where it starts and finishes and go from there.

I have a terrible time remembering songs by rote memorization, but as long as
I can remember where it starts, goes and ends I can probably pick it back up,
just by remembering the chord the song starts on. It's because I've improvised
a ton in different keys and I know my pallet of notes to choose from. I'm
familiar with what chord colorations are available and I know how melodies
tend to move. Do I hit wrong notes? Sometimes, but I guess if I know they're
wrong and correct them I'm still playing by ear, but I'm also playing a little
bit by theory too, the theory kinda shrinks the constraints of playing by ear.

If I see a chord progression, let's say G-C-D, I don't remember it that way. I
remember it as a I-IV-V progression in the key of G. It helps.

------
kbob
I started playing the sax in fourth grade (age 9). I took lessons and played
in school band. By ninth grade, I could usually play back what I heard. When I
heard a melody, I heard specific notes and intervals. I think learning to hear
that way was harder than learning to subconsciously play notes.

The skill transferred to the bassoon and piano, though I don't play piano as
well.

Years later, I picked up the sax again as an adult. This time, my emphasis was
on jazz and improvisation. I still took lessons and played in bands
occasionally. My drills were playing the same tune in all 12 keys and
improvising on chord progressions in all 12 keys. The transposition came more
or less easily -- less than a year of practice. When playing a drill around
the circle of fifths (repeat a phrase in the keys of C, G, D, A, etc all the
way around), I'd know what it should sound like and my fingers would find the
notes. I wasn't always conscious of which key I was in.

When I improvised, sometimes I heard specific notes in my head and played
them, and sometimes I thought about the chords/scales and let my fingers
wander within those scales -- I didn't know what I was playing until I heard
it. (I also didn't know about modes as much then.) I don't know that I was
ever good at improvising, but I enjoyed it.

------
vinayms
I haven't achieved mastery, but was able to play songs on the guitar by ear
fairly well, though slowly, both songs that I heard and the ones that I
composed in my head. I am rusty now.

Its a simple process with two parts to it.

1\. identifying the notes in the song.

2\. playing the notes on the instrument of your choice, including your own
voice.

The second part is all about knowing your instrument inside out - which key,
which fret etc map to which note. The hard one is the first part. Loosely, the
second is akin to coding and the first akin to developing the
algorithm/design. The only way around it is to develop an ear(mind?) for the
notes by abstracting songs - listen to a song as a sequence of notes rather
than a "song". Its easier said than done.

For this task, learning theory is not useful. Surely, it can help identify the
key with only a few notes which lets you fill out the rest of the notes, but,
more often than not, real world songs, unless specifically designed to train
students, don't follow the key bookishly and will always have an exception
here and there, which means identifying the notes by the ear is still the
key(ha!).

------
kamaal
I can play harmonica(chromatic), by the ear. I play mostly Hindi Bollywood
Music.

To be frank before I 'cracked it' it largely felt like magic. After I cracked
it, it largely felt like the time I learned to ride a bicycle without training
wheels. It felt magical.

But on a whole lot, not having to look at a piece of paper, sight read and
then play is a huge convenience. You also begin to thing in terms of sound,
than sight. Which is basically the whole point of music. I think the first
person who needs to enjoy your music is you. If you have to look at piece of
paper to play a song, you sort of get too busy to enjoy it yourself.

Harmonica is a very enjoyable instrument, its portable, you can carry it
anywhere, and play it at your convenience. You can play a wide variety of
genres on it. Other big part of playing the harmonica is its in your mouth, so
you can't exactly see the keys, like you see on the Piano or the Guitar. I've
seen many people think of it largely as magic.

Music is the closest to Magic, I've gotten after code. To manipulate emotions,
purely by thinking in terms of thoughts and sounds is just _Magical_. Not just
to those listening, but to you yourself. You feel yourself creating art in
real time.

------
spurgu
There is simply an infinite amount of levels to it. You might start off by
just being able to recognize the difference between a minor and a major third.
Then you expand that further. And to recognize what note it is relative to the
scale.

At some point children's tunes become easy. At another you recognize the
specific chords in children's tunes. Then you expand that to be able to
identify the notes in more complicated tunes. At one point you might pick up
jazz...

The point being that at any point in time during your development you will
feel mastery of some level of melodies/chords/harmonies but feel utterly
confused (tone deaf) by more complex ones. It's an infinite journey and the
key is enjoying it, there is no final destination.

------
adrianmonk
What does it feel like? A lot like hearing a song on the radio and singing
along with it. Most people can relate to that, even if some are better than
others.

