Ask HN: What does it feel like to master playing an instrument by ear?

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

"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!

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 ) 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... ).

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.

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.

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.

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!