How do I get rid of the sheet music?

addicted2myuke

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I've been playing daily for 15 months and doing well as long as I have sheet music in front of me. I cannot even remember a simple song if I am not looking at chord boards. How does one learn to play by ear?
 
Well, you could look at Jim D'Ville's workshops or DVDs: http://www.playukulelebyear.com/

And, I can't play by ear, but learning to think of a song as a collection of chord progressions, and not a collection of chords has helped. Uncle Rod's Ukulele Boot Camp helped to train my what chords go in what key knowledge.

But if you just want to play a song without looking at a sheet, you will first want to get rid of the chord diagrams (which by now I don't even look at) and just use the chord letters, then eventually play the heck out of the song in order to memorize.

Last, pick up your uke with nothing in front of you, and just start playing the song and figuring it out from what you remember and from what chord progression sounds best.

Granted, I haven't actually done this, but I can anticipate chord changes in most songs I know, so I can play from chord sheets probably too easily.

Plus figuring out a song by singing and playing with no chord sheets is how most people learned to play songs before the internet.
 
I have memorized so many chords by now that I can just look at the letters and know where to place my fingers, but still struggling to remember the chords to the song. I guess I'll just keep plugging away. Thanks Mr.Rios!
 
Choose a song or two that you really want to learn and that have just a few simple chords. Nothing too complicate. Play a verse at a time, first looking at the music, then looking away. Add verses until you can play the entire song from memory. Play through memorized songs a few times a week to keep them memorized as you are learning new songs. Pretty soon you'll have plenty of songs memorized. I find that listening to recordings of songs I'm trying to memorize helps. Try hearing the song in your head without playing and singing, just thinking through it.
 
Well, start with simple things. Maybe the simplest is 12-bar blues. "Hound dog", "Shake, Rattle and Roll". Play a few.

Then there's the ones with standard repeating progressions - Stand By Me, You Ain't going Nowhere.

Listen out for songs that you think should be "gettable". They won't all turn out gettable, but some will, and that's very satisfying. Some artists are great for this - Bob Dylan, Hank Williams - they use easy chords and reuse the same ideas in different combinations to produce very satisfying songs.

So how do you find the actual chords? Well, first you need to decide where the chord changes are. This is just feel. Changes are really the most important thing - they are what drives the music along. A lot of people seem to miss this, and think of a song in terms of "blocks" of chords, which leads to music that sounds static rather than dynamic. So listen to songs and try and feel where these changes are. After a while it becomes obvious.

Then you start trying out different chords until one fits. It's trial and error at first, but as you go on you develop an instinct. You begin to know whether it's major or minor, or has a 7th.

Don't be afraid to make mistakes - all this takes time. Work on a song for a couple of days at least before "cheating" and hitting chordie for the "actual" chords - but bear in mind that there may be many ways to play a song and online chords are frequently questionable.

The good news is that being able to play by ear will improve your ability to retain songs learnt from sheet music - you'll be remembering things that make musical sense rather than meaningless sequences of letters and symbols.

Good luck!
 
Thanks for these comments, Novohal. I, too, have no ear for notes or even being in tune, which makes it very hard to memorize songs.
I'm an intermediate strummer and a beginning fingerpicker and I enjoy uking, but even 100 plays through is not enough for me to memorize picking all of Edelweiss--there's always a part that falls out, and it's a different part each time.
 
I, too, have no ear for notes or even being in tune, which makes it very hard to memorize songs.

The way to think of it is "I am still developing my ear for notes and being in tune." - it's a work in progress, and there are things you can do to make it progress properly.

It's true that these things come easily to some and not so easily for others, but whatever the starting point, everyone needs to develop the skills. It looks like magic when someone tunes a uke by ear in seconds, or pulls a melody and chord sequence for a song they've just heard out of the air. But what you don't see is the long period in the wilderness before these skills matured. I struggled for a long time!
 
