Can I Learn To Hear A Song On The Radio And Figure It On My Guitar By Myself?

By Maurice Richard

You hear a cool song on the radio or some other device and your first thought is that it would be great to be able to play it on your guitar.

Anyone that I know that has learned to play guitar has wanted to be able to do this. That's the point of playing guitar for many people. To play the songs you like!!

You crack out the guitar and you start to work on it and you just can't seem to make any headway. Next thing you know you are ready to throw the guitar to the ground.

Not cool!

Find A Professionally Trained Guitar Teacher To Help You

The best way to figure out how to hear a song and then play it is to find out where your skill level and find songs that fit it and expand from there.

As discussed above that is not easy to do and pretty much impossible when you have no training on this subject. So, what you can do is to seek out and find a professional guitar teacher to help you.

They will know how to assess your current playing level as well as your ability to hear and interpret music and then build a plan to help you be successful.

This won’t be free but it is better than the trial and error approach that can leave you so frustrated you could quit playing guitar.

About The Author:

Maurice Richard is a professional guitar teacher that operates out of the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He has been a member of an elite guitar teaching mentorship program since 2007 and has taught many people how to hear songs and play them on guitar.

There Are Many Reasons Why You May Not Be Able To Do This

If your attempts were anything like mine when I first started to try and transcribe a song from the radio to guitar it failed miserably.

You hear what is being played and try to find the same chord but you just can seem to find it. Whatever you do seems to not sound right.

Then you strike gold and find one that fits and that feels great. But then you can't connect it to the previous or the next chord. After a while and with much frustration, you give up trying.

The two main reason I could not do it properly back then was because my playing skills and my ear for music was not well developed. I was trying to figure out things that were beyond my ability.

I had no idea what was within my ability and every attempt seemed to be well beyond it. That was not much fun so I stopped trying.

The Underlying Problem Was Not Knowing What Was Within My Abilities

The real problem was that every song I tried to figure out on my own was well beyond my skill level on guitar and ear's ability to hear the right things.

There were chords I did not recognize and could not play and I had no idea what to do to make them sound that way.

There were other chords I just could not even come close to figuring out and that was mainly because I had a very low vocabulary of chords. I needed it expand my knowledge beyond basic open chords.

On top of that most of the songs had too many chords that changed too fast so I just could not keep up.

That was very frustrating and did not feel good.

How Do You Figure Out What Is Within Your Abilities?

Great question.

I wish I would have asked it a long time ago because I could have avoided a lot of wasted time and effort doing things on guitar that I was not ready for.

The way I did it was trial and error. Fortunately, I am the type not to give up easy or I would have quit guitar a very long time ago. The problem with this method is it usually takes a very long time and success is rare.

The best way to learn how to hear a song and figure it out on your guitar is to be taught how to do it by a trained expert. There are professionally trained guitar teachers out there that will help you learn this skill.

They will know what level you are at and what you should be able to handle and present you with songs you can be successful with and build on that so you get better quickly.