There’s a reason why blues players practice using pentatonic scales so much. There’s a reason rock and metal players practice three note scale patterns. There’s a reason that jazz musicians practice playing over 2-5s so much. They’re the basics of those genres. And in order to play that genre well you’ve got to understand the basics.
Once you’re comfortable with the basics, then expand past them, but make sure that you have the basics down.
They’ll help in whatever else you learn.
And they often overlap.
Pentatonic scales can be used to player over 2-5s in jazz. Playing over 2-5s will help you better understand how to use pentatonics. Knowing three note scale patterns will help you get more comfortable playing scalar runs, which can also be used over 2-5s.
But starting with those basics and understanding those really well will help more with whatever carry over there is.
Getting more comfortable with the basics will only help.
I’ve been listening to “Blues for Alice” by Charlie Parker recently and I’m learning to play it on guitar. I learned it on piano a while ago, but haven’t reviewed the song in quite some time. The melody fits strangely on guitar. But it’s not originally played on guitar.
The shapes don’t feel like guitar shapes.
Songs by Wes Montgomery on the other hand, or other guitar players, fit a little bit better.
And it’s very useful to improve your playing. Learning to play your instrument and use it in ways that you don’t normally use it can help you have more control over your playing. You’ll be able to play more things more easily because you’re used to all of these different shapes on your instrument.
It also gets you out of the boxes that guitar players over get stuck in. We like shapes and boxes on guitar. There are a lot of them, and they fit really nicely on the instrument.
But sometimes it can be easy to get stuck in those shapes, so learning songs that were originally written or played on other instruments can be super useful.
Try to play it as closely to that original recording as you can. Try to play it as much like a saxophone player as you can. Add the same legato notes and the same slurs and inflections.
It may be difficult at first, but once you get used to it you’ll see how much it improves your playing.
This might sound obvious, but I think it’s incredibly useful to get yourself out of the habit of always practicing the same things in the same ways.
New ideas might give you some extra inspiration and some new material to play around with.
It’ll also give you more dynamic playing because you’ll be able to play more different things, rather than only playing the same old ideas.
Where can you get these ideas?
Listen to music that you don’t normally listen to. If you mostly listen to rock music, listen to some jazz or funk or hip-hop. If you mostly listen to jazz, listen to rock music or hip-hop music.
It’ll also make your playing sound more well rounded. Being able to play multiple styles of music, even just a little, means that you know enough about that style to get the basic sound. It also means you understand how that style is different in terms of note choice and rhythm than other styles of music.
Learning to play quickly on an instrument takes some dedicated practice. And it can be especially frustrating if you aren’t sure how to improve your playing speed. I’ve had a number of teachers on different instruments who have given me many different practice techniques for playing quickly. I’ve compiled a list of them here.
I believe that playing speed is a result of efficient and relaxed technique. The more efficient movements you’re able to use and the more relaxed you’re able to play, the easier it’ll be for you to increase the speed. But those are things that you need to get used to. Often players will tense up when they play faster. Practicing staying relaxed is a key to playing quickly
The guitarist Guthrie Govan has mentioned in lessons that with good technique the speed will come. I agree with that quite a lot. If you can play something relaxed and well, you’ll likely be able to play it quickly. The more you’re able to relax as you speed it up, the more easy it’ll be to play faster and faster.
Some parts to playing quickly are things that’ll naturally come from playing your instrument. Playing slowly will lead to playing quickly, as long as you’re using efficient movements and staying relaxed. Though I should make a note that those two things are not always easy to do.
With that out of the way let’s get into the first tip.
1. Use a metronome
This is my first tip. If you don’t practice with a metronome it’ll be incredibly hard to increase your playing speed because you won’t be playing the correct rhythms. Another option is to play along with recordings. The goal is to have a constant beat that you are playing with. This will help develop your own internal sense of rhythm.