This is good advice and it soothes my impatience. It's also good to remember that I'm playing for my own fun and pleasure. And I am improving, though at a glacial pace.

My husband and I recently heard the Durham (N.C.) Ukulele Orchestra at two performances. It's a five-person group, and three members play more than one instrument. They played rock, Latin, polka, Tin Pan Alley, blues and specialty numbers, ending with Born to Run. They all had song sheets in front of them, but they weren't reading from them, just glancing at them from time to time. One lead player is also a lead guitarist in another group, and he was totally into his fingerpicking solos, but he had to read lyrics when he was singing.
 
Thanks for these comments, Novohal. I, too, have no ear for notes or even being in tune, which makes it very hard to memorize songs.

It's funny because I always thought I was tone deaf. I picked up the uke about a year ago, thinking this was the case.

So this morning I pick up the uke, play a few chords, and notice that it just doesn't sound right. I check the strings against the "A" and none of the other "A"s sound right. I pluck the E, but it sounds okay, I check the A on the E string with the A on the G string, and they sound exactly the same.

So I get the tuner, and sure enough, the G and E strings are in tune, and the C and A just off. I was amazed that I could tell, since this was the first time I had ever noticed anything like that.

But if you do enough tuning, and playing you eventually do train your ear.
 
You're asking two separate questions here. How to play by ear and how to memorize a song. I don't yet play by ear so I can't help with that question, but I might be able to help with memorizing...
As said by others, taking small parts of the song and playing them without looking at the sheet is a good start. Begin with the first few chords and build from there, trying to look at the music as little as possible. Now here's the big trick that works for me - and this goes with anything you have to memorize: Work on it just before you go to bed. Your subconscious will go over it as you sleep. As soon as you wake up in the morning, work on it again. You'll find you've retained a lot from the night before.
Also, remember that you're memorizing for muscle memory rather than being able to recite the chords or notes in your head. It's a different process and it requires playing the piece over and over rather than the academic study of just trying to remember all the chords and where they go. The more advanced songs I've memorized I wouldn't be able to tell you how to play. I'd have to be holding my uke and just play the song because it's all muscle memory instead of in my head. Hope that helps.
 
You're asking two separate questions here. How to play by ear and how to memorize a song. I don't yet play by ear so I can't help with that question, but I might be able to help with memorizing...
As said by others, taking small parts of the song and playing them without looking at the sheet is a good start. Begin with the first few chords and build from there, trying to look at the music as little as possible. Now here's the big trick that works for me - and this goes with anything you have to memorize: Work on it just before you go to bed. Your subconscious will go over it as you sleep. As soon as you wake up in the morning, work on it again. You'll find you've retained a lot from the night before.
Also, remember that you're memorizing for muscle memory rather than being able to recite the chords or notes in your head. It's a different process and it requires playing the piece over and over rather than the academic study of just trying to remember all the chords and where they go. The more advanced songs I've memorized I wouldn't be able to tell you how to play. I'd have to be holding my uke and just play the song because it's all muscle memory instead of in my head. Hope that helps.

Another thing is age. Muscle memory is there. I know because I could still play a trumpet after not playing for over 50 years. I can even remember some songs from when I was 15. However, now I can play a song 100 times and still need to use the charts. I can play by ear, but it might not be in the same key as the original recording. These things are factual from my personal experience on trumpet, but I'm still a rookie on uke. I know it's not just me, because other musicians, my age (70's), have the same problem.
 
Hello addicted2myuke,
I like songs with only two chord changes when I am trying to teach the grand kids to sing and play. This trains the ear much more quickly, and before you know it, they can sense whenever the change is needed.
Jim
PS: I teach them to sing the lowest note they can manage. That will be sung as "do"....then we go through the do,rae, me fa, so la te, do,rae, me fa so.....until most of us reach our upper limit which is about one and a half octaves. Chords C and F are about the easiest to handle for the kids. We just capo (elastic rubber band and a pencil) up a fret or two to get a comfortable key to sing in. I hope that makes sense.
 
