Jim Duff Music Blog

Growing up in Kentucky, Jim Duff counted the legends of traditional Country music as his heroes. Artists like Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Townes Van Zandt made a huge impact on the young songwriter and helped shape his sound. However, music was not his only talent and life took him in another direction for a while.


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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Learning To Play Guitar By Ear

You have a huge advantage if you are a guitar player who can immediately play a new tune you have just heard. You can improvise in your performance and promptly learn new music. Being able to play guitar by ear will not just make you the soul of a party. You also gain professional standing as a competent musician.

You have a lot of choices if you want to learn how to play the guitar. The traditional method is to take private lessons from an expert guitar teacher. You can also teach yourself from a book, an instructional video or DVD, or online from a website. Multimedia guitar lessons on the internet have become a leading choice. No matter how you learn how to play the guitar, you will soon reach to a point when you will be keen to learn how to play a familiar song or a new one you heard on the movies. Maybe you want to learn how to play your favorite song from your favorite CD by your favorite band. What about your favorite television theme song?

Whatever song it is, one way to learn the tune is to purchase the sheet music or score and learn how to play it from following the written music notes. Just getting the score for a new song can be difficult, and there is usually a cost and a delay before you can even start to learn. An alternative more flexible way to learn the song you want, is to learn to play the guitar by ear. If you learn guitar by ear, you will be able to pick up just about any song you want just by listening to the CD. This will become a very useful skill, especially if you want to have a career in a music related field. You could take the following two steps if you want to learn guitar by ear.

How To Learn Guitar By Ear

If you want to learn guitar by ear, here are a few tips that will help. The first thing you will need to do so that you can learn guitar by ear is to train your ear to listen. Contrary to popular belief, you do not need to be born with an ear for music in order to learn guitar by ear. You can, in fact, train your ear to pick up the guitar chords of the music. The main thing you will learn to pick up just by listening to the music is changes in the chords, as well as to identify the differences between chords. It is important to be able to recognize the difference between major and minor chords.

The next step when you learn guitar by ear is to develop the skill to tune your guitar to match the song. This may sound easy enough, but this is an art you must learn. You need to tune your guitar so that it is in tune with the song you want to learn. Sometimes this is best accomplished by tuning individual strings to be in tune with individual notes.

If you can follow these two basic steps, you are well on your way to learn guitar by ear.

Alastair McLea

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