Playing by ear means listening to a piece of music and finding the notes, rhythm, or chords on your instrument without relying on tabs or sheet music.

In this lesson, we’ll break that process into smaller steps: listen for one clear part, sing or hum it back, find it on your guitar, then compare what you played with the recording.

1. Identify the key parts that stand out

Start by choosing one part that is easy to hear. It might be a short melody, bass line, rhythmic figure, or repeated chord sound.

Listen to that small section several times before trying to play anything. Notice how long the phrase is, where it repeats, and whether the notes seem to move higher, lower, or stay the same.

Audio example

Take this short recording for example and see what stands out to you. I’ll write out the notation at the end of the post but first I’ll go through the steps to show how you can go about learning these chords by ear.

On your first few listens, keep the questions simple:

• What part stands out most clearly?
• Can you clap or sing its rhythm?
• Does the phrase repeat?
• Do the notes move mostly higher, lower, or back and forth?

Learning the rhythm in a song

Don’t worry if you can’t write anything out yet, the most important thing is to pick up the key parts by hearing and singing along. Being able to notate rhythms and pitches of notes will come with some practice. If you were able to figure out the rhythm of the audio clip which happens to be in a 6/8 time signature, the notation would look something like this. 

2. Sing back parts: If you can hear it, you can play it

Before searching for notes on the guitar, try to sing or hum the phrase back. You don’t need a trained singing voice. The goal is simply to hold the sound in your mind long enough to compare it with the notes on your instrument.

Roadmap practice: Listen to one short phrase two or three times. Pause the recording and sing or hum it back. Repeat until you can reproduce the basic rhythm and direction of the notes without the recording playing underneath you.

Even if you don’t know the notes on your instrument or don’t know any music theory yet, you should be able to start matching notes according to what you’re hearing. 

Some people like to write things out as they are hearing and learning a song. This can be very beneficial to understand a song as a whole and to remember specific parts when you come back to it. This is called ‘transcribing’, the act of notating music according to what you hear.

In addition to being able to hear certain notes, if you understand how scales work, it will be way easier to figure out the rest of the notes of a song. This leads us to my next point.

Learning the bass part

At this point, you may be able to hum back the bass notes in the audio example you heard in the previous section. It may look something like this so far:

Now find it on the guitar: Sing the first note, then search for that pitch on one string or within a small fretboard area. Once it matches, sing the next note and repeat the process.

Work one note at a time rather than guessing the whole phrase at once.

3. Use scales as a guide map

Once you’ve found a few notes, your scale knowledge can help narrow down the remaining possibilities. If the phrase clearly belongs to a familiar key or scale, use that note set as a guide while continuing to check everything with your ear.

After identifying several notes, listen for which note feels like the musical home or resting point. Then compare the notes you’ve found with familiar Major or minor scales to narrow down the likely key.

Let’s take D as a starting note for the Major scale you see above. We would get the notes: D, E, F#, G, A, B, and C# to make up the D Major scale. 

How about a D minor scale? Following the minor scale formula, you would get the notes: D, E, F, G, A, Bb, and C to make up the D minor scale.

You can apply these formulas to start on any note.

With these scale formulas in mind, you can see how it takes away a lot of the guessing element when figuring out notes. It provides a kind of map to help you figure out melody lines and other instrumental parts.

 Keep in mind that some songs can switch between keys throughout a song but generally, a lot of popular songs stay within one key or scale. 

You can check out this other lesson to learn the 5 Major scale shapes on guitar or how to play minor scales on guitar.

Find the key of the song

The notes we’ve identified so far fit within the notes of C Major, so C Major gives us a useful starting point for testing the rest of the phrase. As we uncover more of the melody and harmony, we can confirm whether that key fits the full musical context.

4. Learn one part at a time

Once you can reproduce one part, add another. For example, learn the bass line first, then the melody, then begin working out the chords.

Keeping the parts separate at first makes it easier to hear what each one is doing before you try to combine them on guitar.

5. Find the chords of a song or progression

After you can hear and find the bass notes, those notes can give you clues about the harmony. Your knowledge of related chords can then help you test which chord qualities fit the recording.

Play a possible chord, listen again, and compare. Keep the chord when it matches what you hear and try another option when it doesn’t.

For example, in C Major, you have the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B. If you create triad chords (three notes) built on each note by skipping a note of the scale you get:

You can think of the bass notes as root notes for any of these chords. So, if the bass line goes:

  F     /  A      /  D      /  G     

You could first try adding the chord qualities derived from the C Major scale and see if they match the chords of the song you’re learning.

They would turn out to be F Major, A minor, D minor, and G Major.

Roadmap practice: Choose one bass note from the example and try the likely Major or minor chord built from that note. Play it with the recording and listen closely. Does the chord blend with what you hear, or does something sound different?

If some chords don’t fit the song, there are other things to explore such as chord inversions, secondary chords, or slash chords.

Note that you also have songs that are based on minor scales, which technically has the same notes of a Major scale starting on the 6th degree.

For example, the A minor scale has notes A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.

These are some triad chord structures derived from both Major and minor scales:

Dim stands for diminished which is a triad chord built on the notes 1, b3, and b5. For example, the notes of a G diminished triad are G, Bb, and Db.

See this other lesson to learn all the related chords in every Major and minor key.

Learning the chords

Using this tool of related chords coming from the same scale, we can also try applying this to the bass notes we figured out earlier. Since there are no sharps, you can start assuming that you are in the key of C. Now, we’ll fill out the chords according to the bass line so far. Also, think of the notes with slashes as the notes we still have to figure out. It would look like this:

6. Playing along with the song

Playing along with the original recording is how you check your work. If your notes and rhythm line up with the audio, you’re getting close. If something clashes, stop at that spot and compare it again.

Slowing down a difficult section can make the details easier to hear. Once you can match it at the slower speed, gradually return to the original tempo.

Slowed down audio example

Speaking of changing tempos to learn a song, try hearing a slowed-down version of the audio clip example we’ve been working on learning by ear. It will be much easier to pick up the missing notes in each chord.

Roadmap practice: Before looking at the completed notation below, choose one short part of the recording and try the full process:

1. Listen to the phrase several times.
2. Sing or hum it back.
3. Find the notes on your guitar.
4. Play along with the recording.
5. Then compare your result with the notation.

Final audio notation

Finally, here is the complete notation of the audio clip we heard at the beginning of this post. The chords are written above the staff lines to indicate the harmony (meaning the chords implied by the melody in each measure).

Wrapping up

Playing by ear becomes easier when you work with small pieces of music instead of trying to solve an entire song at once.

Start with one phrase. Listen closely, sing or hum it back, find the notes on your guitar, then compare what you played with the recording.

As that process becomes more comfortable, your knowledge of scales, intervals, bass notes, and related chords can help you work out larger sections of a song.

The next lesson will keep developing the connection between what you hear and what you can find on the instrument.

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