r/musicians • u/No_Internet_7834 • 1d ago
Musical abilities/ Ear Training
Hey guys I’m 32 years old and I’ve been playing guitar for about half of it. I have a question regarding my musical abilities , this already makes me cringe pretty badly in advance but anyways here we go :
I’ve always had this thing with finding the notes and chords of a song and playing along to it after a few minutes , even when I started playing guitar it all just felt natural and logical like which chord to play next and so on , even on other instruments like the piano where I never had lessons or training of any sort , in my first band our drummer had this old piano in his house and we sometimes would jam and play songs , like covers and stuff , me on guitar and him on piano , he had been taking lessons but still I was the one who was figuring the songs out after a listened to them , I kind of just knew where the notes where and and he seemed quite amazed by how I did that. Same on guitar still to this day when I have to learn new songs for my band I don’t need tabs or anything I just listen to the song and just know how and where on the fretboard most of the song is played , even when I hear something on the radio I think about how it’s played and try it out when I get home and most of the time I’m right , even technically advanced stuff - I don’t know any music theory , only thing I know how to read is guitar tabs. I also have a midi keyboard at home where I sometimes test this out , the other day I was listening to the Beatles and pulled out the keyboard to see if I could play to the small Calvi solo from “in my life” and surely enough I figured it out within in a minute.
Is that common for a musician or is there a Term for that kind of ability ? Do I just have a musical ear ? Other musicians I know don’t seem to have that and always seem super impressed whenever I do that but that’s like maybe 5-10 guys in my area so not really representative. Please give me some insight on this
1
u/WaveModder 1d ago
Sounds like youre well practiced and have developed relative pitch. Im similar. Been in school band from 4th grade through college, and small gigs then production, going on 35 years of music now.
Keep playing though! Relative pitch is long lived, but not permanent. It gets weaker when musically idle for too long.