Learning to play by ear

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I also learn music better by ear than by sheet music. Luckily for me, the instrument I am learning, you really gotta have the music memorized instead of playing it off the sheet. For one, there is no way to turn the pages in sheet music when you are busy marching, have both hands occupied with the chanter, and the (usually) left arm maintaining constant pressure....

In "Mr. Holland's Opus" (Netflix or Redbox if you haven't seen) there's a line where the girl is stinking up the passage and he asks her what's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen, and she says a sunset. He tells her 'play the sunset'

The sunset is notated on paper so a blind person can see it

For learning to play by ear, I think that even tab is more trouble than it's worth. Learn the chords, find chord charts for some songs you know, and start playing along.

For what it's worth, "music theory" is actually going to do more for you playing by ear than it is if you're playing from notation. Playing by ear (from chord charts), when you see that you're supposed to play a Gmin9 chord at some point in the song, with a little music theory, you can figure out what that is and how to make that chord. Playing from notation (on piano, anyway), it will tell you what the notes are, it may not even include the chord name.

I don't know if you're involved in a church at all, but there's a whole "contemporary worship" thing going on these days; the songs tend to be fairly simple, chord charts are pretty easily available, as are youtube videos for a lot of the songs. Even if you're not good enough to play in the worship band, the leader will often be willing to share charts, recordings, etc.

In general, I'd say that piano is going to be more of a "play from notation" instrument and guitar is going to be an instrument where "playing by ear" is a popular approach. If your [i]guitar[/i] teacher is pushing you to read notated music, you may be going to the wrong music teacher, for you, anyway. Check the bulletin boards at the local music stores, make a few calls and say, "I want to learn to play by ear, I don't want to have to learn how to read music," and you WILL find teachers out there who understand that and probably learned that way themselves.

The way I learned to play songs on the guitar by ear was by learning all the main chords and then playing along with songs on itunes.