It’ll also ensure that the fast passage you’re playing is the correct speed and rhythm. When playing quickly the goal isn’t simply to play a bunch of notes as fast as possible. The goal is to play a specific rhythm quickly. In order to ensure that we do that, we need to have something to measure with. Our measuring tool here is a metronome.
You can also compare your own playing speed to a recording if you’re learning from a recording, though I recommend only using it to check how close you are to playing it at full speed.
2. Play incredibly slowly
I’ve got a YouTube video about this topic that has some tips in it. This is my main practice technique when I’m learning fast passages. I play them incredibly slowly. I’ll play so slowly that I can think about each individual note and play it perfectly. This means that you’ll have to play incredibly slowly. I mean slower than 40 bpm. It’s so much slower than anything you’ll likely ever play.
It may get a little boring so be patient when you’re doing this because it can be incredibly beneficial for your playing to play this slowly. The goal isn’t to play musically, but to practice your playing technique. It’s more a mechanical exercise than a musical exercise.
Another approach to this is to play every note of the fast passage as two whole notes. Next play everything as a whole note. Then play each note as a half note. Then play every note as a quarter note, and an eighth note, until you’re playing the correct speed. This forces you to slow down and focus on each note.
Think about what you’re doing when you’re learning to play quickly. You’re training your fingers to be able to move quickly. This means that many small movements need to be done without thinking about them, because you don’t have time to think about each tiny movement at fast speeds. It also means that extraneous movements will make it a lot harder to play.
I like to separate checking your speed and practicing your speed with this technique. Checking your speed is playing it either with a metronome or a recording at the proper speed, or playing it as quickly as you can. But only use playing quickly as a way to check how close you are to the goal speed. Once you’ve checked, go back to practicing slowly.
When using this technique you should mostly be playing slowly. Most of your practice time should be spent playing incredibly slowly. Checking your speed should be used sparingly.
3. Practice at moderate speeds
This is a tip I learned from my private lessons with Joe Stump, while at Berklee College of Music. He was a big fan of this technique.
Take a fast passage and practice it at moderate speeds. Keep practicing it at a moderate speed until it starts to feel easier and easier. Once it feels much easier, increase the speed. Then practice it at the new moderate speed. Repeat this process until you’re playing it at full speed.
I like to think of this technique as practicing playing endurance. It’s similar to how some people train cardio-respiratory endurance. Choose a set amount of time to run for. Run for that amount of time multiple times. Once the difficulty drops a little bit, increase the distance or speed or your running and repeat.
Practicing at moderate speeds will get your tiny finger muscles moving repeatedly at a speed that isn’t too difficult. Eventually with some practice that speed will become easier and easier, and you’ll be able to increase the speed.
4. Slowly increase the speed
This one is pretty straight forward and goes with the above tips. Slowly increase the speed. But only increase the speed when you can play it well at a slower speed.
This isn’t the first technique that I try when I’m working on a fast passage. I practice it slowly a number of times first, and when I’ve gotten it about as fast as I think I can with that technique I’ll start slowly increasing the speed. The reason I do, and why I recommend doing this, is because you need to get the passage under your fingers first. It needs to be fairly comfortable to play to start this technique. You want to have it memorized and you want to know where the sticking points will be for you.
But the key to this being effective is to use a metronome, or a slowed down recording, and to only increase the speed when you can play it well. If you make a mistake every time you play it, leave it at the lower speed.
Some people like to increase the speed by increments of 1bpm. I don’t find that all that useful and most of the times I’ve done this I’ve increased the speed by around 10bpm. Using bigger chunks also ensures that you’re playing at a manageable speed. You want to play at a speed that’s comfortable, not a speed that’s just barely playable for you. Start slower than you think you should because you can always increase the speed if it’s too easy. But starting too fast may cause you to play the passage sloppily or with tensed muscles, which may ingrain poor playing habits.
