Learning to Play By Ear: a First Steps Seminar - PHH 252

Welcome to the show. Playing by ear is one of those things that musicians either know they can do or think they'll never be able to do. Those who are practiced at it seem to have endless tunes at their fingertips. Name a tune and they, if they know it, they can play it. To those who can't do it, at least not yet, it seems nothing short of magical. But ask someone to explain how they work this little magic, and you'll likely get an answer that isn't much of an explanation. They might talk about understanding and learning to hear chords, or they might say they learned by trial and error trying to play along with songs they liked, or they might simply shrug and tell you they have no idea. But it's only rarely that you encounter someone who will actually attempt to explain their process. Now notice that I said when you meet someone who is practiced at it. Playing by ear is something you can learn. Like so many other apparent feats of magic, there's no real trick to it once you learn how it's done. Now I'm not saying it's easy, but it's certainly doable. Even better, if you decide to experiment with the practice ideas we're going to talk about today, You'll find that you'll begin to notice things in your music that you never paid attention to before, things that help you learn and understand your music at a deeper level. That's why playing by ear is really not a magic trick, but a serious musicianship skill, and that's why I wanted to talk with you about it today. Now, what you're going to hear is a recorded part of a live seminar I gave a while back for our My Heart Mastery members. The call you're going to hear was originally followed by a workshop call where I guided them through the practice techniques from the seminar call so that they knew how to continue developing their skill in playing by ear. If you've ever wondered, this is the kind of thing we do inside the My Heart Mastery community. We have a live call each week where my coaches and I guide you through every aspect of playing the harp, whether it's learning new music together or learning how to learn a piece of music or working on technique or working through our Scale of Success curriculum. If you like learning about topics like this and getting expert instruction on how to be a better harpist and musician, I strongly suggest you check out everything that we include in our My Harp Mastery membership. And join us. And of course, I will put a link to our Join Now page so you can read more about the membership and see what's included. I'll put that link in the show notes for you, but I want to get on with the seminar call. Remember, today it's all about learning to play by ear.

Ta-da! Here we go. All right, so let's start talking about tonight's topic. We're talking about learning to play by ear. Now I know that, I mean, for some of you that's probably second nature and you do it all the time. For others of you, it's one of those things that, you know, it's like, no, no, don't make me do that. So that can be, it can be a little intimidating. But of course, like anything else, you know, it seems like it's this magical, mysterious thing that some people are really good at. And it's a skill like anything else. So while some people may have, you know, more of a natural bent that helps them learn more by ear, and other people have a natural bent that helps them learn more by reading, both of those things— playing by ear and playing from the page— they're skills that you learn, and they're things that you get better at. So So don't think that just because you've never played by ear, you can't do it. It's certainly something that you can do. And of course, the big question is why you would want to do it. I mean, if you're not in a situation regularly where playing by ear is important, then you might think, well, why would I want to learn to play by ear? I'll give you a couple of reasons that are really good. First of all, it's kind of fun to be able to pick out a tune, and so even though most of us might never want to actually play by ear and make that our primary learning method, it's very helpful to— we're almost all going to come across one of those moments where it's like, "Oh, let me see, how did that go, and can I sort of pick it out?" We go to the hunt and peck method, which— and there's nothing wrong with that, but I'd like to sort of improve on that. So, it can be useful even if it's not something you do all the time, but more than the actual learning to play by ear part, learning to play by ear is important because it trains your ear, and it does a couple of really important things for you when it trains your ear. First of all, it can help you, and I know this seems totally counterintuitive, but it can help you sight-read better. I know, why should playing by ear help you sight-read better? Well, because it makes that connection. You've probably heard me talk before about the sensory triangle, which I came up with that sort of fancy name a long, long time ago, and it doesn't need to be fancy, but if you think about a triangle, that it's a way that, you know, your ear ears and your eyes and your fingers and right in the middle of the triangle, your brain, all those things are connected and all of those