The Bhakti House Guide to Playing Music by Ear: Stop Depending on Sheet and Chord Charts

What if you could hear a song and simply know what to play?The Bhakti House Guide to Playing Music by Ear is a comprehensive, practical course in developing the musical ability that frees you from constant dependence on sheet music, tablature, and chord charts.Rather than teaching you to memorize songs one at a time, this book teaches you how music itself works by sound.Beginning with the fundamentals of focused listening, you will learn to hear the tonal center, recognize intervals and scale degrees, reproduce melodies, identify chords, follow chord progressions, recognize rhythm and meter, transpose music into new keys, improvise naturally, and learn complete songs directly from recordings or live musicians.But this book goes far beyond basic major and minor ear training.You will explore major, natural minor, harmonic minor, melodic minor, pentatonic and blues scales; all seven diatonic modes; chromatic and symmetrical sounds; chord construction; inversions; seventh chords; extended harmony; altered chords; borrowed chords; secondary dominants; modulation; cadences; chord substitutions; and the relationship between melody and harmony.You will also learn how these concepts connect with North Indian musical thinking, including sargam, swaras, rāga concepts, melodic ornamentation, and the distinctive listening skills especially useful in kirtan and devotional music.Throughout the book, one method remains central: Hear it. Sing it. Find it. Understand it. Play it.The goal is not perfect pitch. The goal is functional musical hearing-the ability to understand what you hear well enough to reproduce it, accompany it, change it, and make music with other people confidently.Inside you will learn how to: - Hear melodies and reproduce them on your instrument- Recognize chords and chord progressions by sound- Identify major, minor, modal, pentatonic, blues, and other scale colors- Understand intervals and scale degrees- Find the key of a song- Hear bass movement and harmonic function- Recognize triads, seventh chords, inversions, suspensions, and extensions- Harmonize melodies by ear- Transpose songs without rewriting chord charts- Follow another musician in real time- Improvise melodically and harmonically- Apply ear training to harmonium, keyboard, guitar, ukulele, violin, voice, and other instruments- Understand sargam and introductory rāga concepts- Follow and accompany a kirtan leader- Lead call-and-response music with greater confidence- Learn complete songs directly from recordings- Develop lifelong musical independenceWhether you are a beginning musician who feels trapped by chord sheets or an experienced player who wants deeper musical instincts, this guide is designed to help you move from reading music to actually hearing music. The Bhakti House