5. Isolate sections or techniques
If a specific section is difficult to play quickly, isolate it. Play only that section over and over and over again. Make sure to play incredibly slowly and use some of the previous techniques to increase the speed, but work on that one section alone. I often do this with transitions between sections if you’re moving in a weird way on your instrument. The same can be said with playing single hand parts on piano. Play only the left hand part if that’s the difficult part for you. Sometimes there’s a tricky two notes in a piece of music. Play only those two notes super slowly to reinforce good, relaxed technique.
You can do this with specific techniques too. On guitar if you’re trying to play a fast passage of alternate picking, make sure that you can play that picking pattern fast enough on it’s own. Then try to play it all legato with hammer-ons and pull-offs to get your fingers moving fast enough.
This allows you to focus only on the difficult stuff so you can get better at that exact thing.
6. Play faster than you think you need to
This means be able to play it faster than the performance tempo. Make sure you can play it about 10 to 20 bpm faster than you’ll need to in the song. This ensures that it’ll be easy to play when you perform that song. If you can just barely play it fast enough it won’t sound good or musical, but if you know you can nail it at the proper tempo it’ll be easier to play well and make that passage sound clean.
Performing a song that has a passage that’s at your maximum playing speed isn’t fun, and won’t result in a good performance. That passage will likely be sloppy. With the nerves of performing live, that may cause you not to even be able to play it at all.
To prevent these things from happening, practice it up to a speed that’s faster than the performance speed. That way the performance will be easy to make sound good.
7. Use efficient movements
This means use small movements. For piano and guitar it means keeping your hands down by the fret board and the keys and moving them only as little as possible. Think about playing piano and moving your hand all the way up to your head every time you press a key down. That’s a lot of movement, and if you’re playing quickly you’ll have to move incredibly quickly to play anything. If you keep your hand down by the keys and only move the finger that’s pressing down the key you won’t have to move as quickly because the movements are smaller.
The same can be said for guitar. A lot of the time it’s about just lifting up your fingers a tiny bit off the fretboard. Lift them up just enough so that the string can sound underneath them, but keep them by the fretboard. Another way to move efficiently on guitar is to keep fingers down when they’re on a lower fret than the sounding fret. For example if you’re playing a passage on the 9th, 10, and 12th fret, keep each finger pressed down as you play higher frets.
Another thing that can be added here is to practice moving your hand to where it will be playing. So you want to move your hand to position before you need to play.
There are lots of examples of this depending on what instrument you’re playing, but the bottom line is to move the large parts of your body as little as possible and have your fingers do more movement.
8. Practice perfectly
By this I mean that you should practice perfect playing when you practice. Not everything you play needs to be perfect, but when you’re focusing on practicing and learning a new lick or idea, practice it so slowly you can play it perfectly. If that speed is 16th notes at 120, that’s fine. But for most people, especially when learning something new, it’ll be significantly slower, and that’s fine. The goal is to form good playing habits, not to play quickly.
So play so slowly that you’re playing perfectly. It’s much easier to form good habits the first time, than to correct bad habits later on. This means that when you’re practicing you want to play slow enough that you’re playing well. When first learning an instrument this can be frustrating because that ends up being quite slow, but as you get better that minimum speed for quality playing gets faster and faster.
When you’re practicing something think about how many times you play it well. If you play it well 5 out of 10 times, then you’ll likely play it well 5 out of 10 times when playing quickly. But if you practice slow enough to play it well 10 out of 10 times, you’ll be more likely to play it well 10 out of 10 times when it’s faster. You perform how you practice. If you practice sloppy playing, you’ll perform with sloppy playing.
The old phrase “practice makes perfect”, isn’t quite right here.
We want to think “perfect practice makes perfect.”
Final notes
Often people are in such a hurry to play quickly, that they don’t form good playing habits, and end up playing with sloppy technique. That’s not the goal here. Our goal is to form good playing habits and play with proper and efficient technique. That takes patience because it means slowing the music down enough so that you can properly form those habits.
Playing quickly with poor or sloppy technique isn’t nearly as impressive as it feels. It’s much more impressive to be able to play quickly and cleanly. And that’s something that takes a solid amount of practice, but all it takes is proper practice. This is a good thing because we can all practice properly. And with the proper type and amount of practice we’ll be able to play quickly too.
