How do pianists play without sheet music?

The only way to learn the piano without reading music is to learn by ear. It essentially means to learn to play a song by combining a knowledge of music harmony (essentially, chords) and active listening to identify patterns and intervals (the relationship between notes in distance).

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CHORDS

Like the main scale types, we have two main types of chords: major and minor. Again, there are other more complicated types of chords to learn about but these two main types (each consisting of three notes) will set you up for a lot of popular songs. Learning about chords is learning about harmony. Harmony is the way the chords are put together to create a certain feel within a song. You may know the term ‘harmony’ in relation to singing: where a backup vocalist might ‘harmonise’ with the lead vocalist who is singing the melody? This applies to the reference to harmony within songs too. The harmony within a song is what gives the melody a base. Without harmony, a melody is left bare and without context. The decisions of which harmony (collection of chords) to put behind a melody can make or break a song, the choices made here can vary so significantly as to create completely different feelings even if the melody does not change. This is why harmony is so important to learn about - it is the cake to a song, while melody is the icing. Again, like the scales, if you learn the pattern to building major and minor three-note chords, you have the blueprint to 24 different chords. That’s a major and minor chords for every note in the octave. Once you know the chords themselves you’ll need to learn about ways of putting different chords together, this is called a chord progression. Throughout history pop music has drawn on the most reliable, comfortable sounding chord progressions, that will sound very familiar to you. You’ll need to memorise the blueprint for these common chord progressions so that you can play them in any key. This process of learning the blueprints for the two main scale types, the two main chord types and the several main chord progressions will set you up for learning the vast majority of popular songs today and throughout history. It’s that simple. By learning these blueprints you will understand songs more quickly than those pianists who simply learn to read sheet music alone.

EAR-TRAINING

Learning about these scale and chord blueprints is the first level.

The second level is training your ear to identify these things. And in many ways, this is the hard part. Because instead of just using your fingers and your memory, you now need to use your ears. The good news is that you already recognise many of these things just from listening to music all your life. The way certain music makes you feel, even when you take the words away, is a result of the harmony of the song. The chords have been chosen and designed in a certain order to elicit an emotional response from the listener. You’re essentially emotionally manipulated whenever you listen to music! But we can take that emotional response and use it to identify the chords that we hear.

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At a basic level - when you hear a major chords your emotional response is to feel happy, or right with the world. When you hear a minor chord, your emotional response is to feel sad, melancholy, or just not as happy as you did before. At the next level we can train our ears to recognise chord progressions by starting with the most common ones - we can recognise the way we respond to the change in chords and listen to, not only the harmony of the song, but listen to our inner-reactions to that part of the song. Using a mixture of listening to our emotional responses, and using what we know about music theory we can combine the two to decipher the harmony of a song. Training our ear to recognise intervals is less emotional and more about repetition.

What is an interval?

An interval is the relationship in distance between two notes. How far away are the notes from one another? If we can recognise the interval then we can go from one note to the next and decipher entire melodies. If you are familiar enough with scales you will be able to hum them without playing them. If you can hum a major scale, then you can effectively work out an interval. The distance between C and G is an interval of a fifth, because if I hum a major scale starting on the C, I will hum 5 notes to get to the G. I won’t go into the names too much here, but just to explain that this is something you’ll need to learn about.

pianopicnic.com - How To Learn Piano Without Reading Sheet Music

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