You’re already beautifully equipped to hear all the details you need to hear in order to play by ear, you simply need to know what it is your hearing! Here’s my journey to developing my musical ear and how you can do the same.

read on or Watch the video below [7 minutes]

It all started with Fur Elise.

The first time I heard that song played by a friend I felt like my heart had been lifted out of my body through the power of music.

I was about 7 years old and I had taken lessons for a year or so.

My friend was much more advanced than I was, and she played so beautifully and that song was so beautiful, but also sad somehow.

I asked her to play it again and again and after she was sick of playing it, I ran home and tried to remember those opening notes…

My luck was that those opening notes were the smallest interval on the piano, and definitely achievable by my small hands.

I only worked out the first few notes at that age, later I learned the whole thing, but I was immensely proud of myself.

my piano teachers hated it.

It was something I continued to do all throughout my formal piano training but it was like a dirty little secret!

Because I was learning to read sheet music and pass my classical piano grades, playing by ear was something that was neither taught nor tolerated.

My teachers had no idea what to do with it, so it became something I had to pursue on my own.

Of course when something is forbidden it becomes your obsession!

So I skipped class in school to go sit in the piano rehearsal rooms and I would play songs by ear in secret, I did it at home when I was supposed to be practising my exam pieces!

I’d figure out and play songs from TV themes, from the movies, from cartoons, from the radio… all by ear.

To this day, it remains my preferred way to learn new music.

how i teach the skill of playing by ear

So when I started Piano Picnic, the first thing I wanted to teach was to play piano by ear.

I took the process I had perfected over the years and broke it down into easy-to-learn chunks and my first signature course was born.

Over 4 years later, hundreds of students have taken this course and my catalogue of different courses has grown to include not just playing by ear but many creative pianist skills…

…and now I think it’s time to reveal the next level of playing the piano by ear.

To get better at playing by ear means to learn songs faster, to learn more challenging songs and to become fluent at this skill.

To do that we need more than to apply a process. The process was the start, now we need to train!

how do you play by ear on piano?

To master the skill of playing by ear, pianists need to train their ear to recognise more things.

As children we learn to recognise the sounds around us: like a parents voice, the sound of a dog barking, or a car zooming by.

We can also teach ourselves to recognise musical ‘objects’ to more quickly observe and identify the musical information we hear and translate that to our instrument.

The human ear is an incredible instrument in itself.

Our ears are incredibly equipped already to recognise space, density, pitch, patterns, rhythms, distance & emotions.

We simply need to teach our brain to recognise those things more consciously rather than subconsciously and then apply it to the theory we know.

We train our ‘ear’ just as we might train any muscles in the body – with sustained effort over time, focus, discipline, a training program and dedicated coach.

Active listening can be a doorway to a deeper musical understanding…

It focuses our mind on aspects we often wouldn’t otherwise notice.

It also helps with the skill of learning to play music by ear, a term that simply means to actively listen and translate what you’ve observed onto your instrument.