Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Lesson Learned: Playing By Ear vs Sight Reading

For any of you adult beginners, especially those who have pecked keys without any prior training, pick ONE method and stick with it. After rambling and getting stuck and giving up, I fully decided on PbyE. Saved me a lot of grief and frustration.

"The Secrets to Playing By Ear" by Jermaine Griggs helped A LOT. No affiliation whatsoever. He does use basic ledgers in some of his examples but most of the way ti's about chord progressions, intervals, inversions,and ear training. Easy to pick up as long as you follow along and stay focused his lessons.

I am happy for you that you have found a method that works for you. Sticking with the piano is the key to progressing and enjoyment.

Glad that it works for you, but this piece of advice is not something I would agree with.

I would say exactly on the contrary. Try different methods. I played Alfred's all in one piano course way, way too long. I wish I had discovered all the stuff Albert doesn't talk about in their books earlier. Book 1 and book 2, and not a single word about phrasing.

The topic of playing by ear vs. reading music has been discussed before. Every have their way of learning their pieces. A few months ago went to a piano recital. This 9 year-old prodigy played an all Classical repertoire (Schubert, Mozart, Bach, etc.) for 40m entirely by memory. We assumed people who perform Classical music learn their pieces by reading. In a concert whether you have sheet music in front of you is irrelevant as long as you can get through the pieces.

Met a man a while ago who learned a few pieces of Classical music by watching video tutorials. He hated learning notations. Used to tell him if he is going to learn a 7m piece in 3 months would be easier for him to have the sheet music. He insisted music notations is a foreign language that would be too difficult to learn. Wouldn't even try reading an easy piece like "Mary Had a Little Lamb". Can't really say he has a learning disability. When you listen to him he plays his pieces very well but to this day still prefers to do the painstaking thing of watching people's hand patterns in videos.

A lot depends on the style of music you get into. With Classical people tend to associate reading music as a requirement. Some get to the point of being note-readers that they can't play a thing without the music in front. Some musicians can play both ways like reading through a piece and playing something improvised in the style of Chopin on the spot.

Nice, fair balanced view, thepianoplayer416.

Thing is, in the long run both contribute to your musicianship in an important way, so the issue becomes less and less of an either / or.

The best thing is to be able to do both well. Many can too, so it's not like impossible or anything. Just takes time. The pendulum swings easily from one extreme to the other and the best solution seems to be somewhere in the middle.

This reminds me of the boyfriend of a friend of my wife's. He is a globetrotting entrepreneur who runs a string of companies who has a number of odd ideas. For example, he prides himself on running all of his companies from the road out of a single suitcase, which is so efficiently packed, he would put George Clooney's character in the movie "Up in the Air", to shame - probably one of the first digital "nomads".

But related to your tale about the anti-reading acquaintance, this person is a polyglot and knows to speak 10+ languages including Russian and Mandarin Chinese, however has never picked up a language book or learned to read these languages. That's because his entire purpose for learning languages is communication and culture. And reading/writing or even normal language learning systems are completely uninteresting to him. Instead, he dives in trying to communicate with people who don't know any of his other 9 languages and muddles through in this manner until he is fluent in their language. What he lacks in grammar and language structure though, he makes up in joie de vivre and and unmatchable ease in communicating -- almost like a child, with nothing holding him back in trying out new languages and expressing what is on his mind in a new language he has never spoken before. As an example, my wife's friend only speaks Mandarin Chinese and French, and yet neither is is first language, but he has no problems at all communicating with her quite freely. My wife and I tested his Chinese and Russian, and it was very impressive mastered, although he would not be able to read a single word of either language, nor would he want to.

That's interesting but to be frank I find it quite stupid and limiting. Even if his purpose is just communicating with people reading and writing are pretty much necessary in the modern world. How would he read signs or a map to get around in a foreign country? How would he order things? People want to communicate online or through mobile devices too, and they do that in writing. It seems what he's doing only works if speaking with foreigner in his own country, which is a rather sad use of speaking 10 languages.

I personally agree with you. I have two languages I've been pecking away at these last several years myself, for which the sole purpose is to be able to read native-language literature. But if I were to describe what I think his rationale is, it is that he doesn't care much about functional literacy. As an affluent traveler, he really doesn't need to be functionally literate in any language except English to be able to make do. I directly know this from having worked in countries which speak languages very different from English. He does not really need to read street signs (and would probably prefer asking people where he is in their language anyways), he does not need to read a map, and I imagine if he can transliterate the language into Latin alphabet, people would still understand him. My wife and I transliterate other languages into the Latin alphabet all the time, and I myself have never encountered a problem. I just speculate that the problems you identify don't prove to be roadblocks for him. His entire goal though is sharing of ideas, for which I suppose he has decided requires him to speak other languages. I suppose that if he meets goal, then he is content, even though he continues to be functionally illiterate in those languages he is learning.

I respect the OP's choice, but I'm not happy seeing this presented as advice. If one can get a balance between hearing/ear and reading that is probably the best of two worlds, and they are interrelated anyway.

I'd say that if you have absolutely no interest in classical or in using lead sheets, and just want to be able to play what you've heard in your own way (however basic), there's no need to be able to read music. Lots of folk, pop, rock and jazz musicians get by without ever learning to read music.

The downside of course, is that you can never play anything you haven't heard before. A bit like relying totally on someone else reading 'War and Peace' (or 'Fifty Shades of Grey', depending on your predilection) to you, if you want to know the story. OK, there's always the movie......

As for languages, I can speak four languages fairly fluently but only read & write in one easily. What little I learnt to read & write of the other three had long ago been lost from disuse. But there are two other languages which I can probably read more easily than I can speak, which is fine because I rarely ever have to speak in those languages.......

I dodged reading music while playing guitar for decades and only now realize I made a huge mistake.

Are you including English? Because if so, I am reading fluent English here, which means your native language must have been neglected. And that is just

Yes, my native language has long been neglected, because no-one uses it here in the UK, where I have been living for most of my life..........

I am finding Alfred's quite *cough* boring as all get out *cough*. All of the arrangements are so weird!

Yes, it is soooo boring! In retrospect I wish I had started with a more exciting course. But it is never too late and I have so much more fun now when playing.

When I began my formal lessons, I had played using an online tutorial and largely by ear for a couple of months. Managed to figure out a few songs I like, and played a little for my teacher during my first lesson. He was impressed, but did caution me that I might get a little...bored with Alfred’s. However, it forces me to learn the basics. He keeps things interesting by giving me songs to learn and then building upon them. I have to say Alfred’s is pretty dry, but it also can be frustratingly difficult.

I supplemented Alfred’s with lessons on video that have helped me a lot

The downside of NOT being a memoriser is that you always have to have the music in front of you.

Everyone is different in what they can or cannot do, so there is no one solution. Indeed, there are a myriad of 'solutions'.

I find myself reading a lot more than memorizing, quite the opposite of when I first started. If the only thing I could do was play by ear, then I wouldn't be able to play anything My ear training highlight last week was figuring out maybe the first 16 notes of star wars by ear. But some of them were wrong and my teacher had to correct me, haha.