things have to work together. And just like in sight reading, you know, you're trying to play what you see on the page, but your ears come into that part too, because when your ear is well trained or even partly trained, what it helps you do is hear what is on the page, right? So when you know the sound or you have an idea of the sound of what's coming up, it makes sight reading that much easier. It actually can help you predict what's coming next, and think how much that would speed up your reading, right? And that actually comes from practicing hearing and from making the connection between the sound of the note and the string you play it on. And then, of course, we take that one more step and apply it to the note you see on the page. Notice how this is sort of exactly backwards from what reading is, right? You see a note on the page and we associate it with pitch and a string. And this is exactly backwards. We're hearing the pitch and we're associating it with a dot on the page and a string. So it's the same process. All these things are tied together. So playing by ear is really very helpful because not only will it help you when you get to that jam session sometime, but it's going to help you read better, learn better, and it's just going to help you make those musical connections that will help everything come together. So that's why I thought it was really important that we spend some time working on that and learning about it. So that's what we're doing. And of course, what we've been talking about the last couple weeks on the Q&A calls, key signatures, plays right into this. Because if you're going to learn to play by ear, the thing that is most important is that you need to know your keys. Not that you necessarily in this instance need to know all your keys and all their flats and sharps, although that's exceedingly helpful. But when you start from keys, you start from the very basics of musical understanding with the very basic intervals in our system of Western tonal music, and those intervals are the half step and the whole step. And you remember how we've been talking about how major and minor scales both are just made up of those half steps and whole steps and how they actually work, right? So that if you have— let's see if you can see this— if you have a C major scale, right, you've got a whole step between C and D, a whole step between D and E, a half step between E and F, then a whole step between F and G, and a whole step between G and A, and a whole step between A and B, and a whole step between— I mean, half step between B and C. So what's the difference between a whole step and a half step? Well, I mean, obviously a whole step is two half steps, right? I mean, that's pretty obvious. The definition of a half step is that it is the smallest interval in Western tonal music, as opposed to, you know, music from India or music from China or Japan where they have a different tonal system in their native folk music that, you know, they use microtones and all kinds of exotic things, and we don't. So our smallest increment is a half step, and then of course two half steps make a whole step. So if you picture it on a piano keyboard, which is why when people study piano it gives them a really good visual understanding of half steps and whole steps. On a piano keyboard, the half steps are any two keys that are right next to each other without another key coming in between. So if you picture those two white keys, E and F, that are right next to each other, that's a half step. Then if you picture the white key of F and the black key that would be F sharp, there's no key in the middle there either, so that's a half step. But if you picture the white key F and the white key G next to it, there's that black key right in the middle. So F to G is a whole step, not a half step. So that's a very visual way to look at it, and unfortunately on the harp, whether it's a pedal harp or a lever harp, we don't get to see that. So that's the downside of the way our strings are set up. The upside, of course, is that all our scales are fingered the same. So just remember that. In the long run, it makes things really easy from a playing standpoint. All right. So when you've got those half steps and whole steps straightened out, then all you need to do is to put them in the patterns for the major and minor scales. And I feel like we've talked a lot about that the past couple of weeks, so I'm not going to belabor the point here, but if you've got questions, you know, feel free to ask. And I've got the chat open too, so you can always type in the chat if you feel like, oh, I need to ask this now. You can go ahead and type that in. So the pattern for major keys: whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. And for minor keys, there it's whole, half, whole, whole, half, whole, whole. So if you picture the minor key, I'm going to use A minor because it's right here. You have a funny perspective on my harp today, don't you? Okay, so it's a whole step from A to B, a half step from B to C, a whole step from C to D, whole step from D to E, whole step from E to F, whole step from F to G, and whole step— I missed some— I think I said that wrong. Whole step from F to G and whole step from G to A. Now that's for the key signature. We