From robert@cs.stanford.edu Tue Aug 05 13:44:25 2008
Subject:Re:Sheet music resource

> Most people cannot play by ear. I cannot. Many of us have to begin
> with the written music. Then when we have the piece in our
> possession, we can learn by observation how others interpreted it
> and we begin to improvise.

No. You will never be able to improvise properly until you can play by
ear, simple as that. It is fine to learn from what other people have
played; I encourage it. But you absolutely must -- and this is much
more important -- train your ears! You will not get your ears trained
by playing material that other people have transcribed. You must do
the transcriptions yourself or you deny yourself a lot of the benefit.

If you don't feel ready to do transcriptions, you should be learning
intervals, chord qualities, scale tonalities, and scale degrees by
ear.

These days there's lots of software out there to help with this; when
I learned it there was none of that, but a few years ago I bought my
girlfriend a copy of a program called "Practica Musica" and it seems
pretty decent for ear training. It covers a lot of other stuff, most
of it unnecessary IMHO, including getting caught up on nomenclature
way more than is healthy. But fundamentally it's a good a useful
learning tool, it seems to me.

Anyway, start by learning your intervals, and by that I mean learn
what they sound like. So if I sing a note and tell you to sing a major
sixth above, you should be able to do it. That sort of thing.

-- Robert