If you can have the patience to go through these practice techniques, you’ll be well on your way to playing quickly.
Learn to repair and maintain your instruments. Basic things. Know how to change your guitar and ukulele strings, for every type of guitar that you have. If you have an electric, a steel string acoustic, and a nylon string acoustic that means knowing how to change 3 different types of strings. Learn how to clean the instrument and keep it in good playable condition.
There are tons of videos on YouTube that’ll teach you how to do these things. I recommend watching videos from reputable guitar companies, like Fender, Gibson, Stew Mac, and Martin. Or a musician that you follow and trust to give solid advice.
The first time you change your strings is scary. I recommend you buy two sets of strings in case you break some of them. But it gets easier and easier the more you do it. Eventually you won’t even think about the fact that you’ve been changing your own strings.
I’m not good at playing bebop solos. I don’t listen to much bebop. I can easily play a jazz solo that uses lots of pentatonics. I also listen to a lot of Jon Batiste.
The type of music you listen to will affect what type of music you play. I don’t mean to be saying something obvious here. What I mean is, if you’re trying to learn to play bebop you need to listen to bebop.
If you don’t listen to bebop it’ll be hard to play bebop well.
You won’t know the language.
Whatever style of you’re learning to play, listen to it. Get into it.
Listen to it like it’s your new favorite genre of music.
Editing your music is just as important as composing it. Going back and revising and changing sections, taking some sections out, removing parts, and adding parts. These are all just as important as writing the first draft.
The first draft is hardly ever the draft that gets used.
Learning by ear can be incredibly intimidating if you’ve never done it before, but the more you do it the easier it becomes. Here’s a guide for beginners on how to learn songs by ear.
This might seem like a strange first step, but learning to hum or sing along to the part that you’re learning can really help at first. If you’re learning a song with vocals I recommend learning to sing along with the entire song before learning anything, or even starting to sing the goal part. The main benefit this gives you is a reference point for where in the song different sections are. When you’re able to sing along with the song you’re able to remember the form of the song.
This way you’ll be able to learn the other sections a little faster with this reference point.
What if I’m learning a guitar part?
I recommend doing this for every song you learn just to more fully know the song, but you don’t need to learn every single lyric. It definitely helps me get into the song a little more if I can sing along with it, but if you’re under a time crunch it can be an extra step that takes up a lot of time that isn’t worth the effort.
The main idea is to learn to hum along with the melody. Knowing the lyrics isn’t as important as being able to hum the melody along with the song.
But if you haven’t ever learned a song by ear this step is almost necessary and will help loads in being able to learn the rest of the song.
2. Slow it down
When you haven’t learned a song by ear it might be going by a little too quickly to be able to figure anything out. You might feel like the song is just too fast for you to hear where the notes are.
That’s not uncommon.
So after you’ve learned to sing the song, sing it slowly. Slow it down in your head and sing it slowly. This is the primary benefit of being able to sing along with the song. Once you’re able to sing it well enough to hear it slowly and accurately in your head you can match the pitches you’re singing on your instrument. I’ve found this to be more useful than slowing the recording down because it forces me to listen closely and to use my inner ears to slow the music down. It forces me to focus on the sound of the entire musical phrase, rather than focusing on individual notes.
You can also use programs to slow down extremely fast passages. If you’re learning a solo there may be passages that are hard to hear accurately at full speed. They may be too fast or just too complicated. Fortunately, YouTube has a playback speed feature that can be useful here. I’ve used it many times to learn guitar and piano solos because the notes are sometimes so fast that it’s hard to hear clearly full speed. But once I’ve slowed down the music I try to focus on learning to sing the melody, and then I learn it on my instrument. That way I’m still going through the same process of internalizing the music and being able to recreate the music before playing anything.
