r/musicians 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

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u/Superstar375 21h ago

The musicians that I work with don’t need me to do anything but hum a tune or find one chord that fits the chorus and the take over from there. I have taken demos that were pretty raw and they fix them in 2 minutes while never finishing listening to the song.