need tips from pro's

Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2006 5:54 am

ok well i wanna learn to play guitar by ear, i can kinda do it, but very poorly.
doe any of the pro guitarists on this site know any tips to developing my ears to be able to play by ear.

thanks in advance J o s h

Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2006 8:05 am

Hey guitarist, i am by no means a pro, but I would say just keep picking and get a good idea where all the notes are and the sound a piticular note produces in diffrent locations on the neck.N ow maybe you could help me, which end are you supose to blow into?

Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2006 7:41 pm

Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2006 8:17 pm

i think you'll need to look up chords though - won't be able to get them by ear very easily.

-Seneki

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 7:21 pm

yeah - agree with above . learn some chords first - then let your ear tell you when to play them. You can actually play quite a few interesting songs with 3 to 5 chords sharting out.

learn G, C, D, Em and play around with 'em. lots of cool music to be had with them.

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 9:39 pm

also,,,once you have learned some chords......then experiment with the picking hand.....different picking techniques can yeild different songs,sounds,etc....
I can play the same three chords and by picking it differently i can play about 10 different songs.....hope this helps
Gunner
oh yeah...practice,practice,practice and more practice and when you think you have practiced enough.....practice some more!!!!!

play until thy fingers bleed!!!!
then a better guitar player you will be indeed!!

ubw newbie Joined: Oct 05, 2005 Posts: 23

When developing my ear, I thought it was much easier to learn melodies and figure them out. I mean simple melodies like you find on tv shows or whatever...not speed metal solos.

You could just sit and watch TV and try to figure out every melody you hear. Your ear will improve very quickly this way.

Brandon

Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2006 9:36 am

Hi Josh, Erick here, I'm not a pro by any means, but I used to play along with The Allman Brothers Band live at the Filmore, they just jam away and you can try to jam along, also Mile Davis "In a Silent Way" is 3 long jams and one tune is based in D with a lot of room to jam along, anything that jams long and is simple is good, Phish has a ton of stuff to jam with. . . . . make sure you tune up in standard tuning to play along with most music, I'm sure you know this, but just in case . . Embarassed

I would suggest to try and learn basic therory, triads and inversions of all your major and minor chords, it helped me huge, you can play the same chord on any 3 strings all over the neck and they all sound different. Plus get a distortion box and a delay pedal if you can, it makes it more fun.
One more thing, get a simple loop box, you can probably get one on ebay fairly cheap, and you can record a simple loop, be it one chord two or three and just play along, it's a lot of fun . . . play through the pain too and good luck! . . .

and like gunner said practice practice practice

Peace,
Erick

Posted: Sun Feb 26, 2006 8:58 am

A Few Things...

1- I'm with gunner, work on your picking hand technique, personally i feel like all your originality will (has to) come from your picking hand. How you strum a 4 chord pattern can completely change the feel of a tune... Lots of times i'll mute all the strings until I find the picking rhythm I want before even fretting a note... then Just let the fingers land wherever.

2- Learning to play other things by ear or how to write what you hear, you need to come up with a way to sing "intervals" to yourself and know how to play them. So, for example the first two notes in the star wars theme... sing that to yourself and find the two notes on your fret board... Thg theory guys will call this a 5th, but the important bit is that your ear knows the interval, and your fingers learn that the second note is 1 string over and 2 frets down from the first note...

3- Erick (Guitarman152) is spot on as well... I jammed to all the tunes he's talking about, all the way thru nirvana and fugzai tunes... Play along with stuff, after a while you'll be able to learn an entire song in the time it takes to play it once thru.

4- Loop pedals rule. Not only for practicing, but they are great writing aids, and I find having it around I really get great ideas from looping a couple of chords and then finding something to fit over it. When I take the songs to the band... I usually only take the second part (which I would have never come up without the looper).. SO GET ONE! Smile

Rock on brother.

bp

Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 5:45 pm

Wanna get better? Four rules;

1/Play every day. Even if its just for a short ammount of time (15 minutes)
2/Try new things. Even if its not texbook, find techniques suited to your favoured music style.
3/Dont give up even if you find you are not progressing very quickly. Keep doing 1 & 2 if you find this happening.
4/Enjoy yourself. Dont keep punishing yourself for not playing like Joe Satriani after a few months. It takes time and even Joe himself would admit to developing himself from basic techniques even to this very day.

Remember, no legendary guitarist was born that way. It was simply by picking it up and enjoying themselves. Thats how I learned and to this day ive never bought or learned from textbook methods.

~AK

ubw newbie Joined: Jun 04, 2006 Posts: 1

hey..i need help with picking..im trying to get faster at it but i dont know what to hit because i dont know what notes sound good with eachother..also im not to coordinated with my pinky..can somebody help me

Posted: Sun Jun 04, 2006 7:59 pm

With the pinky just keep practicing. It'll come around.

If you're just beginning to improvise I recommend learning a blues scale first (pentatonic) and playing with that. You gotta know the key you're playing in, but given that you can slide a single scale up and down the neck as needed. You can learn new scales that offer more options, but you gotta start with something.

Here's a site that shows one of the most popular positions of the scale. I played this scale over a chuck berry boogie jam alot when I was learning.

http://www.worldguitar.com/minorpent.html

I recommend charting this out up and down the fretboard and gradually learning other cool positions that give you some options on different licks.

Posted: Sun Jun 04, 2006 8:37 pm

I was looking around and also found this site that shows the other popular positions for the blues scale several clicks in. it has a realplayer video so you can see/hear it too

http://www.cyberfret.com/scales/blues/index.php

need tips from pro's

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