3. Learn the melody
If you’ve never learned a song by ear then this will likely take a while, but your goal is to be able to play the melody of the song on your instrument. Even if your instrument is a chordal one (like piano or guitar) and your goal is to learn to play that specific part. Fiddle with your instrument and play a bunch of wrongs notes until you find out how to play the melody.
An exercise I often have my private students do is a call and response exercise. I’ll tell them the scale that I’ll be using and the starting pitch and I’ll play something for them. Their goal is to play it back. I play it as many times as they need and as slowly as they need. I’ll even play what they just played, their “guess” for what it is, and then what I played so they can hear it played on the same instrument and by the same person. That often helps them hear that they didn’t play the correct thing.
Count the notes
Another thing I have my students do, especially if they’re new to playing by ear, is count the notes. I’ll ask them to count how many notes the passage contains. I normally don’t play more than 8 notes, and for newer students I start with 3 or 4. But I’ll ask students how many notes the passage had and sometimes I’ll have to play it slowly. I also make sure I ask them how many total notes, even if some notes are repeated. If I play one note five times, that means that passage has five notes. Rather than counting how many unique notes the passage has.
Learn the rhythm
Next learn the rhythm of the passage. Make sure you can play the rhythm on your instrument. Then start adding notes to it. Sometimes the tricky part of a passage is the rhythm and the notes aren’t all that difficult, but the difficult rhythm makes it sound like the notes are difficult too. So learning the rhythm first, without any notes, can help remedy this problem.
Use your music theory
Use your knowledge of scales and music theory to help you out here. If you recognize that you have five notes within a specific scale, check to see if that scale is used for the song. You can basically use the process of elimination if you know your scales well.
Here it’s especially useful to be able to sing along to the song so that you can use your instrument to match the pitches that you’re singing.
Don’t be afraid to go note by note and figure out each note individually.
4. Find the key
Once you can play the melody, write down, or put together all of the notes used. That’s the key.
This step can be done quickly, but it can be helpful to make a conscious note of what key a song is in. It can just help figuring out other sections of the music because you already know what group of notes that section is likely to use.
5. Find the chord progression
Listen to the bass line. The bass player will likely be playing the root notes of the chords. If they aren’t playing the root notes, then the chords may be inverted.
Once you can sing along to the bass line, figure it out on your instrument. That will give you some clues as to what the harmony is. There are a few things you can do after you’ve figured out the bass line. You can check the chords built off of that note within the scale. You can listen to the chord quality (major, minor, diminished, augmented, etc.). You can also use the melody to figure out what the harmony is.
Check chord quality
Listen to the chords and see if you can figure out what type of chord each one is. Are there any major chords? Are there any minor chords?
One way that I’ve seen this taught is telling people to listen to whether the chord sounds “happy” or “sad.” This doesn’t always work, but can be used as a crutch at the beginning.
After you’ve figured out the order of the chords and what chord quality they are try testing out different chords or arpeggios on top to find out what specific chords that song is playing. This is easier to do on a chordal instrument.
Check chords within the scale
Given that I know what scale the song is using and I know my diatonic chords, I’d check if the bass line lines up with any diatonic chords in root position. This takes some knowledge of music theory and scales to do. If you don’t have that knowledge this step may take a little longer, but it’s still doable.
Check the chords in root position built off of the notes in the bass line. If the bass is playing a C chord check if C major or C minor is the harmony there. If it isn’t the chord could be an inversion. Check diatonic inversions like Am/C and F/C.
Check other chords outside the key
If you play the arpeggio or chord built off the bass note and it doesn’t sound correct check other chords that include that note.
For example if the bass is playing a C and the chord isn’t C major, there are a number of other chords we can check. After you’ve checked Am/C and F/C check other non-diatonic chords. Those are chords not within the key. Check C minor, Ab, Fm, and D7. Not all songs exclusively use diatonic chords, but some songs may have chords that are outside of the key and if the chord you’re testing out doesn’t sound correct it might be a non-diatonic chord.
Use the melody
If you know the bass line and the melody, you likely know multiple notes in each chord. Put them together. The melody is often playing a chord tone (in a lot of styles of music at least), or accenting or centering around a chord tone or chord tones. Use that knowledge to figure out the harmony.