talked briefly last time about those other forms of the minor scale,, and I promised Angela, I believe, that I would go into more depth, but this is not the time. I will do that at a time when I can actually play that for you, but we'll save that. We won't do that right now. What's important about whole steps and half steps is that, first of all, if you understand that they're in a key, it can help you find your place in the key, and we'll be talking more about how to find your place in that key. But it also just gives you that really basic sense of the size of a step from note to note. Is it, you know, the big step, a whole step step, like from G to A? Or is it that small step, a half step step, like from E to F? And you can mess around with this. You can try singing it and see if, you know, if you sing a G and then an A, can you find that G-sharp in the middle in your voice? Can you sing that? Can you find it? And if you sing an E to an F, can you see that there's no other real note, at least for our purposes, there's no other real note in the middle? So that's where you want to start. As I said, we've talked a lot about major and minor and the keys lately, so I don't feel like we need to go into that a whole lot, but we can always come back to it. So that's the place to start, just because most music you hear and that you would want to play by ear is in a key, so we might as well start there. And then the next thing to bear in mind is the tonic triad. So let's get a couple of terms straight and make sure we're all on the same page there. When you have a key like C major, the key you are in The name of the key is the tonic. Tonic comes from one of those Greek words, and the word would be tone, and it's just the tone that defines the scale. So the tonic of the scale is the keynote of the scale. If you're in C major, the tonic is C. If you're in A-flat major, the tonic is A-flat. If you're in triple D-flat minor, then the tonic would be triple D-flat, which will never happen, I promise. So all of those things are there for you. So the name of the key is the tonic. The other word you need to be absolutely clear on is dominant. So I'm going to get a little bit technical here. Dominant is the fifth note in the scale, counting where you start. So if you're in C major and you start from the tonic, the tonic is 1, and then D is 2, and E is 3, F is 4, G is 5. So G is the dominant in C major, and tonic and dominant are in a particularly close relationship. First of all, if you play any tonic and dominant, your ear immediately perceives the lower note as the note of the key. We call it a key-defining interval because when you hear those two notes, the bottom note's gonna sound like the tonic to you. Or these two notes, the bottom note sounds like the tonic. Or these two notes, the bottom note sounds like the tonic. And that's just the way our own tonal system is devised. But people have tried over the centuries to decide that there's a whole acoustic reason that our tonal system is so— is constructed this way. It's sort of interesting, but it leaves out the fact that there are— that the acoustics of sound are the same no matter what your tonal system is. It's just that ours works out this way. If you have— here's my middle C. When I play a harmonic on that C, I get the octave. The next harmonic up— oops, I can't get it today. There it is. And this string is way up there— is the fifth, is the dominant. So right in our overtone series, the dominant comes in very soon in that series. And so that's part of sort of the strong relationship between any note and the note a fifth above it. So tonic and dominant are what we call them. The dominant, I guess, is the dominant note in the scale other than the tonic, so that's a good way to remember it. I just wanted to be sure, absolutely sure, that you had those terms straight because I'm going to be using them a lot, so I just didn't want to skip over anything. So the tonic triad then is the 3-note chord— get the triad part— that is formed with the tonic as the bottom note, and then the dominant, and then the note in the middle, which is out of tune at the moment. So that's because I've got the window open. So it— and of course, that tonic triad will be major if you're in a major key, or minor if you're in a minor key. So the, the quality of that middle note, of the third, changes. Tonic and dominant do not change whether it's major or minor. So that's the next piece of that, and now I want you to be able to consider that there are— that if you take a scale, each one of the notes in that scale has a special relationship to the tonic, right? C, and then C and D, and C and E, and C and F, and C and G are dominant, and C and A, and C and B, the seventh, and C and C, the octave. So that's where intervals come from, just a basic main point. What does all this have to do with playing by ear? Well, if playing by ear starts with training your ear, this is what you want to find out. So we're going to be doing a lot of singing in this particular unit, but what we're going to be doing is thinking about the spaces, the intervals between notes, and learning to find them. So if you've ever sung a melody like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, you give yourself a first note. How do