If the pitch moves up, the note vibrates faster. (This is measured in hertz – “hz” – or how many cycles the vibration makes per second.) This might sound silly, but think about it, a note is simply a vibration occurring at a certain frequency. This can be hard to hear at first, but one thing you can listen for is an intensifying of the note’s vibration. If the note moves up or down, the pitch will change accordingly. Sing them out loud (your voice vibrating your head helps you hear changes in pitch) and identify when the first note changes. If the note stays the same you won’t hear any kind of movement in pitch.įor reference, here are the songs from the list that use the same note multiple times at the beginning of the melody: “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “Ode to Joy.” This little test has a section on identifying whether a note moves up or down. Interval training exercises help you learn to identify the distance between notes. Hopefully one will sound obviously consonant and “home.”Īn ear training app is a very powerful practice tool that’s especially helpful for honing the skills needed for this step. Try playing any of these three options on your uke while singing the first note of the melody. The first note of a melody is usually a note in the first chord. Now it’s time to find it on your ukulele. Then isolate the first note and sing it by itself. Sing the beginning of the melody a few times until you feel confident it’s right and fits with the chord. Conjure up the melody into your head and try to hum or sing the first few notes.Īll of the songs included above start on the root chord so you can strum C while you sing. Strum C and let the sound get in your mind.
Strum C G7 C and hum an improvised little tune to get your ear accustomed to the sound of the key.įrom there you need to find the note the melody starts on. If you have to listen to a recording you might end up playing in a hard key and spend your time feeling lost instead of figuring out the notes.Ĭ is usually the most familiar key for ukulele players so start there. I like what Victor Wooten has to say about playing without theory in this video snippet (in our case here, “theory” can mean what’s written on a page). Someone who nurtures this connection is able to easily jam and play stuff they hear in their head. It helps you connect your ears to your fingers. You are more committed to a song you’ve put effort into figuring out yourself.īut most of all, exercising this part of your musical mind frees you.You are forced to get comfortable playing what sounds good instead of what you think is right.You have a better chance to make the music your own.In a nutshell: I think that when you learn a song note for note by ear… With all the answers available via the internet nowadays you might wonder why you’d take the long way around. Why should I make the effort to learn by ear? But if you stick with it, you’ll be rewarded. So, with that in mind, it’s best to approach this method of learning music with the same open-mindedness as a new language learner. Of course, most people are much more comfortable speaking their native tongue than they are playing music. What changes is the device used to interpret the message (ears instead of eyes). Putting it on the page doesn’t make the message any different. I just makes it different.įiguring a song out on your ukulele by ear is like understanding spoken word as opposed to reading. More than anything, it’s just an approach that most people aren’t familiar with. This allows players to almost completely skip the most important part of musicianship: listening! Is figuring out a song by ear hard? It’s an age of zero patience and “ About 1,710,000 results (0.23 seconds)” searches. Nowadays there are thousands of tab websites are at the tip of your fingers. If you didn’t use your ears to analyze songs you were at the mercy of others and their handwritten transcriptions.
This was part of the required skill set as an ukulele player. …There in the darkness you’d find a time in which everyone was pretty good at figuring out songs by ear. If you were to go back to the time before the internet was a thing, back before there was widespread access to ukulele tabs, even as far back as when people were like: “Jake who?”