6. Learn any other parts
Lastly learn any other parts within the song that you think are interesting. This is the step where I’d suggest learning the specific instrumental part that you’re looking to learn. If you’re learning a specific guitar or piano part this is the step you’d learn that.
Repeat the above steps (when applicable) and use the knowledge that you gained through the previous steps to help you.
The reason I put this one so far down the list is because all of the previous steps will give you a solid amount of background knowledge of the song to be able to easily figure out other parts within the song. Having knowledge of the structure of the song and how the song is formed can help guide you in learning other instrumental parts within a song.
Learning the harmony will especially help you figure out what the guitar and piano parts likely are. Being that they’re both chordal instruments, they’ll likely be outlining the chords in some way. So you can get a head start on learning that part if you already know the harmony.
7. Roman numerals and solfege
I use roman numeral analysis and solfege all the time. They’re two incredibly useful tools for ear training. They give you a reference point for what you’re hearing. You can relate the melody and chord progression that you just figured out back to some type of framework like roman numerals and solfege so that you can better learn songs in the future.
What they do is they give you names for the sounds you’re hearing. The different scale degrees have names with solfege and being able to listen specifically to the relationships between the notes will help you learn songs in the future without needing an instrument. You can figure out how the notes are related even if you haven’t learned the key because you’re listening within that specific scale.
Roman numeral analysis does the same thing. It gives you names and a reference point for chord progressions. It can help you listen to a song and hear how the chords are related, and how they relate to the tonal center, even if you don’t know what specific notes a song is using.
This skill is called relative pitch. You’re listening to the relationships between the notes and how they relate back to the tonal center, rather than listening for specific pitches.
Final notes
Learning songs by ear is a lifelong endeavor and you’ll always be able to improve your ear training skills. But it’ll get easier the more you do it. The more songs you have learned, the easier it will be to learn songs in the future. You’ll start to recognize chord progressions that you already know. You’ll start to recognize solfege syllables or scale degrees. You’ll start to hear rhythms that you know and strumming patterns, and piano parts, and harmonies. You’ll start to recognize licks in guitar solos. Eventually you’ll be able to hear modulations. All of these things will happen the more you practice ear training and learning songs by ear.
The better you get, the better you get. It’ll be easier to pick up songs by ear. One of the best feelings that I’ve had as a musician is seeing the results of my ear training practice. Listening to a song and understanding what the chord progression is and knowing what solfege syllables the melody is playing is an amazing feeling. And this doesn’t even take all that long to achieve. For some songs it may be pretty quick if the song is similar to the songs that you have previously learned.
As tired of an analogy as it is, you’ll start to hear music in a similar way to hear a language. You’ll understand the different phrases and combinations of notes and musical ideas that the musicians are using.
I’ve been learning a few Iron Maiden songs on guitar recently. Some of the solos I can’t quite play fast enough. There are just a few small licks within some of the solos or sections that I can’t play fast enough, but I play what I can.
I learn as much of the song as I can play, which means I can learn the entire rhythm guitar part, and then I learn the solos as best I can. I can play the solos, they might just not be as fast as they’re played in the recording.
So play what you can. Even if you’re learning a song that’s above your playing ability. Learn as much of it as you can, and play the sections that you can. Even if this means you have to play some sections slowly. Learn them slowly, practice them slowly and speed them up when you can.
It’s better to learn the song and be able to play it as much as you can, than to decide not to learn it at all. I think this especially applies to solos that are too fast. Learning the language used in the solo and getting it under your fingers as much as you can is much more beneficial than just not learning the song at all.
Having the language under your fingers will give you more ideas to play while improvising and creating your own solos. Even if you have to slow pieces of the solo down you can include a slightly slower version in your own solos.
When you’re playing along with the recording you can just play a background part, rather than struggle through the section of the solo that you can’t play. That’ll still help you have a larger repertoire of songs that you can play.