you find the next note? Right? It's twinkle, twinkle. Okay, what is that note? Well, actually, it happens to be the dominant. We're going up from the tonic to the dominant, but that first thought that you have to have is that the distance from the first note, the twinkle part, to the next twinkle part is not bicep. It's by leap. All music moves in one way or the other, right? I mean, I guess it could stay the same, in which case it's not moving, but when music moves, it either moves by step or by leap, and your job is to figure out which one it is so that when you're playing by ear, that's one of the questions you're going to ask yourself. So there's our leap, and our next most important question is going to be how big is that leap? So we're going to do some practice with intervals and just learn a little bit more about how that works. And then we move by step and back to where we came, and now if you think about that same melody, we're going down by step and we end up back where we started. It's an interesting little melody for all of its simplicity. It's an interesting melody to think about from a playing-by-ear standpoint because it starts with that big leap, and if you guess the leap wrong, it's really easy to find out that you've guessed the leap wrong because you don't get back where you started, right? And this melody should come back to where we started. And if you guess that first leap wrong, you won't go back where you started, even if you get all the others right. So it's an interesting— what it points out is that you are evaluating several different things at once. You're evaluating leaps and stepwise motion,, but you're also thinking about how notes at ends of phrases or ends of pieces or just temporary resting points, how they relate to where you started or how they relate to the beginning or the end of the piece. So if you take a melody and let's try— well, let's keep on going with Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. We know what it sounds like. And we want to play it on the harp. Okay, so— or we've heard it somewhere, and we'll pretend it's this mysterious melody because none of us have heard it before. So you're going to ask yourself this little series of questions when you hear the whole melody, and we'll just stop right there. Your first thought should probably be, is this melody in major or minor? Because it's going to make a difference. And we talked— I think it was last week, we talked, maybe the last two weeks, we talked about how to— how you can tell whether a piece is in major or minor. And from looking at it, we talked about certain clues like accidentals and the beginning note or the ending note, that sort of thing. But when you're just listening to it, you don't have those written those written clues, so you really have to learn to tell by the sound of it. And the nice thing is that guessing is always good. You have plenty of musical experience, and if you guess and you say it's major and it is, you can pat yourself on the back. You know, you find out later, it's like, yeah, okay, I thought it was a major. Good job. And if you're wrong, Well, you know, you just guess again. There are only two choices, at least for most of what you would be doing this for. So you say, okay, so we think it's in major. All right, so then your job is to pick a key. Does it matter what key you pick? Not necessarily. I mean, if I just, you know, heard Twinkle Twinkle Little Star someday and I, and, you know, and I came home and wanted to play it, I could start on any note, but having decided that it's in major, I want to be sure that I start in a major key. And the immediately next question is, what is the starting note? Did it start on the tonic, or did it start on another note of the scale? How do you test that? Well, if you Here, going back to my little Twinkle, the first thing you might do is to, before you decide on a key, before you decide on major or minor, start by seeing if you can sing a triad that sounds like it's in the same key. Like, okay, I'm going to use that note I ended on, and I'm going to sing a triad. Well, that was a major triad, and I can tell because it doesn't sound like a minor triad. And that sounds like it belongs to what I just played. All right, good. So the tonic triad has already given me a good feel for what the key is as far as major or minor, and now I just get to pick. Well, let's see, let's suppose that I don't want to to put it in that key. Let's find another key today. Bum. Okay, that's a nice low key. I'm in a low sort of a mood, so we'll go with G. You know, you might hunt and peck around a little bit. Here's another hint: if you want to start seeing if you can guess accurately what a note is, learn to sing either middle C or the A above middle C, and just, you know, when you're sitting at your harp, sing it. Match the pitch with your harp. Find how it feels in your voice. How does it feel? What does it sound like? How does it vibrate in your head? And just start developing your pitch memory that way. That's something that interests you. That is exactly how you do that, and it will it will work over time. So, all right, I just got a nice horn beeping there from outside. So here's a G, and we're going to do G, and I've just heard my— let's see. Okay, and I'll sing that triad. Okay, I got that part. Nice. And now I have to find out where those notes are. Well, I got the first one. What's the second one do? Well, we already discovered that it moves by leap, so if it's a big leap, one thing you can do is sing stepwise up to it, just like in the scale. Let's count. 