Playing By Ear intro

I haven't put anything up here in a long time and I've spent that time thinking more about playing by ear.

This seems to be the big hurdle that all beginners want to get over. They've learned their rolls and several tunes, maybe from Tab - and let me just say that you need a good grasp of your rolls in Scruggs Style and should be able to play several songs before you tackle what is in these lessons. You should also know how to read Tab - but when they're asked to play a tune that they haven't 'learned' they're lost; they can't play 'by ear'.

I think there are 2 approaches to this. The first is the way I learned. I would play along with the record - yeah it was a long time ago - just doing my rolls, usually the forward-reverse, and every now and then I would hear that what I was doing was the same thing as the record. Then I would notice that a lick here or there was something I had heard in a tune I had already learned. Gradually I could hear more and more melody notes inside the rolls I was using. It was a long slow process before I felt confident that I could approximate just about any tune after hearing it a few times.

So that approach was basically finding the melody inside the roll. The 2nd approach, the one that's more teachable and the one we'll be discussing, is just the opposite; putting the roll around the melody. For this we first need to know how to find the melody and so that will be our first lesson

j