It feels very natural with your voice because you've been making sounds with
your vocal cords for your whole life, so it is second nature. I think the main
reason a musical instrument feels less natural isn't that it's a unique and
different category of thinking. It's just that you have way less practice.

If you can work things out slowly and you have any amount of intuitive feel
for it, I'd say you probably just need more practice. Though ear training (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear_training](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear_training)
) can be really helpful. You can get software to drill you on intervals. And
some people find it helpful to remember the sound of intervals by famous songs
they occur in (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition#Reference...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition#Reference_songs)
).

For me, it has been a gradual process. At first it was nearly all trial and
error. Then I could pick out 1 note in a lot fewer tries than random chance.
Then I could play little segments of melodies once I had figured out the keys.
Then I could play the whole melody in near real time. Now finally after
gradually getting more comfortable over the years, I can guess chord
progressions reasonably well. All these things came months or years apart
depending on how big of a jump it was and how much I practiced.

Incidentally, I am an amateur pianist, and I have virtually no natural talent.
When I started, I could not play anything at all by ear. If I can do it,
anybody can.

------
Timpy
Learning to play the instrument by ear is a completely different thing from
learning to play a song by ear. My bachelor's is in classical guitar
performance, but I've been playing all sorts of instruments my whole life. If
I hear something "new" and play it by ear it's because it sounds similar to
another thing that I've learned to play before. Learn a whole bunch of songs,
and eventually you'll hear something "new" and say, "wait a minute that's not
new to me, that's only a little different from the last song I learned."

I recommend that you learn using every resource available to you, build a
vocabulary of music you can draw on while you're at the harmonium, and then go
about discovering music by ear. Forcing yourself to learn the skill of
harmonium playing only by trial and error is an unnecessary constraint, and it
will take you much longer to play fluently by ear.

------
neverminder
I've been told I have a perfect pitch (by people in music business). I learned
violin since the age of 7 by ear. I went to after school classes for that and
technically I was supposed to learn from notes and the fact that I would just
throw them out and learn a piece by ear in no time annoyed my teachers and
peers quite a bit. They would ask me to tune their instruments before concerts
though. Later I learned keyboards, some other instruments and eventually
acoustic guitar (finger style) the same way (I have a Taylor 414ce-R
collecting dust in a closet). I wrote a few songs as well.

In my opinion based on many years of experience at the very least relative
pitch is a necessary learning an instrument by ear and essential for
instruments without fixed tone positions, such as violin which has no frets
unlike a guitar.