5 notes. All right, good. So I figured out the leap. And now I'm going to go up one more because I think it goes up. Does it go up one? Bum bum. Yeah, is it a half step or a whole step? Bum bum. There's a half step. Oh, that's not it. Bum bum. Whole step. Okay. Bum bum bum. Now I'm taking you through this the long way. Once you get past that first interval, you think, okay, it sounds pretty stepwise, I'll just kind of go And did I come out where I expected to? Yeah. Okay, so you don't have to do all that soul searching for every note. In general, when you hear a melody, you're going to go through all these steps but as quickly as you can, right? You're going to decide, okay, you're going to listen to it, decide major or minor. Okay, I think it's major. Give yourself a key, sing that singing that scale or that triad just to give yourself a sense of the key, and go back to the melody again. Listen to it again. Think, let's see, did it move mostly by step or by leap? Was there anything that was really exotic that sort of stood out, like a really big leap or something that sounded kind of different? Or not. And did it end on the tonic? Did it begin on the tonic? You're going to ask yourself those questions, and then you're just going to get in there and try it, because there's really no substitute for just trying it. What you're doing here, again, I will remind you, is that you're working at training your ear, training your ear to hear those things so that you can make quicker associations between how notes sound what they look like and where you play them. And so you can have all those things working together. The very simple ones, and it's a great way to just sort of do that as a warm-up. I see Darlene saying that she needs to learn to sing, very embarrassing. What happens if you can't sing? Well, it depends on exactly what you mean by the word can't. I mean, if you really can't match a pitch, every once in a while that happens. It's extremely rare that somebody who actually plays music can't match a pitch, but I would encourage you to, to try to hear it in your head. I mean, if you absolutely— if your voice is so bad you can't stand to hear yourself, that doesn't count. That doesn't count. If your voice is so bad you can't stand to hear yourself, you still need to sing, and you need to match. It doesn't have to be pretty. It It just needs to match. And it really— the singing is so important because it helps you internalize these intervals. It's the only way you can do it, internalize it that way. And by singing, it's the only way that you can actually tell that what you think you're hearing is what you're actually hearing. There's not another substitute for it. Unfortunately. I mean, I'm, you know, I am not any kind of singer, but you can— almost everybody can actually match a pitch. And if you're not sure if you can, then do Barbara's technique and sit there with the tuner and sing into the tuner and see where the C is, see where the A is, learn some of those notes. And if you, if you can't stand to hear yourself, sing. I wouldn't suggest earplugs, but I would do the drills a little bit faster. And as you get a little bit less uncomfortable singing, then you can be funnier with your pitch. But it's really— it is really the best way for internalizing all the intervals and the scales and the triads, and then for detecting what you're really hearing. It's— I don't know another substitute for it. Tricia said, "I just realized that in 7 and 8, that's a period, not a dotted quarter note." Oh, yes, right. That's not a dotted quarter note. How funny. The punctuation in the sentence looks like a dotted quarter note. Yeah, no. That's okay. Thank you for pointing that out. Isn't that funny? I wouldn't— I see why you would have thought that, absolutely, but I've never seen an eighth note with a comma after it before either, so that's kind of different. It makes it easier, yes, that's right, just a little bit easier for sure. I mean, if you, you know, if you absolutely can't stand it, you know, you're not gonna— you're not getting graded on this, then just don't do it, but I will tell you it is absolutely the most powerful way to learn this stuff. Try it. If you still can't stand it, then, you know, then don't do it, but you've got plenty of other drills on this page that you can do. There is an awful lot of singing, but not all of them. If you, if you are a reluctant or a reluctant singer or just a A bad singer like me, start with number 2, and this is kind of where— on this page, that's kind of where Barbara was. You can use that tuner to actually help you tune your ear. You can use your harp though too, right? Just play the scale very slowly. Oh, this is just too high for me today. Let me try some A-flat. That's a nice, nice friendly key, and just match the pitch as you go. If you can't hear yourself, then you stop one ear the way singers do, right? And match it and match it and do it again until it matches.

It's too high.

