It’s always best if you plan on becoming a musician to learn how to read music. It will also help your development to take a class or read a book about music theory. Music is a fantastic blend of both mathematics and language. All of those little dots and words on the page are there for a reason, and that is to help anyone know how the artist intended the song to be played.
But the interesting part about music is that you can reproduce a song without ever having seen the sheet music. As a matter of fact you can play almost any song in the world, and have it be instantly recognizable by anyone else who also knows the song if you learn something about Chords.
There are 12 major and 12 minor keys in music. Each key has eight notes that forms the scale. Within those eight notes three determine the chord. In other words, out of the 88 keys on the average piano all you really have to do is learn how to play the right three together and you’ve got the beginnings of learning how to play music by ear.
Now this is where understanding something about how music works will certainly help. Each key is defined by the tonic, the third and the fifth notes out of the 8 notes that make up the octave of the key. The major third is always full half step above the tonic while the major fifth is always 7 half steps above the tonic. Don’t get worried, it’s really not that hard. What that basically means is that your thumb, middle finger and pinky finger can be used to play any one of the 24 chords. All you have to do is learn the 12 major and 12 minor chords and you will be able to follow along with any piece of music ever written.
Once you’ve learned the chords, all you have to do to play piano by ear is find the key the music is being played in, and then follow along playing the chords that change as the melody changes. This is certainly not very difficult to do, even with just a few months of practice. At that point you can actually begin to embellish just about anything you can imagine, that’s where your own creativity will come into playing piano by ear.