I can't speak from the perspective of someone who may have no pitch, because
for me the technique was the hard part, not melody, chords or finding the
right notes.

~~~
anentropic
yes I think developing a sense of relative pitch is somewhat necessary for
what the OP asks, otherwise you will be stuck in trial and error forever

------
gg5ever
I can play violin by ear, meaning that if someone plays me a melody I can
generally play it back note-for-note fairly quickly. I also can hear most
common chord progressions. I do not have perfect pitch, so I struggle with
series of random notes and note clusters.

What does it feel like? It feels the same as how you can just sing happy
birthday without having to do any calculation about what note or lyric comes
next. You can hear the song in your head and sing it. I also feel that the
notes map into a grid and I will have songs mapped out by intervals.

If you want to become better at playing by ear, you can improve rapidly with
rigorous training. This is how I like to learn. I think it's much faster than
just plunking around with your instrument and rediscovering everything for
yourself, but may be less fun for you. Ultimately, you should do what you
enjoy and avoid burning yourself out.

I spend about 30% of my time on technical mastery of my instrument. Right and
left hand technique, scales, arpeggios, chords, speed.

Another 30% is spent working on repertoire. These are songs where I already
have all the notes worked out or written down. This is where you learn to
polish your work to the point where it can be performed.

The remaining 40% is consists mostly of transcription and improvisation. I do
some ear training as well. Transcription is very painful for most beginners,
but you quickly improve at it. I cannot stress how invaluable transcription is
for improving your ear. You say you "slowly work things out by trial and
error". This will pay HUGE dividends if you keep it up!

For improvisation, I suggest recording a backing track playing simple chords
very slowly and attempting to improvise. I try to have some guiding idea, like
trying to arpeggiate over all the chords, or only move in half or whole steps
but always land on a chord tone, or always land on the third of the chord. As
you get better, you can speed up your backing tracks and work on more complex
chord progressions. Knowing your scales and arpeggios will really help here.
The more comfortable you are with the layout of your instrument, the easier
improvising will be.

I'll stop with this piece of advice -- plan your practice sessions! It doesn't
matter how you break them up, as long as you are consciously working on
something specific. Staying organized and having a plan will ensure that you
continue to improve and help combat the plateau that many amateur musicians
encounter.

------
asplake
"What key to press" isn't the best way to think about it. Music is full of
patterns, idioms, and so on, and we practice those too. That's why beginners
are taught scales and arpeggios, and to get into rock or jazz, you learn their
chords, progressions, etc.

In terms of what it's like to be able to do it, I'm a competent church
musician, and generally I prefer to pick up songs from recordings than from
sheet music – I can generally listen 2 or 3 times and then sit down at the
piano and do a decent enough rendition.

When I'm very familiar with a song, I quite like to rearrange, reharmonise,
etc. This has required both study and deliberate practice – I look for
opportunities to use particular reharmonisation tricks, for example.

Start with stuff you like, and play along to recordings. Choose a level of
difficulty that stretches you a little, and keep practising until it both
sounds and feels good. Have fun!

------
rssmllr
Playing an instrument by ear requires a well-trained ear. You should strive to
gain perfect "relative pitch", because "absolute pitch" is not realistic for
most people unless you acquire it at very young age.

The free app, Functional Ear Trainer (iOS and Android), has been an immense
help for me and people I know. Use it for 10 minutes a day and sing along with
the notes. Soon you should be able to recognize and sing certain intervals
with 100% confidence, regardless of the key.

The most important intervals for songs in a major key are: Octave, Perfect
5th, Major 3rd, and Perfect 4th

It helps to learn songs that you can associate with each interval (going up
and going down). Just google "songs for each interval" and find songs that
work for you.

Training your ear is the first step. Then learn how to reliably find each of
those intervals on your instrument.

------
summerchild11
I'll echo what most have already said - it feels like singing your favorite
song after you've learned all the words and you've memorized all the pauses
and breaths and long runs. It feels like driving home after not being there
for years; those familiar roads from your childhood never leaving your mind.

The intuition will come, after countless hours getting to know your instrument
and your music. The easiest way for me to start was to practice with songs
that I already knew. It's easier to train your fingers when you aren't worried
about training your ears at the same time. Learning a new song on top of a new
instrument is double the work for a beginner.

I'll also highly recommend trying to learn scales and arpeggios by ear. Scales
being your "do re mi fa sol la ti do", and arpeggios being the thirds of those
scales. There are lots of youtube videos of musicians playing scales and
arpeggios, look those up and try on your own instrument. This will help you
build muscle memory and allow your brain to make more intuitive aural
decisions. No one LIKES practicing the basics, but there is a reason why they
are drilled into musicians at even the highest of level of conservatories.

As you play songs you know, you will start to notice things like the "steps"
between notes, and what those "steps" sound like. Oh those notes sound just
like the notes from that other song, I'll bet this is a 5th too. This melody
is just a drawn out descending scale, I know how to play that.

Lastly, have fun. It is normal to get frustrated or have "off" days when
practicing. Mistakes are NORMAL, and mistakes can be good! Try to push through
those moments and end your practice sessions on a high note (heh). Come down
off of a particularly difficult practice session by going through scales
again, or playing a song that you know. We want POSITIVE associations with
music, not grumpy ones. If you are having an off day, don't force it. Come
back the next day ready to bang out some tunes.

------
zenthn
First, you have to practice listening to music. You have to focus on
everything: melody, rhythm, harmony, instrumentation, and dynamics. You also
need to study those things so you know exactly what you're listening to.
Practice scales, arpegios, and chord progressions and you'll start to
recognize them. If you hear a song in a key that you can't even play in, it
doesn't matter how good your musical memory is.

I started playing piano as an adult and can read music and play by ear. I
worked as a dueling piano player for a few years wherr listening to your
partner and figuring out what they're playing is a part of the job. I also
write music down in various forms. Chords and lyrics, guitar tabs, and sheet
music.

Everything helps, but you have to practice playing by ear as well. Just put a
song on a loop and play along until you get it right.

------
cybervegan
After about 5 or 6 years of abusing an electric guitar, learning from tab, you
tube tutorials, general messing round etc. what it feels like to __me __is
that now can guess from a note I hear, _roughly_ where that will appear on the
fretboard, and how it was struck - picked, finger, palm muting, and so on. I
can listen to a riff and if I can get the first note or chord, I can work from
there as I know a bit about what "next" note or chord will or won't work. You
start out with a very generalised idea of where the high and low notes are,
but it takes time before you internalise that, and then later you begin to be
able to relate the sound of another musician playing to how _you_ might play
the same. I'm still crap, though.

------
lettergram
Both 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.

------
kstenerud
Get a teacher.

Learning on your own will get you at best to 70% of your potential, at which
point you'll hit a wall because of all the bad habits you've developed which
impair "effortless" play style. You'll get tired faster, injure yourself more,
and you'll be so tense or badly positioned that some things will simply be
impossible for you. From there, it's nearly impossible to fix things because
you'll have to deconstruct almost everything and start afresh.

Put in the work & effort. There's never enough time to do it right, but
there's always enough time to do it again.

------
cyberjunkie
Really cool to hear the insights here. I've always wanted to learn things by
myself, and so I picked up the guitar ages ago. I wish I spent a lot more time
on it.

I can read guitar tablature from Ultimate-guitar.com and once upon a time
(OLGA). I'm afraid I'm very robotic because I need to see where I'm going to
play it. And because of that, there's no melody, and I can't remember chords
and notes or know what scales and notes to play when. I think I have
reasonable finger motion, even to the point where I don't need to look at the
fretboard at all.

Like I said, amazing to hear from the experts. I envy!

------
cranjice
Knowing which keys to press translates loosely into an understanding of theory
(even at a very simple level)

Think of the piano keys (chromatic scale) as the alphabet, and theory as the
language that makes words from it.

Tbh a little theory goes a long way. It’s all related and your understanding
will build over time. You’ll start to see patterns.

Just start off learning how to play a simple song. Then, try to think about
what key is this song in? What chords make up that key? What intervals am I
playing? How would I transpose this song into a different key? Etc.

You can teach yourself, but a teacher or good course will accelerate the
process.

------
CyberFonic
As 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.

------
sverige
I gave up on piano when I was eight, but I have played the tenor sax since I
was 10 years old and bass guitar since I was 14. It's been many years since I
got to the point where I could play by ear. I guess after enough practice you
just get to the point where you hear the song in your mind and play it without
thinking.

My best analogy for non-musical coders is that it's sort of like touch typing
while writing code. Your thoughts just come out through your fingers without
thinking about it.

------
pizzicato7
The 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.

------
dmitripopov
This is why they teach you solfeggio lessons in a classical music school. Once
you are familiar with common harmonies you can extract song meta information
by ear and then apply it to the instrument of your choice (where your playing
technique comes in play). Learning music is a lot, A LOT more than learning
how to play an instrument.

------
dyu-
It took me around 10yrs to be able to identify the notes immediately just by
listening. I didn't really had to study it to learn ... it just came naturally
for me. It correlates easily to the music theory that you know, which is the
main foundation that you need to get acquainted with.

I play a lot of instruments but bass is my main instrument.

