It is fascinating to see a very talented musician learn a piece they've never played by ear. Amazing talent and hard work to be able to just do this. This video is great and it helps that it is a piece from one of my favorite Christmas albums ever made.

Thanks for posting. I enjoy this stuff. It's amazing the ear some folks have.

I have a friend who can hear a song once or twice and then immediately be able to play it on guitar or piano. He can also pick up just about any instrument and play around with it for about an hour and seemingly have it mastered (obviously not really mastered, but good enough to impress your average joe).

My best friend's older sister used to sit at the piano with a radio next to her and play along with whatever was on the station at the time. I was fascinated!

Yep

Wore out some cassette tapes learning songs on bass and keys.

maroon barchetta said:

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Yep

Wore out some cassette tapes learning songs on bass and keys.

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That's exactly how our band would learn songs. We'd make cassettes of three or four songs we wanted to play and hand 'em out. Give everyone a week or so to figure out a part as close as possible to the original.

We weren't super skilled but we could fake our way through a lot of easy pop and country songs. LOL

Question for anyone who's really good at reading music. Are you actually quickly noting every note you are playing, or are you just looking at intervals and chord shapes?

I took piano lessons for around 4 years, as a kid, and I remember reading music for me was simply learning the intervals and chord shapes and my brain basically relaying those to my fingers. Granted, I never got to the point of dealing with more difficult keys or more than a triad on either hand. At most, I probably only really focused on C, D, F or G.

I've been going down a rabbit hole lately of interviews with The Beatles, and it is fascinating listen to them talk about how they first learned to play. They didn't even have cassette tapes, much less guitar tabs, or magazines. They would basically hear a song on the radio and then figure out how to play it from memory. Apparently George and Paul were pretty good at that, but John would just kind of get the gist of it and then make up the rest. Anyways, it started making me think that the wide spread availability of things like tabs has made people more technically efficient, but we have lost a lot of the creativity found when people are trying to figure stuff out.

Somewhat related, but not exactly the same, I read a thing about Ringo and how everyone craps on him, but he didn't really have many rock drummers to look at and try to emulate. So, while his stuff may seem simple, it's because he was having to make it all up as he went.

AustinAg2K said:

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I've been going down a rabbit hole lately of interviews with The Beatles, and it is fascinating listen to them talk about how they first learned to play. They didn't even have cassette tapes, much less guitar tabs, or magazines. They would basically hear a song on the radio and then figure out how to play it from memory. Apparently George and Paul were pretty good at that, but John would just kind of get the gist of it and then make up the rest. Anyways, it started making me think that the wide spread availability of things like tabs has made people more technically efficient, but we have lost a lot of the creativity found when people are trying to figure stuff out.

Somewhat related, but not exactly the same, I read a thing about Ringo and how everyone craps on him, but he didn't really have many rock drummers to look at and try to emulate. So, while his stuff may seem simple, it's because he was having to make it all up as he went.

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Brian Wilson was the same way. And I think things just came to him in a way that it didn't for other people.

Lathspell said:

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Jazz is definitely harder to do this than the majority of your popular music. Even with the "greats", a lot of it is pattern recognition and interval recognition. You don't have to have perfect pitch to do this, just a certain level of relative pitch.

This is why I laugh at people telling other people what they hear isn't real. This comes up all the time with guitar tone and such.

Perfect pitch is nuttier than simply learning a song by ear. The video that basically started Rick Beato's channel was of him playing increasingly dissonant chord pairings and his son just sitting there and calling out every single chord/note. That is what blows my mind.

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Love me some Rick Beato videos. Makes me wish I had been more interested in it all back as a kid in marching band.

I picked up playing guitar in the 90s.. I had a few tab books, but otherwise, I pretty much learned everything by ear.

I still do it today. If my kids are playing music on the echo, sometimes I grab my guitar and just play along. Usually not hard for pop songs.

Way more difficult for jazz, and metal.