There are multitudinous websites which declare to teach you to play piano by ear. Does it work? Can you truly prepare to play the piano strictly by ear? This system is somewhat possible, however I consider that this system has its limitations.

Training to play by ear generally means that you need to be able to hear pitch and gage the element of chords with your ear. You would need to be able to distinguish the divergence between major and minor chords, prevalent and diminished etc. Most people do not possess an ear capable of such distinctions and that can lead to problems with this design.

I often cannot tell the particularity between chords. How is someone with no occurrence supposed to do this? Does this mean that my ear isn’t any splendid? Quite the contrary, I have very pleasing relative pitch and can often hear entire chord progressions but often miss the nuances of each specific chord. Therefore an approach which is solely geared to hearing the changes has its limitations.

Another issue with study by ear is that you cannot gain a complete understanding of music just by listening. Music is like a mathematical equation. It has formative structure derived from centuries of musicians and teachers who have dedicated their lives to the understanding a betterment of each specific musical genre. To discount this process and work around it using just your ear is counter productive in my opinion.

For proof, let’s say you’re going to imbibe to play the blues. If you apprentice by ear that would mean you would have to hear not only the paramount seventh chords, then the melody which is derived from the blues scale, the rhythm which comes from structured meter and the re-harmonization of the chord structure all without understanding the words I just said. It would mean you would have to hear all of this without knowing what its called, how it works and how it all comes together. You would master by watching someone else play the piano, copy it and repeat it until it sounds the same as what you just hear.

Not only is this a completely inefficient way of grasping it is highly confined because you cannot gain an understanding of what it is you’re actually doing. Only until you are able to comprehend and dissect each specific aspect of the music can you fully welcome and matriculate from it.

In my humblest opinion, it’s highly productive to imbibe how music is formulated rather than just hearing it and trying to repeat it because you can stretch the boundaries of comprehending and be able to move your playing to another level. Even if you were able to copy certain aspects of learning to play by ear that would severely limit you from moving beyond that point because you easily cannot understand what it is you’re doing.

What is a finer way to learn? Choosing a teacher or online piano lessons that can a helping hand you build a strong foundation. Please pick a course that helps you with the basic understanding of how music works. At this moment you can use your ear to strengthen your understanding because the ear can converse with the mind and come to a consensus of how and why things sound the way they do.

A basic understanding of how chords and scales are made and use that counsel to formulate melody and structure. Your ear can support this process obviously but it’s the scales and chords that produce the building blocks of true musical understanding.

It’s not enough to know how to play a simple F, G, C progression with melody. You need to know why and how this progression works and why it sounds the way it does. Then and only then can you begin to build on that foundation by preparing richer chords, re-harmonization and deeper complicated melodies.