Learning to play guitar by ear is a skill all guitar players can accomplish. There is no art to being able to play by ear. All it takes is some practice to coach your capacity to differentiate the scales and chords that are being played in a tune.

This article has some ways for training your ear that I have used over the last 25 years of playing and learning guitar.

At beginner level, you want to start out by being able to differentiate between major and minor chords. A simple drill for starting with this is to record yourself playing a progression of major chords (A up to G). Next, record variations of the chord progression, but replacing a major chord with a single minor chord. Once you play back the variations you should be able to say to yourself whether each chord is major or minor as you hear it.

You can refine this by listening to songs on the radio or advertisement jingles on TV and picking out the major or minor chords. You can check if you are correct by playing your guitar along with the tune. Start by just playing the bass note (E string) to find the root note then try playing the major and minor chords and decide which sounds better to your ears. For example, the root note could be ‘g’ so play a G-major followed by a G-minor along with the tune and see which fits better. This is not perfect as complex tunes could have bass to chord variation (for example a ‘g’ bass note played with a C major chord).

Once you’ve mastered this you should focus on learning chord sequences/progressions. This is a fun part as you just listen to songs and aim to figure out the chords being played. Most pop/country/rock tunes have simple chord sequences so this can be quite easy to do. Start off with a simple song and break it down into its sections - verses, chorus and bridge. Take each section and try to understand the chords used. You may realise, for example, that verses use 2 or 4 chords for each line of the song or that the chorus repeats 4 chords. Start trying to work out which chords are being played. Play along with the tune to find the chords. You want to build up a mind map of the chords. You can start by writing these out, but ultimately, move to remembering the chords and their sequence.

After some practice playing along with a variety of songs, you will have memorized a number of sequences and will start to see that most songs follow some fairly standard structures or templates in how they combine verse/chorus/bridge and also in how they group chords (major and minor).

Playing by ear is a skill that you can never stop learning. You can always find a songwriter new to you or a type of music that you can try to analyse the chord progression and chord types. With time you learn to pick out of complex chords (diminished chords, sevenths, etc.) to a level where you can play along with most songs after a one listen.

Looking for other ways to teach yourself guitar? Read Ann’s review of the Jamorama online course for learning guitar. Covers all skill levels.

This article teaches you a nice little chord change for you to use over and over again. It can be used in many different situations adding another item to your bag of tricks that you should be building up over time. Even if you are not yet at a level to be able to play this piece you still need to keep it as you will be able to refer back to it when you are at a level to be able to play it. Your bag of tricks you will be building over time will be invaluable in times to come and will help tremendously in your quest to becoming a great player. This sequence is really effective but it does assume you have some understanding of playing the guitar.

If you are not yet at the level to be able to play this chord sequence, dont worry, just keep this tip for future reference and once you get to the level to be able to play this phrase simply pull it out of your bag of tricks that you will be building up from lots of FREE articles I will be posting over the coming weeks.

Ok, let’s get going:

Play one bar with all down strokes and on the beat using an ‘A major’ chord in the open position using your 1st, 2nd and 3rd fingers.

Next lift off your 3rd finger to reveal the open B string (this chord is called Asus2) and play one bar.

Next using your 4th finger hold down the ‘B string’ at the 3rd fret (1st and 2nd finger remain unchanged at the second fret throughout this sequence) and play one bar, this chord is called Asus4. Then finish with one bar of ‘Amajor’ to complete this four bar sequence.

And thats it!

You will find that this chord sequence pops up in many, many songs, sounds really effective and can be used by the relative beginner to produce a really nice sounding sequence.