Playing by ear, like being a “natural singer,” can seem to be some mysterious genetic trait that’s accessible to only a chosen few. While some people naturally have a better ear than others, anyone with normal hearing can learn basic ear-training skills. As Janie Barnett, a professor of ear training and voice at Berklee College of Music, says, “There’s perhaps only 10 percent mystery, 20 percent tricks of the trade, and 70 percent devotion of time.”
Whether your student is struggling with the most basic ear skills or already has some natural ability, the exercises and tricks in this article will help give them the foundation they need to play guitar by ear at whatever level they choose.


Feel the Beat
We tend to associate ear training with melodies and harmonies, but the most basic kind of ear training is playing in time. Timing turns those notes and chords into music. What do you do with a student who can’t tap his foot to a beat, much less strum chords in time—even at a slow tempo?
The key is getting those students physically involved. New York City guitar teacher Valerie Mackend says, “I put on Michael Jackson and we get up and dance, move our arms up and down with the beat.” Put on some music of your own, and have your student clap, stomp—whatever it takes.
If a student is still having a hard time finding the beat, Jon Geist, a teacher at New York’s American Institute of Guitar, suggests asking a student to slap his thighs to really feel the beat. You can also do patty-cake or have your student play claves, a cowbell, or another percussion instrument along with the music.
Once your student can hear and respond to the beat, have him play a simple quarter-note or eighth-note strum pattern on the guitar along with a CD. Mackend suggests you turn up the volume, strum along with the student so he can hear and see how the strum pattern is supposed to sound and look, and count along to help him get used to keeping track of the beats.

Sing the Pitch
A student who can’t hear and match a pitch will find it nearly impossible to move on to more advanced skills such as finding the key of a song by ear on the guitar. Singing is the most direct way for a student to physically feel and experience pitch without having to deal with technical issues on the guitar, and singing will ultimately accelerate a student’s ability to relate what she hears to the guitar.
To make singing less intimidating to her students, Mackend explains that training the vocal cords is just like training any muscle. To demonstrate, she has a student feel the vocal cords on her neck while singing a low note up to high. The higher the student sings, the tighter the vocal cords get. “If I sing ‘la’ and you’re able to match that pitch and sing it, you knew exactly how tight to make those muscles before you even heard what you were doing,” Mackend explains. “Many people come out with the wrong note then slide to the right note. So it’s not that they have a bad ear, it’s that they haven’t developed the muscle control.”
For a student who has trouble matching a pitch, John Lehmann-Haupt, a solo fingerstyle and classical guitar specialist, suggests asking her to sing any pitch. You can then deliberately slide into the note (doesn’t matter from above or below) to let her feel the progression from dissonance to the consonance of a proper unison.
You can use this opportunity to explain the phenomenon of beating, or audible wavelengths: When two notes aren’t in tune the different sound waves cause a kind of turbulence in the air. As the notes get closer to unison, the sound waves line up better and the beating slows down. If you don’t hear any beats, the sound waves are perfectly aligned and the notes are in unison.

Incorporate the Instrument
You can then move on, as Geist suggests, to having the student slowly sing the major scale using the standard do-re-mi solfège syllables. Ideally, the student should sing along with a keyboard to avoid the intonation issues, such as accidentally sharping or flatting notes, that come up with the guitar.