Match it, match it, match it, and do the best you can. It doesn't have to be pretty. It's just— it's just sort of— it's a learning tool, that's all it is. You never have to demonstrate it for anybody. We're not going to be demonstrating it. You don't— not going to have to do it for me next week in the workshop or anything. That's not part of what we're doing. But it's a wonderful— I, I just don't have a substitute for it. I don't know another, um, tool that works as powerfully. So whatever they were. So, um, and in case you ever wanted to know how to sing tonic and dominant, think of after winged monkeys, and you'll be there every time. Sing every first, third, and fifth scale degree in your piece, right? These are the notes that make up the tonic triad. Sometimes it's interesting to take a look at a piece you're playing and see where those notes are. Where are they? How do they— do they play when you see them? Are they supported by a tonic triad? Sometimes they will, Sometimes they won't be, but just to sort of take a look, note where they are, see what it is they're doing. Just a thought. And then number 7 is a little bit similar to the pitch precision drills. For each of your pieces, sing that tonic triad before you begin to practice the piece. This is always a cool one. If your piece— let's see, my harp's in A-flat right now— if your piece is in A-flat major, just play that A-flat or play the opening of your piece, and all of a sudden I flash to the— to the Ippolitov-Ivanov Nocturne, which does not start on the tonic, but you can just play that tonic note and then sing that tonic triad, and then start to play, just to you know, get yourself in the habit of singing and, you know, creating the key in your head rather than just on the strings. That's another way to think about it, right? Because all those sounds are there. They don't only live on the harp. They live out in the ether. They live inside you, and just, you know, see where they are. Give them a try. My favorite is number 8. Start Anywhere Drills. You're going to play your scale. You can play it or you can sing it. You can sing the tonic triad, then sing any of the notes on the scale, or you can play it. So there's my A-flat scale. I've just got that. I'm going to play one of the notes and then sing from there to the tonic. That was an F, so F, G, A-flat. Well, that's cheating. What if you sang the longest way to the tonic? From the F down to the A-flat. F, E, D, C, B, A. Ooh! F, E, D, C, B, A. So singing from anywhere in the middle of the scale to the tonic is an interesting, interesting drill. And you can take that one step further with drill number 9. And then drill number 10, and this is sort of what we're working on next week, only the melodies aren't all familiar. But we're going to be working at actually playing melodies. This is how to sort of work on it on your own. Play a familiar— or you're going to play a familiar melody by ear, starting by singing the melody aloud. So we've done a lot of Twinkle tonight. Maybe you want to go to Row, Row, Row Your Boat or Hot Cross Buns, or you can do something much more complicated like the Irish Washerwoman. I don't know, I just pulled that out of nowhere. Greensleeves. Right? Sing that melody. You don't have to do the whole thing, just a little bit of it. Find your starting note. Find it on your harp. Just pluck around until you get there. Decide on your key. Sing the melody again, and then play it through and see, you know, see how long it takes you to get it right. So these are just little drills. They don't have to take a lot of time. They can be really, really interesting, but if they're tricky for you, you will find that with just a little bit of attention, they come together very quickly. And if some of the early ones are easy for you, just skip to the harder ones and, you know, put your skills sort of to the test a little bit. If you're experienced at playing by ear, see if you can apply those same techniques to your sight singing, or to your sight reading rather, because it works for that as well. So, you know, that always works. So this is a lot of information, but I'm really excited to think that we're going to just work a little bit at playing by ear, just to, you know, get you a little bit more comfortable with that. Let me see. Angela says, "If someone asked me to play something I didn't have music for, I would not even attempt to play it by ear." Well, most of us wouldn't. I mean, if somebody comes up and they ask you for You know, something, especially if it's a, you know, I mean, most of the time you're not going to just like pluck little single notes until you figure it out, so most people aren't going to do that. I know ear training is required for music majors, but will this help me? Yes, this will help you because it's not required for music majors because they're special or because they need to know more. It's required because it's really how we hear learn and read music. It's that other part of the triangle. I mean, if you're a good reader, you can absolutely be a good listener too, and that's what this is. This is understanding what you're hearing. This is putting a name to what you're hearing so that you're not just sort of like hearing this whole wash of music and not knowing about it. When you start— I haven't even finished reading her comment. Sorry, I'll come back to that. Let me go to your comment first. Okay. Not meaning to be obstinate. Oh, no, you can be obstinate all you want. That's fine. I need enough motivation to compensate for the torture of singing. I guarantee there will be no easy drills for me. Sorry about the long paragraph. No need to apologize. Barbara says maybe humming would be less intimidating than singing. It might be. It might be. Go