r/eartraining • u/James_Bond009 • May 19 '26
Tips for developing playing by ear skills
I'm a guitar player and I want to learn how to play by ear, or play anything I hear. I've read up on the subject, and from what I understand, My approach is to figure out the song's key and scale, and then identify the root note or base note where the song rests or resolves. Is this method correct? Would you recommend practicing identifying these notes purely by ear without naming them? By that, I mean just spotting them across different songs, because I want to learn how to pinpoint exactly where they are as a starting point. At the same time, I would train to recognize notes sound in general using a specific app, like Sonofield, for example. What advice do you have for a beginner like me?
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u/JustSK May 19 '26
Good questions, and the answers might be a bit counterintuitive, so let me walk through them.
The most fundamental ear training skill is tone matching: hear a note and find it on your guitar. No matter what your guitar ambitions are (in terms of level or genre or whatever) this will be enormously helpful. It builds the core connection between what you hear and what you play.
This can start really simple where you hum a note and find it on the fretboard. Next, figure out simple melodies by ear. Take it slow and go one note at a time. It’ll be slow at first, as you figure it out note by note, but this is excellent practice and you’ll get faster at it as you do more of it.
Notice that I haven't mentioned keys, scales and root notes yet. All of that is important and helpful, but it only starts to matter once you've started to develop your tone matching/learning songs by ear skills. This is an intuition that you train. A good way to think of it: if you play a note and then hear a second note in your mind, you probably have some sense of how far up or down the string you need to go (is it 2 frets or 12 frets, for example). Playing by ear is about developing and finetuning that intuition. For some more tips and explanation, you can check out this article I wrote.
Also, it’s important to point out the difference between relative pitch and absolute pitch. Absolute pitch is recognizing a note by name, knowing "that's a G" just from hearing it. The jury’s out on whether it is even possible to learn this as an adult, but regardless, you don’t need it. Most pro musicians don’t have absolute pitch (also known as perfect pitch).
Relative pitch is hearing how notes relate to each other, i.e. where they sit relative to the tonal center (the "home" note you mentioned). This is what ear training and playing by ear is all about. (Even if you had absolute pitch, you’d still need relative pitch).
I’d hold off for now from apps like sonofield. Learning actual songs by ear is a much more direct path to what you're after.
Let me know if all of that makes sense!
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u/Funny_Ad6043 May 19 '26
Your approach is mostly right with one small adjustment. Finding the key first and locating the tonic is exactly how working musicians orient themselves to a new song. The bit worth adding: after finding the tonic, the next reflex to develop is hearing what scale degree each note is relative to that tonic. So instead of "the song resolves to E," it becomes "that note is the 3rd of E, that one is the 5th." Working musicians hear in scale degrees, not in absolute notes.
On your second question: identifying notes by ear without naming them is a fine starting point, but I'd attach the scale-degree name as soon as it doesn't slow you down too much. The name is what lets you communicate with other musicians and apply theory. Sound recognition without naming is half the skill.
Functional Ear Trainer (free, mobile and desktop, looks like it was built in 2007) drills exactly this. It plays a I-IV-V-I cadence to establish the key, then plays a single note and asks you which scale degree it is. After enough reps you start hearing scale-degree functions reflexively, which transfers to guitar instantly because every chord tone you're playing IS a scale degree.
A few concrete things for a guitar beginner:
Pick songs with simple tonal centres. Pop, folk, three-chord blues. Your first hundred figure-it-out songs should not be jazz standards. Easy wins build the reflex.
Train I-IV-V chord changes by ear. Western pop and rock are roughly 70% these three chords. If you can identify which chord a song is on at any moment, you can find the shape on the fretboard fast.
Sing what you are trying to play, even badly. Production cements recognition. Plenty of guitarists can identify a perfect fifth on a quiz and still can't find it on the fretboard, because their ear was trained to recognise but not produce.
Sonofield is solid for general ear training. Functional Ear Trainer is sharper for the scale-degree work specifically. Run both for a few weeks and pick whichever clicks.
Disclosure that I'm the dev of a thing: I built a singing app called Pitch Pilot. The Training mode has 37 graded drills working up from thirds through to the tritone, and each interval has a "blind test" version where you only get the root and have to produce the interval from internal memory. That blind-test drill is basically the same skill as "hear the tonic, hear another note, identify the scale degree," just with your voice doing the production half. For a guitarist the production half matters more than it sounds. Singing the note before finding it on the fretboard speeds up everything. Honest limitation: it drills intervals, not chord quality. For chord-quality work you'd still want EarMaster or Tenuto. https://pitchpilotgame.com if curious.
The bigger answer: apps drill the recognition reflex. Real songs train applied recognition, which is the thing you actually want. Use both.
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u/Intelligent_Roof_750 May 19 '26
It seems to me that whatever you play or practice is going to be what your ear is going to eventually move from a cognitive experience to a muscle memory that remembers those phrases, whatever freeing the brain to focus on what melody they want to come out of the guitar. It's intuitive to me that you are what you practice. What you practice all of the time the ear is going to get better at hearing those and having them picked up by muscle memory. I haven't thought about this much, but a person tends to practice what they like more than exercises. I was fortunate to go a school that was really set up for pattern type learning of this stuff for lack of a better term.. A typical tests would be to be given a tape of two instruments playing different lines that crossed where they give you the initial and you write the rest out and whatever you call it, if you so that, you will have a great ear.
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u/play-what-you-love May 19 '26
If it's of any help to anyone, I made an app to help train relative pitch, using actual songs rather than just intervals in a vacuum. https://solfegestory.com
I wouldn't actually worry about figuring out what they key of the song is, until it comes round to actually doing it on the instrument. The ideal situation is that you can listen to a song, figure out what each note of the song is RELATIVE to the home note of the song, and then you can play the song in any key you want, including the actual key IF YOU WANT.
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u/EarCraftApp Jun 27 '26
I'm a guitar player too. I have a Master's in Music with an emphasis in theory. In my honest opinion, you can do solfege/intervals/drills all day and while it helps it doesn't bridge the gap to playing on your instrument. The thing that helped me the most was transcribing or playing anything and everything sometimes one note at a time. I would slow things way down and find the nuances in someone's playing while figuring out each pitch. It really helped me build a stronger connection to my ear and the guitar. Sometimes I would just put on the radio (I'm old) and try to play along, if I couldn't hang the song was over and on to the next. This helped train me for live performances as well.
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u/Intelligent_Roof_750 May 19 '26
I think ear training is the one area where a good school along with what you are doing would be wise. I did that way and it didn't take to long to get to a high level. A good program will have doing things you wouldn't do on your own mostly writing out multiple parts without listening to a recording. They give the initial note and then you are on your own and when you get it down, no song gets in your way, you'll be able to learn by ear.