I can't play melodies to save my life

Busterthedog

Ok,i'm 57,if you asked me to play a melody e.g twinkle twinkle little star or Happy Birthday I have no idea,I have the worst ear ever,any tips or exercises that would help?,I am not even talking about a chord melody but just single notes(chords would be great but need to walk first)

Legionreturns

Do you read tab? I find with most melodies it's simply a matter of practice. 

sweepy

Try humming them as you play along and remember to breathe

VimFuego

https://www.justinguitar.com/en/ET-000-EarTraining.php

this is what I am currently working my way through, I have found even after only a few weeks of hearing, and playing, intervals, it's really helping me.

Danji

Play to the television, learn the themes tunes, and the adverts. You'll learn a load of melodies, and your ear will start to develop. 

DulcetJones

Not sure if this helps but several popular songs feature a guitar solo that is the melody of the vocals, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a prime example.  Pointing this out to some of my students was an "aha" moment for them.  Making the connection from that perspective seemed to help.

viz

I think you are right in thinking about melody (tunes) as well as harmony (chords). A lot of teachers seem to teach chords first because they see guitar as primarily a harmonic / accompanimental instrument, but being able to play a tune is at least as important as being able to play a chord progression, IMO anyway. In fact I would guess that every lead guitarist started off trying to play tunes from day 1. I reckon it must be hard to make the transition from strummer to lead guitarist later on, though definitely not impossible. 

The first question is, can you sing or whistle a tune or do you think of yourself as being rather tone deaf - ie you enjoy music but can't reproduce it at all even with your voice? If the latter then you're right, it's going to be difficult for you to play melody, but give it a go and you can always fall back on focusing your attention on your harmonic proficiency. 

If the former, then the issue is not that you have a bad ear but that you find it difficult to replicate tunes on the guitar. This is not surprising - the guitar's layout is not intuitive for playing tunes, and everyone finds it hard. Unlike the piano where the keys are laid out in order of frequency from lowest to highest, the guitar has two dimensions to worry about; the pitches rise in frequency in single semitones horizontally up the fretboard (frets), but also vertically in bands of 5 semitones (from string to string); and there is the the added complexity that between two of the strings there are only 4 semitones! Not easy. It's a bit like gears on a car; you can 'rev up' on a low string (eg up the frets on, say, the A string) then you need to change gear back to a low fret on the next higher string (D string) to continue rising in pitch. And the ratio between 4th and 5th gear is different from all the others - what a stupid system! (there is a reason for that btw but anyhoo.)

It would be good to get used to playing chromatic (semitones) scales up and down the neck on a single string, but also across the strings, changing gears as you go, so you get used to where the change points are on each string. 

But then I'd focus on playing simple tunes - twinkle twinkle and happy birthday are indeed classics for this because they have a combination of important intervals (jumps) as well as sections of more scalar music. Play them on a single string to start with, to obviate the gear-change issue. This is what every young child instinctively tries to do when they first pick up a guitar, and it's the best approach. 

What the single-string training will give you is a feeling for what is a small jump and what is a large jump and how high to go. It will be difficult to hit the right note every time but you will get closer and closer, and learn instinctively whether you have overshot or undershot, so which direction to adjust towards. This ability is absolutely fundamental to playing melody, it cannot be stressed enough. So as others have said, get playing along to any music, TV, radio, nursery rhymes, anything. You will improve. 

As you work on that, there is the string-crossing issue to consider. Everone struggles with that, because your brain needs to be able to 'subtract' the interval that's already between the strings when going from one to another. So if you start on the B string somewhere and you want to go up a 5th (first two notes in twinkle twinkle) by hopping across to the E string, you need to know that instead of moving up 7 frets like you would on a single string, you need to move up 2 frets, as there's the equivalent of 5 frets between the strings. Nobody actually thinks like that mathematically, their brain just knows it in musical intervals, but I'm just trying to describe what's going on physically on the guitar neck.

Much of melodic playing is actually just guitarists playing well-worn patterns that seem to have been baked into their fingers, which is like a short cut, so as Dulcet Jones points out there are lots of melodies that replicate the vocal verse - these are possibly more tunefully 'natural' as they are not born from what someone's fingers dictated, but from the music itself. Much of Brian May's work is melodic in this way, so is Ritchie Blackmore's (eg the middle section in Since You Been Gone). 

All this is what comes through many years of practice, so just spend the next few decades working on it . It's hard work but every breakthrough is incredibly rewarding. Let us know how you get on!

jellyroll

I use Tonedear and Teoria for ear training practice. 

viz

jellyroll said:

I use Tonedear and Teoria for ear training practice. 

"Calm down; it's only tonedear"

Freebird

I find it helps to know the position of the tonic and dominant notes at all times.

EricTheWeary

I think often the problem, speaking for myself anyway,  is not listening properly. The 'I've known this song for years' or 'I've got the cd on in the car' approaches aren't necessarily enough and focussed listening is more helpful. Generally if I can listen to something with a pen and paper in hand that helps, I'll focus on something, then another something until I have a page full of notes and have a clear idea how it all fits together. Say lyrics, song structure (intro, verse, chorus,etc, being clear on variations), listening out for repeated sections, what it is I want to learn. That way I've listened quite intensely many, many times over before I even start on working out the notes ( i.e. they are much more in my head now).  

