👂 Learning Tunes by Ear
Training the ear to catch melody, rhythm, and grace noting — a layered, trainable skill, not a gift you're born with.
⚡ The Short Version
🎬 Watch the moments — all in one place
Every excerpt below plays right here: the player pulls up the exact clip from each class. Watch one, then keep going with that lesson or jump to the next excerpt — or turn on autoplay and they play back-to-back, like it's edited together for you.
About Learning Tunes by Ear
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✅ The essentials
⭐ Essential Highlights
“It is a skill. This is not like perfect pitch, where you have to be born with it. Perfect pitch is a skill that is quite rare, and actually not that useful for musicians. But what is useful is your ability to determine relative pitch.”▶ 05:58 · The Art of Playing By Ear
“Everybody knows Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. If low A is one, that's the fifth note, so that's the fifth. That's exactly how I learned musical intervals: take a song that I know, and teach myself that that's what that interval is.”▶ 07:29 · The Art of Playing By Ear
“From the low A, if we go up to the B, that's the second: Happy Birthday. From the A to the C, that's the third: Oh When the Saints, or Kumbaya. The fourth is A-D: that would be Amazing Grace. A to E, that's the fifth: Twinkle, Twinkle. And the sixth would be A-F: My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.”▶ 10:59 · The Art of Playing By Ear
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Ear learning is trainable, not a gift
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Building an interval reference kit
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The layered method: melody, then rhythm, then gracenotes
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Where ear learning hits its limits
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Canntaireachd and the oral tradition
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