Suzuki Children Play by Ear... Or do they?
The story goes that Suzuki students play by ear. And lots of them do. But lots of them don’t. Lots of them play off by heart, having learnt how the pieces go by using finger numbers, and being given some help by knowing the piece from having listened to it.
If a child truly plays by ear, they can play anything they can sing. They can play Happy Birthday, Eastenders, Star Wars, any music from any ad they’ve ever seen or heard more than a handful of times. And all in a matter of a few minutes of trial and error with their instrument.
If you think your students could do that with no real problems, fantastic. If you think actually perhaps they are using more than a little help from finger numbers and their parents, please read on...
Confession time. It took me ten years in this Suzuki game to realise that I had never really thought about what playing by ear truly meant, and whether or not my students could do it. I had always assumed that my students played by ear because they could sing their pieces and they could play them off by heart. I had been told by every Suzuki teacher I had ever met that Suzuki students played by ear, and I had never considered whether they were right or not. But slowly I realised that my students weren’t all playing by ear, and that I had very little idea of how to help them learn to play by ear unless they did it naturally. Which lots of them did, but lots more of them didn’t.
A student who plays naturally by ear is able to hear a tune, learn it off by heart, and translate it to their instrument with no problem. A student who doesn’t learn by ear naturally will often hear a tune, learn it off by heart, but then only make use of this internalised version to correct an externally learnt way of playing the piece. So a student who doesn’t naturally play by ear (which is the kind of student that we need to concentrate on here) will know how Allegro goes, but need their teacher or parent to teach them which fingers to put down when before they can compare it to their inner version. Essentially they are learning it twice, which obviously takes twice as long as learning it once.
So, here’s what you need to teach your students so that they can play by ear:
- How to sing the song they are trying to learn by listening to it repeatedly until they can sing it fast, slow, or in little pieces (this is the most important bit)
- To recognise whether the tune is going up or down or staying the same
- To recognise whether the notes which go up or down do so by step or jump
- How to play notes that go up, down, or stay the same on their instrument
- How to play notes that go up or down by step or by jump on their instrument
- How to recognise that the note they are playing on their instrument is the same or different from the one they are singing in their head
- To be unafraid of playing the wrong notes in pursuit of the right note, and how to try notes in a logical manner so that there are not too many wrong notes before they reach the right one. Playing by ear basically starts off as a trial and error based exercise so your students must not be worried about playing the wrong version otherwise they’ll never get to the right version!
Exercises to Teach Playing by Ear
During the Twinkles, start these exercises so your students will have a head start when they get to their later pieces.
- Get your student to sing pieces they haven’t started to play yet. Award singing credits for each piece if you think this will help motivate or focus your student.
- Sing a note to your student. Ask them to tell you if you have sung a high note, a middle note, or a low note. Once they get them right each time, ask them to name a note on the instrument that might be in the same register as the one you have sung. On string instruments, they can tell you that the bottom string is low notes, the top string high notes, and the middle two strings middle notes, with higher ones on the upper middle string and lower notes on the lower middle string.
- Once they can correctly identify the register of a sung note (it’s obviously important that you sing it so they can’t see how you are making the sound on your instrument) start asking them to play a note on their instrument that is in the same register as the one you’re singing. Sing it to them once, ask them to play a note, then sing it to them again. Ask them if their note is higher or lower than yours, or if it is the same.
- Once they have worked out if they need to go up or down to get closer to your note, get them to move up or down one note at a time in the order of a scale, singing them your note in between each note of theirs. Ask them “Is your note still higher?” and if the answer is yes, get them to come up another note.
- At this point you will have to make sure that your student understands how to move their notes up and down by step, so you might want to pause on the singing exercise and just get them to practice going up or down one step at a time from a random note. This is particularly tricky for string players going down one note from an open string as they will often want to play the next open string down, not the next note down.
- Once your student can correctly match your sung note on their instrument (this may take several lessons of doing this for a few minutes each lesson) you can start to work on pairs of notes.
- Sing two notes, and go through the process of finding the first note. Then ask the child to work out if it goes up, down or stays the same, and if it moves, whether it does so by step or jump. Practice pairs of notes until the child can find the pair of notes within a few attempts.
- Work up to small groups of notes that your student copies from you. By this time you will probably have been working on these skills for a few weeks, and your students may well be very fast at finding the notes you have given them.
- Now get the child to sing you a bit of something they know to sing but not to play. It might be a Suzuki tune, or something else. Ask them to go through the same process that you did together, but by themselves. Unless your student has perfect pitch you will have to give them the first note of their piece.
- Get the student to sing a few notes, work out how to play it, then do the next few notes. This stage can often take quite a lot of practice, so be encouraging and patient. Most students will not sing in the same key that they are playing, which is a good thing, as they are practising transposing as well as playing by ear.
- Work towards the student singing the notes they know in their head rather than out loud, then finding them on the instrument.
- Congratulations! Your student is playing by ear and you never need finger numbers again!
Huge thanks to Ed Kreitman for clarifying many of these ideas. For more information do buy his wonderful book Teaching from the Balance Point.