A Beginner's Introduction to Playing Piano by Ear
1. In The Beginning 👶🏻
Learning to play the piano by ear is what many would consider to be the skill that they would most like to acquire in all of music learning. To be able to listen to any song and immediately be able to play a piano cover of that song can appear like an impressive feat. However, this is much more attainable than you might think. It’s really an exercise in music theory and pattern recognition.
When watching someone work something out by ear what you may not realise is that they are working through a process of deduction! Rather than working out what notes a song is using, they are actually working out which notes the song is NOT using.
On the piano there are 12 different notes that we can play (7 white notes and 5 black notes). These are the letters A B C D E F and G, and then we also have the sharps (#) and flats (b). A sharp simply means “1 KEY UP” so a C# is the black key to the right of a C. A flat means “1 KEY DOWN” so a Bb is the black key to the left of a B.
The first thing we need to try and work out when working a song out by ear is what scale the song is using. This is because a scale uses just 7 of these 12 notes, so we can immediately eliminate 5 notes that we know the song won’t be using!
The vast majority of songs will be using one of these 12 scales:
2. The Bass 🎸
Now all we need to do is work out which of these scales the song is using!
The easiest way to start working out which scale a song is using is by listening to a section of a song where it is easiest to hear the bass notes (a verse, a chorus or a bridge section). Then try and sing one of these bass notes and find that note on the piano.
As soon as you know one of the notes, you can start ruling out scales that the song isn’t going to be using! For most songs, you will only need to listen for 3-4 bass notes before you have ruled out all of the scales except 1! Even if you sing a note that isn’t the bass note but that note still works in the song, this note will still be in the scale and will help you rule out other scales!
In regular popular songs, they most often have repeating chord sequences, so you may hear a set of 4 chords repeating in the verse and another set of 4 chords repeating in the chorus. This means that if you have found the bass notes for one repeat of the chords in a verse, you have also found them for the rest of the verse and each time that the verse reappears.
If you have managed to deduce the scale from one section of the song, then working out the other sections of the song becomes much easier as you now only have 7 notes to consider rather than 12. For each note you can now sing the bass note and play each note in the scale to find which one sounds like the note you are singing.
3. The Chords 🎹
Having worked out the scale and the bass notes for a section of the music, working out the chords becomes the next step in the process. There are 7 notes in a scale, and so there are 7 chords we can play (one chord starting on each note). We can form chords by playing every other note in the scale. Here’s an example using the scale of D major!
D Major Scale - Notes
D E F# G A B C#
D Major Scale - Chords
D Chord - D F# A
E Chord - E G B
F# Chord - F# A C#
G Chord - G B D
A Chord - A C# E
B Chord - B D F#
C# Chord - C# E G
Now we need to work out which chord goes with each of your bass notes! In a scale there are 3 chords that will include your bass note. In the example above, if my bass note was an “E”, the three chords that include an E are an E chord (E G B), an A chord (A C# E) and a C# chord (C# E G). I can play an E in the left hand and try out each of these 3 options to see which one sounds like the chord in the song!
Now we can repeat this process for each of the bass notes in the section of music we are working on and this should result in a set of chords and bass notes that sounds like the song.
4. The Melody 🎵
If you want to be able to sing with your playing, then you can simply play your chords and bass notes in different rhythms to sing along to and if you want to elevate how you play your chords and bass notes, check out my video on the ”8 Levels of Playing Chords On The Piano” - https://youtu.be/rhgt3lZ1RUU
However, you may also want to work out the melody for a song to play along with your chords and bass notes. A melody is both easier and more difficult to work out in a song. The reason for this is because melodies are much easier to hear than bass notes and they are often the part of a song that springs to mind when you think of a song. However, melodies are also different in every song so there is a less easy formula to follow.
Having said this there are things that we can consider to make it much easier. Firstly melodies will also be using notes in the scale, so once again we only need to consider the 7 notes that make up the scale. Secondly, in most cases melodies will mainly be using notes that make up the chord that’s underneath it. When we have notes in a melody that aren’t in the chord, this adds a lot of tension to the music, so they often go back to notes in the chord to release that tension and trying the notes that are in the chord is a good place to start.
If a melody jumps in pitch it will most likely be jumping from chord note to another a chord note. If a melody is moving by step then it is likely to to use either “passing notes”, which is a note between one chord note and another, or “auxiliary notes”, which is a note that steps away from the chord note and then back to the same chord note.
In essence, when working out melodies try and sing the melody and then try out each of the notes that are in the chord, if it isn’t one of these then it is very likely to be near one of these!
5. Putting It Together 🧱
In order to play a melody along with chords and a bass note, the best option is to play the bass notes in the left hand and to priorities the melody in the right hand while trying to include SOME of the chord notes in the right hand as well whenever it is convenient to do so!
As you can hopefully see, learning to play by ear is a process in which we deduce what the notes, scale, chords and melody are going to be. As you practice the process you will start seeing the same scales and chords reappear over and over again and so the process becomes much faster. Try it out with a song and see for yourself!
Matthew Cawood
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