The Murphy Method Blog

Casey Henry

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post, Thoughts on Learning By Ear – Part 1.

For example: The first song I teach all my students is “Banjo In The Hollow.” When I sit down with a student, I turn on the tape recorder and first play the song through fast, then I play it through slowly. Then I go through each roll in the song and tell the student exactly which strings to play, which fingers to use, one lick at a time. After the first lick, we go on to the second. At the end of the second, we go back and put the first two together. Then we add the third lick, and then put all three together. We go through the whole song this way so by the end of the lesson, the student should be able to put the whole song together, a lick at a time. When the student leaves I expect that she will go home and listen to the song, as well as practice it—listen to it over and over so that she can hum it all the way through in her head, without the banjo in her hands. Much like the “think system” that Professor Hill touted in “The Music Man”: If you can think it you can play it.

The next day, when the student picks up her banjo again, she will probably have forgotten the entire song. That’s okay. It’s part of the process. She just needs to go back to the tape of the lesson and re-learn it and practice it for as long as she can. The day after that, she will have forgotten it again, but it will not take her as long to re-learn. Eventually it will stick in her head and she can congratulate herself for learning her first tune by ear!

Parallel to learning to play lead breaks this way is learning to hear chord changes. For some people this comes easily, for others it takes more work, but it is something that can be learned—it is not an innate ability you are (or aren’t) born with. To start learning how to hear chord changes, start with two-chord songs, like “Skip to My Lou” and “Polly Wolly Doodle.” When you strum the banjo open, it is a G chord. The second chord you need is a D, or simply the two-finger D7 chord. Strum along with the songs as you (or someone else) sing it. When your strum starts to not sound quite right, change to the other chord. Once you get comfortable with the two chords, add your C chord and play some three chord songs (almost all the songs in the standard bluegrass repertoire have just those three chords): “You are My Sunshine,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “I Saw The Light.” (This process is detailed on our Learning to Hear Chord Changes DVD.)

Being able to hear the chord changes while strumming leads to being able to vamp (using slightly harder four-finger vamp chords) and if you can vamp, you can jam. I should mention that in a jam, there will be always be a guitar player, and that looking at the guitar player’s chords is not cheating. It is a very helpful tool in learning the chords to songs. You just have to learn to recognize the guitar chord shapes, and you can read the guitar player’s hands. (Of course, if the guitar player doesn’t know what she’s doing, then you’re in trouble!)

At more advanced levels of learning by ear, when you have spent a good many years developing this skill, you can begin improvising by taking all the licks you already know, which you will by then associate with a chord (G licks, C licks, D licks), and using them to create your own breaks to songs. And at the most advanced level of ear training, you can study Earl’s breaks straight off albums by slowing them down and figuring out exactly what he is playing. And you can do none of this if you simply play breaks that are written down on paper.

Casey Henry

These days there are many different ways of learning to play the banjo: You can try to figure it out by yourself. You can find a teacher and take private lessons. You can try to learn from a book. You can learn from a video. You can go to festivals and ask other players to show you things. Most people use a combination of these ways, frequently starting out with a book and then, in desperation, moving on to another method when that doesn’t work. In my opinion there is one best way to go about learning the banjo, and that is to learn by ear. Now, when I say “by ear” I don’t mean to close your eyes and try to figure out how to play what you’re hearing with no visual input. More specifically I mean not using tablature or written notation of any kind.

Many kinds of music can be read off of a page—piano and orchestral music for example—but in those kinds of music, in almost every case when performing you can continue to read off the music, unless for some special reason you have memorized the piece. And none of those types of music are improvisatory; the musicians are never asked to play extemporaneously. Bluegrass music has an entirely different structure. For one thing, it is far too fast to be read off of paper, and you certainly can’t tote your handy-dandy stack of tab around to jam sessions and set it up on a music stand in front of you. Besides being shunned, you’d be laughed at, and pitied, and no one wants that. Regardless of how you go about learning the banjo, at some point you have to venture out with nothing but you and your instrument into the wide world of jamming.

This is where you can begin to see the benefits of learning by ear. If you never develop a dependence on tab, you’ll never have to break it, and that is one fewer hurdle you’ll have to jump on your path to becoming a banjo player. If you start out by listening, really listening, to what you are playing, it will soon start to sound like music (to yourself and other people) and not just a string of notes. And the most important first step to learning by ear, the one that returns the most benefit in the long run, is learning to hear chord changes, which will, eventually, enable you to play along with songs that you’ve never heard before just by following the chords. At a more advanced level it will enable you to construct your own breaks to songs based on your knowledge of the chords—a process known as improvising.

The basis of the process of learning by ear is listening and repetition. You have to listen to what you want to learn over and over to get it in your head. When you know what it is supposed to sound like, it will be easier for you to play. Often students complain, when learning off of a video or tape, that they have to rewind it and repeatedly watch the section they are working on. They think it would be easier for them to learn if they could just have something on paper to look at, or if they could write it down. But the repeated listening, the rewinding, is all part of the process. It is how you learn by ear.

Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion of Thoughts on Learning By Ear!