~~~
osrec
Interesting. Did you have a particular moment when you just "got it", or was
it a gradual build up of ability over the 10 years?

~~~
throwaway8879
For me, it suddenly clicked after a decade or so. The same thing happened with
improvisation and keeping excellent time. I felt like I was always struggling
until one day whatever I heard in my head came out my fingers.

It's just that the process is very gradual and takes a long time. I suppose
the 10k hour rule applies here.

~~~
dyu-
exactly my thoughts.

------
wemdyjreichert
I never really leaned to read music. Listen to a recording a couple times;
maybe slow it down. Perfect or near-perfect, though not an absolute necessity,
is helpful. Other than that, TONS of practice.

------
betenoire
Practice 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.

------
segmondy
It's like typing without looking at the keyboard or speaking a foreign
language like a native speaker, you gotta practice tons and it takes time

------
anotheryou
i can only speak for melody, but with harmonic instruments it will be similar.

limit yourself to a few tones and improvise. that will get you to the core of
that feeling quickly.

start with 3 notes of a cord, see what you can do with it, maybe try a 4th.
than learn a scale you like and improvise within that.

------
meggar
Try singing/whistling the melody while playing it at the same time.

------
billwear
I 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.

------
skosch
On a polyphonic instrument like the harmonium, "playing by ear" really refers
to three separate but related skills.

One is the ability to hear and predict, Markov-chain style, the chord
progressions in a song. This actually isn't very difficult, once you realize
that 1) all songs make use of exactly the same handful of existing chord-to-
chord transitions, just shifted depending on the root chord (key) the sheet
music is written in, 2) some chord transitions are vastly more common than
others, and 3) each transition has a distinct feel, which your brain soon
learns to appreciate with an intuition similar to that you have for language.

