learning songs by ear

[ficsci 50]

I've been living quite an isolated life as a music student/instrumentalist (shortage of friends/family members who play, have no teacher, know only a few other people who know anything in depth about rock music), so I need to ask. I've been learning bass lines by ear (of entire songs), but often they just get lost in the mix, hence it's harder to figure them out especially if they're pretty fast, but it's still not totally impossible to figure out. So obviously I started wondering whether what I had been trying to do was crazy when I discovered this thread:

http://www.talkbass.com/forum/f22/learn ... me-882278/

I mean... they're easy as fuck to figure out (intermediate? come on). If you can sing it, you can figure out how to play it... right? Or is this exactly what people had always meant when they say "learn by ear"? (that is, "you don't have to search through the muddle of other sounds to figure out your line"). Or rather, is the value in whether or not you can figure out the notes & intervals the first time, without making any mistakes & w/o replaying the original audio?

halp, world is falling apart

[Pandabear 414]

Learning by ear is just that. Listening to a song over and over till you figure out the notes. Some people learn it faster, for some it takes longer.

There's value in more than one aspect. Regardless of if you play bass or guitar. Listening to a song and trying to decipher the notes that are played allows you to develop your ear and recognize pitches, rhythms and the nuances of the song and a players technique. Even if you don't know music theory you can still benefit from it, and if you do know music theory it'll help you understand how it is applied and in figuring out the notes that are played.

To be honest, bass is pretty easy to figure out by ear, even in a mix where it is not so present. Just figure out the root note of the melody, or listen to the drums and you should be able to figure out the bass part. Having good speakers help or at last having an EQ that will allow you to boost the bass and roll off some of the other frequencies that may muddy it.

Iv'e found that developing your ear will not only improve your playing and ability to recognize pitches and intervals, but you'll be able to enjoy music a whole lot better and recognize things in a song you may have not been able to hear before. Even in crappy speakers.

[ficsci 50]

^ Thanks for your reply, but reading your 3rd paragraph really makes me wants to defend what I think bass players are about. I actually think learning bass parts of complex songs by ear is tricky, exactly because in your brain, you assume that the bass line would be the root of the chord, except it's not always true, and when it's not true, that's when I think everything start to sound more interesting because, for example, a Tonic chord in first inversion can be perceived or assigned a role as something other than Tonic (of course it depends on the context of where you put that chord too). This is also why I think it's tricky to write good bass lines that both play a solid support of every chord but is as equal as a part of the "conversation" as all the other instruments in a composition. Back to how this applies to learning by ear is, I think what's difficult to do is to really separate the individual notes that was actually playing from the notes in that you expected was played because you heard the chord (listening/hearing is often a partly-imagined activity, I think).

And speaking of just the instrument, I think modern bass guitar playing (since Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clarke, etc) really redefined what a bass part can be, because I think bassists now who still play with the mindset that "bass is easier than other instruments because it only plays the bottom note" are the mediocre bassists. Okay, the bass has to be like a strong foundation to a building, but at the same time, when you do funky shit to the foundation, everything built over it will also turn out funky, and there is a potential that that could be a positive thing if you manage to also get things on top to not fall apart.