This is something every dreams of. Being able to bat off tunes as someone requests them. In fact if anyone’s ever been to a summer camp, generally there’s a few guitars floatin’ around, and people pass it around wailing off songs like no tomorrow. If only we could pass a piano around a campfire! Well, even if we could, many pianists are not taught the secret of learning tunes: your ears.

Have you seen these YouTube pianists, playing incredible, absolutely jawdropping renditions of your favorite songs? Many of these guys have little musical education in one sense, yet they have it all in the other. You guessed it: their ears.

I’ll give you a personal experience. I was taught as a young child to read sheet music. It’s a skill that is useful to an extent (and absolutely necessary in classical fields), yet whenver someone told me to play a song I learned, I would just stumble upon the keys, trying to memorize finger positions and the notes from the paper, hoping it would sound right. It was a cringeworthy, uncomfortable process, that was like playing Russian Roulette with my keyboard career.

Quite recently, after entering in the jazz world, over the months I heard things like:

“Learn tunes by ear!”

“Throw away your sheet music”

“Use the recordings, man!”

I had witnessed many fantastic performances by people that had learned things by ear. So I thought, you know what I’m going to try this.

Here’s my theory on how it works. Many people can sing a song they love, yes? Are you reading off a paper? No. You have heard this song soooo many times, you hum it all day, you know everything about it. It’s no problem to do a shower rendition at 8am in the morning, waking up your housemates.

What you’ve done is you’ve internalized the song. You’ve spoken it with your breath, felt the lyrics fill your diaghram. You have a physical connection to this song. Some people speculate that horn players can communicate through their instrument with greater ease, because of the quick connection between the brain and breath.

So step 1 to learning tunes: sing them. Internalize them. Do not try to play them until you are able to sing them. If its an instrumental song, you want to learn, hum the song, or you use phonetic syllables, such as (da, da dee, bah). If you watch videos of jazz pianists such as Thelonius Monk, Earl Hines, Oscar Peterson, Bud Powell, you’ll see that they’re humming along as they play the ivories.

Next Post: Step-By-Step Process to Learn a Song