44 replies to this topic

[RHCPkingFrusciante]

To be honest i can only figure out things by ear if i hit the note luckily, sometimes i will be able to figure them out, but if its chords mixed in with lead playing i suck at it.

[openparachute]

Once I learned all of the intervals, and memorized how they sounded, it becames easier to play by ear than read tabs. To learn chords, I just pick out each tone individually, and figure out which fingering on the guitar makes the most sense for my hand.

[bryn]

triplepant, on Dec 12 2007, 09:09 PM, said:

unhinged-sock, on Dec 10 2007, 08:20 PM, said:

How good am I at figuring out songs by ear.... awful!! LOL ultimate-guitar.com for me 100%... ha ha ha

Yeah I really hate those tab sites nowadays... Imagine how it would be without these tab sites... It would be like in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Everybody who really wanted to learn guitar would have towork really hard to figure songs out. There would be a lot more good guitar players now without these tab sites. I learnd songs with tabs myself, but I haven't used tabs since one year now and I'm really Proud. Did Eric Calpton use Tabs? Did Jimi Hendrix use tabs? No. I also think that if you learn Songs by ear you get another perspective of a song. You get a differnt relationship with the song. With Tabs the Songs didn't have much meanigs to me. When I started learning them by Ear that changed. Thats how I feel about it.

took the words out of my mouth or brain.
i stopped using tab sited and its opened up my playing so much more and in so many ways.

[Mad Alchemist]

Did John Frusciante use tabs? Yes. I know that he figured a lot by ear, but I'm pretty sure that he didn't skip completely all these tabs in guitar mags.
Not to be misunderstood, I don't usually use tabs and never seriously tried to because I naturally hear a lot myself. But it's also silly to say that tabs are 100% evil and tabsites are destroying our World Of Music Without Bounds. Tabs are basically musical notation for guitar. Should we maybe forget about musical notation at all and start figuring Beethoven by ear? Some guitar parts are really, really tough to figure, especially when added to the mix. Of course there's no need in tabs when guitar part is made of 4 simple chords. But when guitar part is complicated I see no real harm in using a tabbook to get it right.
The main problem with tabs is that they usually suck, most of them are faulty and\or oversimplified, some are just completely wrong. So if someone uses bad tab and can't realize it's wrong because he trusts blindly whatever this tab says, it's really sad. But if someone uses good tab to figure out some tough leak instead of listening to song 500 times and getting it wrong at the end anyway, it's not a bad thing.

[funky tea]

It sounds like JF does both. While there's no doubt he spent a lot of time figuring songs out by ear, I've read interviews saying that he loved learning from guitar magazines as a kid, so it sounds like he used tabs as well. Note: I also want to point out that he can also transcribe (listen to music and put it into real music notation without the aid of an instrument), but that's another story.....

Also I want to see I can put this "ear vs. tab discussion" to rest. I think it all depends on what level of a guitarist you are. If you're casual player, there's no problem learning from tabs. If its just a hobby, and you don't want to devote hundreds or thousands of hours to practising music (like JF did), then tabs are great. It can be an easy way to learn your favorite songs, and can make it fun. So there's nothing wrong with that.

On the other hand, if you're serious about music, you can't expect to be a good at what you do unless you have a great ear. Pretty much all the great players out there were either born with good ears (for ex. Kurt Cobain), or developed it by spending thousands of hours figuring out parts by ear (JF falls into this category). Personally, I decided to take a different approach. I always found it frustrating learning songs by trial and error, without seeing any consistent progress from doing so. Instead I decided to first train my ear until I got to the point that I could automatically figure out any song/part by ear effortlessly. If that's what you want, there's two courses that you can download from torrent sites -> Relative Pitch and Perfect Pitch by David Burge. Those courses are incredibly good. But the other side of the coin is rhythm, which you not only need to develop co-ordination (like a drummer, pianist, or someone who sings and plays guitar at the same time), but the ability to hear/recognize/transcribe rhythms by ear instantly. There's a great book on this, and I'll recommend it to whoever's interested.

But I understand that this avenue is one that takes thousands of hours, so obviously most people aren't willing to do that (unless you're really serious). Becoming a great musician is a long road, but if you tackle these three areas of musicianship, you'll be set for life.