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I had the same problem when I started playing guitar years ago. I learned to read music as I learned to play the guitar so I was so dependent on reading the sheet music that I never really memorized anything. I will say however, don't stop reading music. If you can read music, it is a valuable tool especially if you have to figured out a song that you have never heard before. I always felt that not memorizing anything held back my progress with guitar.

Now that I've started playing ukulele, I've changed my thinking and approach. I'm not aspiring to be a professional musician (not that I ever was) and I'm doing it for fun and pleasure. So, I use the sheet music to learn the chords and then, as others have said, started learning the song in small junks. Once I get certain chords down, it becomes easier because, they usually repeat in the same order throughout the song. Anyway, I've realized that I could have been doing this all along. I've found that I get to the point that I can anticipate the chord coming up and that my fingers sometimes just go there without thinking about it. Someone else mentioned this as muscle memory. Now it is actually a lot more enjoyable to play and even seems easier.
 
Another memorization tip from my marching band years; When you learn a new song start from the end, not the beginning. Pick a spot near the end to start learning, play through the end. Once you've mastered that, back up a bit farther and again play through the end.

This way as you play through the whole song you get more comfortable and confident as you go along, rather then less. And besides, they may not remember how you started a song...but good or bad they'll always remember how you end it. ;-)
 
Playing by ear is different than committing songs to memory.

For memorizing the chords to a song, I like to break it down into groups. A song will usually have the same progression for each verse, each chorus, etc. Once I memorize the progression for the verse, I'll move to the chorus. Once both of those have been memorized, I'll start on any remaining parts of the song that might be there, like a bridge, or pre-chorus. Soon, you'll have the whole thing in your head.

For memorizing lyrics, I'll again break it down into groups. Just this past weekend I had to play, "The Weight," by the Band. That song has five verses, and they don't have a logic to their order. However, once I hear the first few words of any verse, I can finish it from memory. So all I had to do was memorize the subject of each first line, and in what order they come in the song. Just enough to get me started.

I committed the following list to memory - Nazareth, bag, Moses, Chester, cannonball. No sweat!
 
I can play many songs from having just a sheet with lyrics and chord letters printed on it. But if I tried to play it without the sheet in front of me, I was doomed. I played with an ukulele group for a couple of years, but we always had our music in front of us, even when performing. We went to a place to perform that had a small stage and we were a large group. Suddenly, there was no room for my music stand. Guess what? I actually knew all the songs.

What I started to do was play from the music sheets in the living room right about sunset and leave the lights in the room off. As it got darker, it became more and more difficult to read the page, but it was still there. Believe it or not it worked! This has helped with songs I already play well but still mentally "need" my music or whatever.

For learning new songs from memory I have found that repetition is the key. Learn to play the chord progression well. Learn the chorus. Then play the first verse from the sheet, then turn the sheet over and play until you can play the first verse correctly without seeing it, followed by the chorus. Then just add verses. It takes time and dedication, but once it is in there, it will likely be in there forever. Note: you will drive your wife crazy doing this, especially if you are participating in the Seasons of the Ukulele!
 
you know, most musicians use sheet music, if you play at a bar or hotel or special function, you are of course free to have your sheet music stand(s) there in front of you.. just for reference, and there is no problem looking at them, so long as u dont stare at them the whole time.

playing with other people helps alot too.. if theres a guitarist you can look at, then you know what chord to play by looking at his hands.

anyway, playing with other people also helps u remember the entire thing, i've found..
 
Thank you so much Mr. Bledsoe. I have actually put that method into play and it seems to help alot. I do play in the evening quite often and pick it up very early the next morning and I do retain memory of the chords.
 
Thanks for all the good advice. By the way, I am a woman. ;0)

Wanted. Good strong woman. Must be able to milk the cows and weed the vegetable patch. If you play the ukulele and are interested in music that would be an asset. Please send picture of ukulele. HaHa!
1931jim
 
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