ahead and hum. Humming has a smaller range than singing, so it might limit you a little bit, but go ahead and do it. Absolutely, why not? Good idea, Barbara, thank you. I think, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, if singing is really, really painful, then I mean, if you absolutely can't do it, you will still get some benefit if you just name the note. For instance, if you heard— I'll key mine in. And you said, okay, that's A-flat, A-flat, G, E-flat, F, G, A-flat. Boom. Okay, that's— it's not quite as, um, it's not quite as easy, it's not quite as fluid, and it's not quite as effective as actually just singing it. But it would still work. So you can get these drills without, you know, the pitch precision drills won't help you, you know, you can't just sing those, but you can go, you can skip right to the melodies and try those, see what you, see what you think. What else could you do on there without actually singing? The whole step and half step practice. You could, you know, play a random couple of notes. You could play random intervals too. What are those two notes? Hmm, E-flat and C? No, couldn't be. Ah, must be D-flat and B-flat, right? So think about, you know, see what you can do that way. You can do quite a lot that way without having to sing. Singing, but I'm just going to finish my other thought. This is required for music majors not because it's special because they're going to be music majors, but because it's the other leg of the stool, right? If you can play the music and you can, you know, if you can work with your technique and you can read the page, We also need to know that you can hear and that you can understand what you hear. You're understanding how your fingers move, you're understanding what you see on the page, but do you understand what you hear? Because the more you can— the more information you have about just what you're hearing, the easier it is to play. So for instance, you don't need to play anything by ear, you're not in a situation where anybody's going to ask you to do that unless, as has happened to a few of the people that I know we have on the call, you're playing someplace and they say, "Oh, play Happy Birthday. It's somebody's birthday," and you're going to go, "Uh, okay." So, you know, you can— now, Happy Birthday is one of those things you get to prepare, right? And you can actually, you know, say, "All right. Well, let's see. These are the chords I need for Happy Birthday, and this is what I'm going to do," and you actually learn it, and so that's okay. You can prepare it. But, you know, for that random time when you have to sit down and play it, okay, you know, where's that next note? It's up there. Where's that next note? Oh, it's an octave, what do you know? And now I need a B-flat. So, you know, there are times when it's just kind of helpful, and it can be just kind of fun, but I would say that the main motivation for doing this, if you never see a reason for actually playing by ear, is just because it's going to make connections with the music that you can't get any other way. So, you know, do you have to do this? No, you don't have to do any of it, but why don't you skip to number 10, Angela, and work on playing playing a melody by ear. Listen to it and then just play it and see what you find out. See what you're hearing. Are you hearing the intervals accurately? I mean, if somebody, you know, and why is this going to help? For exactly the reasons I started. It's going to help you sight-read faster because you'll be able to hear in your head what's coming up, and it will help you actually predict what's coming up because your ear will start to hear contextually as well as just sort of note by note. So that's the best encouragement I can give you, and if it's not enough—

I hope you enjoyed that recorded seminar call. Remember, this is just the beginning of how to learn to play by ear, but what I'd love you to get from this is the idea that just starting to notice and examine the things that you hear in music, whether it's in your own playing or in someone else's, rather to just start to hear them, start to listen to them and decide what they might mean. If you just do that little bit rather than only looking at the notes on the page, you are going to get more insight into your music than you can possibly imagine. It's very easy to look at that page and just dig into the notes that we need to learn. And absolutely separate our hearing from our seeing and our doing. And considering that hearing is the thing that draws us to music in the first place, what a shame. It's not only missing a valuable learning tool, but it's missing one of our deepest connections to what we do. So I would encourage you to go ahead, try some of these things. And just start noticing. You will notice a big difference for yourself. Now, next week we're talking about the art of using a practice journal, truly using a practice journal so that it's not just an assignment book, it's not just a daily log, but you're using it as a much more powerful tool to not only help you do what you need to do better and more efficiently, but really to help you look at your playing in a different way. So all about using a practice journal on next week's call. Remember, do check out My Heart Mastery if this call interested you. This is the kind of thing we do every single week, different topics, and you might not have me talking with you. You might have one of the coaches, But this is the kind of thing we do, and we're there to help guide you through all different kinds of aspects of your harp learning. So I would encourage you to check that out. And in the meantime, until I talk to you here on the podcast next week, remember, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.