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When I learn a song by hearing,  I am essentially trying to decipher the notes making up its melody, bass and chords.   With all that in mind, here are the tools that I use (also watch the video):

1. A piano keyboard

This can be a full-sized 88-key digital piano, or just a ‘fun’ electronics keyboard (with at least 61 keys) like the ones made by Casio, Yamaha, Roland and Kawai that are available quite cheaply. In the USA, one could be bought on eBay or Craigslist for between $50-$100, shipped . I prefer using this (my Casio CTK-601 is  pictured) as it doesn’t take up too much space on the dining table, and is easier to work with in front of my laptop (where I of course store my music, and play them on  the WinAmp media player).

The above electronic keyboard typically features some variations of piano (which really is the only instrument you’d need for learning songs) plus other instruments; and you should of course buy one that comes with an electrical adapter.

Most importantly, for the purpose of learning by hearing, you need to ensure that this keyboard comes with a transposer or transposition feature.

2. An MP3 music player

This device (a) stores…

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This blog is not intended to teach in detail how I learn a song by hearing , but just to give you a quick idea of what I do. The individual steps are of course more involved, and I’ll go into them in greater detail in other  blogs .

When I learn a song by hearing, I am essentially trying to decipher 5 elements making up its arrangement:

1. the rhythm or ‘beat’;

2. the main melody;

3. the accompanying counter-melodies (if any);

4. the basses;

5. the chords.

My favorite source of songs to learn is YouTube, from which I download the song’s  .flv video file into a folder in my laptop, and then covert that into an .mp3 song file using an easily-available .flv to .mp3 converter program.   I next listen to this  .mp3 song file back and forth, to learn it.

Watch these two videos on how to convert YouTube video to Mp3 song files…

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Wearing a pair of headphones (with good bass) partially on my ears (so I can hear both the music and the keyboard), I first play and listen to the song to determine the key it is in, and also to get a feel of the song structure and arrangement.

If it’s a more challenging key that has lots of flats…

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(Piano Tutorial follows below article).

Every 4 years when an Olympic Games comes by, I look forward to hearing the theme song

The alluring 2008 feature song, You And Me , sounded very ‘learnable’ and piano-friendly; while there’s nothing better ensuring of popularity in a song than when a popular Chinese singer (Liu Huan) and British opera diva (Sarah Brightman) collaborate.

Here’s how I went about learning it….

The day after being one of the billions of people around the world who watched the song sung at the Opening Ceremony, I clicked to the most obvious source for the music - YouTube. I simply keyed in ‘Olympics 2008 theme’, and the video was there, uploaded by someone just as eager to be the first to share it, as I was the first to put up a piano video (link) on it.

Using YouTube’s ‘Download Video as flv’ feature, I saved the video as an .flv file onto my folder, and then used my simple FLV  program (it’s free - Google it) to convert the video file instantly into an .Mp3 file.

With my usual ‘learning by hearing’  tools set up (see blog), excitedly (hey, being able to quickly learn song via hearing IS so much fun!) I clicked on the song and it…

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In this blog, I will discuss probably a mundane subject,  but yet an essential part of ‘learning by hearing’…

Remember, learning by hearing does not mean not having to read notes. It means that as you learn to hear and decipher the notes of a song, you also need a way of writing those notes down so that you don’t forget them, or have a need to revisit the song again. It’s just obvious that as you progressively become better at learning songs by hearing, your repertoire of songs will increase, and it would be a matter of time before you realize that you cannot possibly memorize all your music or play them infallibly without referring to some form of notation, i.e., sight read.

You should therefore put some effort early in the stage to do this if you’re serious about learning and playing the piano.

If you already read and write conventional music, you may want to skip this blog, as it’s aimed at readers who don’t already know how to read notes; but if you would like to consider an alternative way of writing notes, do read on….

While it all started with my teacher making me ‘shortcut the system’ and write notes in the form of alphabets, I…

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This blog presents my own method of writing notes using alphabets, and is intended for students who have given up on learning conventional music notes, or are open to considering an alternative notation method for their music.

To me, ‘ABC’ alphabets are to be the most logical alternative to writing those tiny squiggly, ‘dotted poles’ in conventional music.   After all, when going through a keyboard, don’t musicians refer to the keys as alphabets C, Db, D, Eb… etc. ? When first identifying the dotted notes on the treble clef, don’t they try to make them easier to recognize, by telling you to remember ‘F-A-C-E’, and ‘Every good boy does fine’ for the intervening E-G-B-D-F spaces? Even the chords are often referred to ‘A Flat’, ‘F sharp’, ‘C major’, etc.  So, to me it makes sense to write the talk.

The difference is, I write all my notes and chords in alphabets in the blank line spaces of an exercise book, instead of using music staves with treble and bass clefs.

It is not my purpose here to explain basic piano knowledge instead - you can Google all that introductory knowledge.  Instead,  I would have to assume that you are already familiar with what octaves are, the names of all the…

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