Thus, it helps to re-write each piece of sheet music into C before you play it
("normalization", if you will), so you can see and hear the essence of e.g.
C→G across the context of different pieces. Later, go around the circle of
fifths, so you can see the patterns reappear in keys other than C. Music
theory textbooks use tables of Roman numerals for this, but those only make
sense to people who already have the intuition anyway. But there are good
videos on this, like
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8qv5hZppyGQbe9laVKwg3w](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8qv5hZppyGQbe9laVKwg3w).

Playing chords by ear is a very satisfying feeling, because it gives you the
illusion that you're 80% there with 20% of the effort. It also translates
easily to other instruments.

Second is the ability to hear and play back melodies. This comes with
practice. Trial and error, hit and miss ... until your miss rate goes down,
which it will, slowly, over time, asymptotically approaching zero. As you
practice your intuition for chords, however, you will soon know what certain
intervals (especially 3, 4, 5) sound like, and that will often help you find
the right next note. When you hit a plateau, read up on different types of
scales – knowing "this part of the melody is mixolydian" will prune the search
tree for you.

Being able to pick out the right note without thinking will turn the
instrument into an extension of yourself, just as you sing or whistle without
thinking. However, you may well be a proficient amateur harmonium player long
before you can reproduce any complex melody completely error-free, so I don't
know that it's something worth obsessing about.

Third is the ability to play more than just simple triads and monophonic
melodies, but to add patterns and rhythms and chord inversions and "crunchy"
notes (sus, dim, maj, 6, 9, 13, etc.) and improvisations on the melody. Those
aren't self-contained skills, but rather a repertoire of tricks that you
acquire as you play and analyze other people's music, and there are lots of
textbooks and videos on them. Those don't do that much for your perceived
level of "fluency", but they do make you feel "eloquent" and they're great for
your ego.

------
djmips
It feels like talking.

------
yesenadam
Lots of great comments here already. I realized I didn't really know what
'playing by ear' means! (Jazz pianist here) I've almost never heard musicians
saying that. Like people have written, it means many different things. Such
as, playing a song with other people when you don't know it. Some jazz
musicians I've known are legendary for that, seeming to not need to rehearse
like mere mortals, they turn up to the gig and play perfectly.

What does it feel like? Like talking, walking. Something you can do without
thinking about it. Well, sometimes I notice my fingers are playing music (on a
table, wall, my legs, I can hear it on the 'piano in my head') and I didn't
realize! I don't know _who_ that was playing.

Any time I hear music (unless it's super-fast, or using strange tuning etc) I
can see every note being played on the piano in my head. The instant I hear a
chord, I already know what it is. (I guess perfect pitch helps with that; I
don't know how people manage without it) And transcribing helps with learning
rhythms, so you just know what a rhythm is (i.e. how you would write it down)
when you hear it.

Some very famous musicians e.g. Hendrix, Erroll Garner, Sinatra apparently
couldn't read/write music, but I don't think it's been much studied exactly
what they knew or how they thought about music. In jazz anyway, most of what
you know (about melody, rhythm, harmony etc) is never put into words - you
learn it from the music - and it would be useless trying to put it into words.
I can teach in an hour most of the 'official' music theory. Everyone _should_
have their own ideas about, say, what scale to play over a minor chord,
because what sounds good is different for everyone.

People learn jazz by listening, and by _transcribing_ tunes, solos,
arrangements (if they're complex enough that you can't learn by playing along,
which is most things.) and playing them yourself. By imitation. So maybe learn
to read/write music, then you can write complex things out. Although, hell, I
don't know, maybe it's better training your ear and never transcribing. But
that would take soo long. Learning stuff that is _really_ fast is pretty much
impossible to hear/learn without writing it out.

'Which keys to press' is like 'How do you know what computer keys to type?' \-
when you learn a language, or anything, your brain puts things together in
bigger and bigger _chunks_ , so eventually you can think in units of sentences
or paragraphs or whole speeches. Or in music, you think 8 or 16 bars at a
time, or a whole phrase, or chord progression etc. Or apparently in chess,
masters just have better _chunks_ than the rest of us; they can do much more
useful thinking with the same number of thoughts. Exactly like a high-level
programming language!

ps Speaking of which, I can't help mentioning that the guy who invented
restricted Boltzmann machines (a type of neaural net), Paul Smolensky, called
them _Harmoniums_!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restricted_Boltzmann_machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restricted_Boltzmann_machine)

------
jancsika
> 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.

------
berkoab
It would help tremendously to learn some music theory. I play the piano and I
can play any song in any key. It's not all trial and error, there's actually a
science to it all. Learn your scales. Practice, practice, practice and you'll
eventually get it.

