Playing by ear vs. reading music?

[Rory]

Playing in the dark is cool, I have experimented with that in past

It is! If all the lights ever go out, I can just sit and play guitar all night~

I think that playing by ear is the best way to learn. In my opinion it gives you a better... Feel to how each note sounds, how its created and how different sounds can be made by using a different technique, moving your hand another way etc. of course it depends what instrument you are playing but I think playing by ear, and learning to recognize how to re-create a sound just by listening takes you farther then simply doing what is told to you. I feel like the way I played was, learn the note and listen to what you are playing, then listen to someone else play it, how or why is it different and how do you want your piece of music to sound? Of course having note to follow can be vey very helpful, but things written on paper, like speech can be made to sound so different.

Interesting to get a perspective from the other side, here. You're completely right. Someone can easily play a string of complex notes, but they'll feel dead. A great example of this is the song La Valse d'Amelie, which has an unbelievable amount of covers and stuff on Youtube. Look at a few; I really enjoy the accordion ones. Some of them just sound dead, even though they're playing the notes correctly. Others sound magical. You can see it in body movement, finger movements, even expression. You can't learn everything through a book or instructor, just as you can't always be taught feeling. Having both that technical base and a knack for feeling the notes is what makes the best musicians who they are, usually.

[Namba]

I play by ear... most of the time. Sometimes I need to look at some tabs to see how other people do it, and if I need to change what I'm doing.

[Sammacha]

Interesting to get a perspective from the other side, here. You're completely right. Someone can easily play a string of complex notes, but they'll feel dead. A great example of this is the song La Valse d'Amelie, which has an unbelievable amount of covers and stuff on Youtube. Look at a few; I really enjoy the accordion ones. Some of them just sound dead, even though they're playing the notes correctly. Others sound magical. You can see it in body movement, finger movements, even expression. You can't learn everything through a book or instructor, just as you can't always be taught feeling. Having both that technical base and a knack for feeling the notes is what makes the best musicians who they are, usually.

Yes, thats pretty much what I was getting at. Well said.
Though I feel that it's like this with most things which require any kind of personality (mainly any form of art lol)

[BlackStatic]

I've always been the kind of person to learn by ear, but I do believe that having at least some knowledge of music theory is never a bad thing.

I always try to exercise different patterns in music; usually in my case this is visually - which dots go where on a manuscript/piano roll/midi mapping, how many blank lines there are between notes on a tracker, even going so far as to "how many rises and falls should be in this square wave and where to make the sample loop without clipping".

I sometimes worry that a lot of musicians don't recognise the fact that music is essentially just another language with its own alphabet (ABCDEFG), punctuation and grammar (quavers, semiquavers, rests, time signatures etc.), vowels (minors, sharps, flats etc.) and this is only looking at western music! It's a mathematical language, really.

[Tiido]

Knowing some of the theory certainly helps - you don't have to figure that stuff out on your own (though it is all really fun), most/all has been figured out by someone else already long ago.

[Rory]

I sometimes worry that a lot of musicians don't recognise the fact that music is essentially just another language with its own alphabet (ABCDEFG), punctuation and grammar (quavers, semiquavers, rests, time signatures etc.), vowels (minors, sharps, flats etc.) and this is only looking at western music! It's a mathematical language, really.

How does that worry manifest in a musician, if I may ask? Like, what do you see that causes that worry? And yeah, it's a mathematical language but with lots of amazing accents.

Knowing some of the theory certainly helps - you don't have to figure that stuff out on your own (though it is all really fun), most/all has been figured out by someone else already long ago.

Figuring out things on my own has always been the most fun part. Experiencing life through someone else's discoveries gets boring sometimes.

[Therval]

i play music by ear...

[crazyprice]

I play by ear as well

[SaulGoodman91]

It obviously takes more practice and skill to play by ear, but its much funner