 I might listen to a phrase ( say a short riff or the start of a melody) and wave my finger in the air like a sparkler (okay,  that might not strictly be necessary) basically creating a simple mental visual image, like a graph, of how the notes go. Here with a sharpie and some supermarket pizza packaging (   )just for illustration purposes is the Smoke on the Water riff as I might imagine it: 

https://imgur.com/gallery/svF4v

in practice it wouldn't be that many notes at once. Just trying to get the relationship between the notes ( are they the same, higher, lower) before I try to find where they are on the fretboard. The very first note may even be going up and down the neck a lot just to find the thing that seems to fit with the recorded version, even that I might change later on. Have little expectation of getting it right straight away, it's not a competition.

For something like Twinkle Twinkle the temptation is to think you know it so well that you ought to be able to play it from memory. Actually, that may not be the case as (my) memory would stretch notes out, be a bit flat,etc, so carefully listening to a recording would be much more helpful. Play against the recording or just listen then find the notes (one,two at a time) on the fretboard. 

TheBlueWolf

Start simple and gradually build up.

The greatest piece of wisdom I ever received is to make sure you know the tune well first, so simple melodies like "Happy Birthday" should get you started.

I don't think anybody is truly tone deaf. Developing your ears is a skill that can be learnt, the key ( pun intended ) is to practice. You'll get better at locating the right notes soon enough, just keep listening. 

Learning songs helped me a lot too. Getting an overall sense of a songs mood can help to zone in on the melody.

fretmeister

You'd be an above average singer round here.

CarpeDiem

What are the specific issues you have in playing melodies? Is it the timing in moving from note to note, or is it knowing which note to play next? Some great advice has already been given by others already, but it's not clear to me what you're currently finding challenging.

Barney

Iff your talking about playing these tunes off the top of your head without any planning it can be fairly awkward to do ....
Its like a lot of people when improvising say they just play what they are thinking ...i dont really aggree with that i think a lot are are just mixing up what they know ....ask anybody apart from advanced players to play happy birthday without forward planning and they would probably not be able to play it straight off 

Busterthedog

Thanks for all the replies and advice,I can play stuff if I have the tab but have trouble picking out a simple melody by ear alone.

CarpeDiem

I would try picking out the melody on a single string (the low E string) to start with, as @viz has suggested. Pick something simple, and try to pick it up in chunks. Slow it down if necessary. It may take some time but stick with it. You may make mistakes to start with, but keep going until you've worked the melody out. Please let us know how you get on.

mandosteve

It's really tough to pick out melodies by ear when faced with a fretboard that doesn't mean anything. Learning some scales in all their positions on the fretboard (start with diatonic major/minor and major/minor pentatonics) and getting them fluid and second nature will help. You'll then realise that stuff you already know how to play will often come from within this. You'll then start to hear how the notes work in the context of songs and your scales. After a bunch of practice and experience you'll start to hear when a melody is say diatonic, pentatonic (not mutually exclusive) or something else and start to find it much easier to pick melodies out.

BigMonka

@viz that was a great in-depth post, thank you! When you suggest working out the melodies to simple things that you know, what's your view on working out the key first and then using knowledge of that scale to find the notes - for ear training is that more or less helpful then just starting with a blank fretboard?

viz

BigMonka said:

@viz that was a great in-depth post, thank you! When you suggest working out the melodies to simple things that you know, what's your view on working out the key first and then using knowledge of that scale to find the notes - for ear training is that more or less helpful then just starting with a blank fretboard?

Thanks @bigmonka! Well these are only my personal opinions, but what I think is - 

Firstly, you HAVE to know the key, by which I mean you have to be able to recognise and sing the "home note" and know whether it's major or minor, with absolute certainty every time (unless it's Sweet Home Alabama obvs). I don't mean you have to name the key or know how many sharps or flats it has, but you do need to be able to sing it and find it quickly on the 'tboard. 

Secondly you have to be able to sing the tune out loud, however horrible your voice. Because that's the proof that you have the skill to recognise a perfect 5th or a minor 3rd or whatever, and can reproduce it, at least with your voice. And build the ability to name the intervals correctly 100% of the time, in the same way that you know 'apple' starts with an 'a'. 

Thirdly you have to get good at being able to do what your voice can do, but with your finger. Imagine if guitars had only one string and didn't have frets or lines or dots. Would you be able to play a tune accurately? If so, you've got not only a good ear but also you can translate music from your brain to your finger. Maybe I think this is crucial because I was a chorister and violinist before I picked up the guitar, but I really think if you don't work at being able to follow a tune in real time, you'll always struggle to play and improvise, and that comes from your ear directly to your finger and not vice versa. In time this becomes second nature, but it does take time. Even singing accurately takes time.

Regarding knowing the scale; assuming you already 'know' the notes to play as per the steps above, I don't think it's as urgent to know that the scale is a phrygian dominant or whatever, unless you're mathematically minded and that interests you (like it does me). You tend to get to get familiar with those structures through listening and playing - and with their nomenclature through practising scales, though I see that as a parallel activity, not a precursor. 

In other words I'd advocate a sound- and music-driven approach ahead of a technique-driven approach.

In parallel you can also of course learn chords, patterns, shapes, read TAB, etc etc - but in terms of actually delivering a tune, the above are the skills you need, imo. There are my ramblings on the subject anyway - thanks!