Playing music by ear?

I've been watching a bunch of people play piano on youtube and the common request is where is the sheet music available. I alse noticed the common response is that there is none, and that these people play by ear.

From what I can understand of the phrase is that these people encode and play what they hear on piano. I'm sure if they're pretty familar with the song and the piano it's a snap. However not too many people, myself included lack these skills.

I also can't read sheet music... well I learned the bits in school but I never use it to play any music. I mostly watch tutorials online and play from memory. I guess it does help with improving memory and becoming familar with piano but it does have its flaws. Sometimes my mind might go blank on something I played a hundred times... And its likely the piece will become harder to play the longer I go on without playing it.

Which of these 3 skills do you think is the hardest and easiest to master in music? Which is the most practical?

the most practical thing to do would be to learn as much about music theory as you can and practice ear training. This is how people play by ear. They understand theoretically what is going on, plus they can identify chord qualities, progressions, and melodic intervals to transcribe a song.

If you're to be what one would consider a "good" musician, all three things - ear training, finger positions, and the ability to read sheet music - are necessary to learn. Keep in mind that I'll be simplifying some points (almost grossly) to illustrate my main point as simply as I can.

Ear training and memorizing finger positions often go hand in hand, and this combination will become quite important as time goes on. Currently, I'm at the point where if I'm playing something I've never tried to play before, I can get most of the notes right just because I know where the next notes should be in relation to the previous notes I played. I'm good at recognizing intervals (the the audible "distance" between notes) as a result of training my ear, and I can best calculate which fingering should come next as a result of having familiarized myself with finger positions in relation to said intervals.

In short, as long as I know what key a song is in - which, again, is something that is gained by ear training - I can pretty much play something I've never played before with some 70-something percent accuracy, as long as I've listened to the song at least a few times. So both ear training and finger positions are both immensely important, and I urge you to start trying to master those first.

Sheet music, on the other hand, is a whole different animal. Whereas memorizing finger positions has to do with muscle memory (tactile) and ear training has to do with recognizing the quality of intervals (auditory), the ability to read sheet music associates both those qualities with what you see on paper (visual). If I'm to be honest...really, looking at notes on a staff and interpreting them as C, E, G, etc. is no more difficult than than looking at the Cyrillic letters в о д а and interpreting them as v o d a, then further interpreting its meaning to be "water".

...Actually, that really is a great analogy, now that I think about it. Music really is like a language in and of itself; finger positions would be like actually speaking the language, familiarity with interval qualities would be like hearing and understanding the language, and being able to read/write sheet music would be like reading/writing the language in its designated script. And of course you know that most people start out speaking and understanding their language before they learn how to read or write, which is why reading/writing sheet music should come last.

As for exercises on how exactly to work on these things, well...there really is no one way, but among the most common are these:

-To familiarize yourself with fingerings, practice scales. Pretty simple. Major and minor work just fine, but you might want to memorize positions for Dorian, Lydian and the rest of the modes as well, just to be dynamic. Play these scales up, down, over one octave, two octaves, three octaves...etc.

-To train your ear to recognize intervals (quality of 2 notes) and chords (3 or more notes), have one of your siblings or someone else play random intervals or chords (provided they're not exotic chords) for you, and try to guess the quality.

-Then, combine the above two exercises by observing intervals in relation to the fingerings themselves. For example, you'll eventually learn that hitting two keys right next to each other produces a minor second, etc.

-Before trying to master reading sheet music, I suggest you get a good grasp on the other three exercises first. First thing to learn are the notes for each clef...mnemonics really help here (e.g., for treble clef: Every Good Boy Does Fine for the lines of the staff, FACE for the spaces between; for bass clef, Good Burritos Don't Fall Apart on the lines, All Cars Eat Gas for the spaces). After you've got a good grasp of that, print out some blank manuscript paper and plot down some random notes, then sit down and try to play them.

I know I'm usually pretty poor at explaining things, but I hope this wall of text has helped you in some way.

Learning "intervals" is the worst ear training idea anyone ever had. Music is composed of notes, not intervals, and it's the sound of the notes you should be memorizing. It's like teaching children about letters and spelling by having them memorize the distance between letters. Absurd. In the real world, it's infinitely more useful to recognize and identify notes by their relation to the key rather than by their relation to whatever note happened to have been played just before that note.

It's also easier. Rather than attempting to memorize a staggering amount of ascending and then descending intervals, you just learn what each of the 12 notes sounds like in relation to the tonic. Once you know this, identifying the various "intervals" becomes as easy as it is useless.

Use the movable do solfège method. Each note gets assigned a syllable which denotes its relation to the tonic (this is the Do-Re-Mi stuff you heard as a child). After training for a while, you start to learn the distinct feel of each note. I trained with this method obsessively (several hours each day) for just a few months in college and I made huge strides in training my ear. I was not naturally blessed with a good ear for music--indeed, I was bordering on being tone deaf--but now my ear is one of my strongest musical points.

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Originally Posted by DuB

Learning "intervals" is the worst ear training idea anyone ever had. Music is composed of notes, not intervals, and it's the sound of the notes you should be memorizing. It's like teaching children about letters and spelling by having them memorize the distance between letters. Absurd. In the real world, it's infinitely more useful to recognize and identify notes by their relation to the key rather than by their relation to whatever note happened to have been played just before that note.

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How is not learning intervals a good idea? Sure, if you have perfect pitch there's no problem, but for us mortals, learning intervals is a very good idea. It is much easier to learn melodies if you know intervals. You just find the first note, then analyze all the intervals to find the rest. Same with chords. If you know the first chord, listen to the interval in the bass-notes, then find the qualities of the chord (major, minor, seventh, whatever), and voila. You know the chords. intervals is some of the first i was taught when i started studying music.

Having "perfect" or "absolute" pitch has nothing to do with it. That's why I emphasized that you learn the notes relative to the key (notice that I had underlined that part) and advocated an ear training method that does so. That point is that, yes, for we mere mortals (I am one too), we have to memorize the notes by their relation to some other thing, rather than just identifying them in isolation. So you can either learn them relative to the tonic (as in movable do solfege--useful) or relative to whatever note happened to have been played before that one (as in intervals--not useful). I am not advocating learning the absolute sound of the 12 notes, I am advocating learning the relative sound of each note in the context of a particular key (the mediant, submediant, etc.).

I did music training with intervals for a while as well. I even made some progress. But I progressed quicker when I started listening to the notes rather than the gaps between them.

Indeed they learn by ear, but alot of them also use visual to learn by ear. They look at a cover (video) online and see the notes they are playing and using there ears try to get an accurate sounding note to it. And by looking at them playing you get a better chance because you can see what they are playing and can just about make out.