Learn to Play Bass or Guitar by Ear
Trust Your Ear! Learn songs by listening.
Be able to play with "No screens. No paper."
No training wheels. No crutches!
Finally play music like a natural with your EARS instead of your eyes!
In this course, you get front-row access to conversations with:
Geno Kreis – Bozeman-based bassist, drummer, flamenco guitarist, and longtime Music Villa purchasing manager, talking about how he really learned: drumming and playing along with records, burning in the major scale, and using rhythm and repetition to figure out songs by ear.
Rob Kohler – Montana-born jazz bassist, composer, and heavyweight educator (Stanford Jazz Workshop), sharing stories and concepts about improvisation, “wrong” notes, intention, context, and how time, melody, and harmony shape your ears and interaction with other players.
Michael Manring – pioneering solo bassist, digging into intonation, deep listening, ear training, and how seriously working on intervals, rhythm, tone, and perception has shaped the way he hears, practices, and plays music.
I record these as long-form interviews and then cut them into focused lesson clips on playing by ear, improvisation, and practical music theory.
New clips from these sessions are being added to the course on a regular basis.
Confirmed & On Deck:
Bottom line:
When you join earPLAYacademy, you’re not just getting my method—you’re getting a growing library of ear, improv, and theory insights from players who actually use this stuff onstage and in the studio, so you can shortcut years of trial-and-error in your own playing.
7-Day Risk-Free Guarantee.
Try the course for a week. If it’s not already changing how you hear music, email me and I’ll refund you. No hassle, no questions.
Choose Your Access Window:
All plans include every current lesson plus any new content added released while your access is active.
90-Day Access $97
Orientation – start strong with a guided overview and setup
90-Day All Access to the full earPLAYacademy core course
Includes all current lessons plus any new ear, improv, and guest interview clips released during your 90 days
Description:
For the serious go-getters who believe they can crush the course in record time and get 100% R.O.I. Intense, focused, and built for momentum.
1-Year Access $327
Orientation – get set up and pointed at the right lessons
One Year All Access to the full earPLAYacademy core course
Includes all current lessons plus any new ear, improv, and guest interview clips released during your 12 months
Description:
For the realists who want solid, no-nonsense time to complete the course at a steady pace. You get a full 12 months of access to ensure you absolutely master the material.
Lifetime Access $997
Orientation – a clear starting point so you don’t get lost
Lifetime All Access to this course
Includes all current lessons plus all future ear, improv, and guest interview clips for life
Description:
For those who want unlimited lifetime access to this course. Come back anytime to refresh, rewatch, and benefit indefinitely from all updates — new lessons, bonus materials, and exclusive interviews.
What you can achieve:
This isn’t about knowing more. It’s about becoming the kind of player who owns the moment — every time.
Here’s what earPLAYacademy trains into you:
Learn by Ear
Develop instincts that make charts, tabs, and guesswork unnecessary.
Learn songs and basslines by ear, not by search
Find root notes quickly and build progressions from them
Hear chord movement and song form clearly
Build real vocabulary through intervals and chord types
Jam Without Fear
Handle unfamiliar musical settings with ease.
Play confidently at church, in rehearsal, or at gigs
Stay calm when keys shift or charts disappear
Lock into the groove without prep
Strengthen time, memory, and feel—not just mechanics
Understand Music Instinctively
Get what’s happening in a song the moment you hear it.
Understand progressions at a glance
Predict where the music is headed
Connect scales, harmony, and movement by ear
Stop memorizing patterns—start recognizing music
Perform with Confidence
Be ready, even when nothing goes as planned.
Play shows without relying on charts
Recover smoothly when things shift live
Memorize full sets with clarity
Stay calm, focused, and in the moment
Create and Improvise
Let ideas flow through your hands without hesitation.
Harmonize melodies in real time
Improvise and solo from your inner ear
Build musical phrases that sound natural
Trust yourself to make strong decisions
Bonus Wins Along the Way
These happen automatically once your ears are in charge.
Don’t fear modulations or key changes
Break out of locked-in shapes and patterns
Hear full song structure as it unfolds
Blend better with singers and rhythm sections
Love playing more than you ever have
LEARN TO PLAY BASS OR GUITAR BY EAR
Most musicians secretly want one thing:
“I want to hear a song and just PLAY it — without tabs, charts, or someone spoon-feeding me the part.”
That’s what learning to play by ear actually means.
If you can hear music, you can train your ears to:
Find the right notes
Follow chord changes
Build real bass and guitar parts
…without being chained to a chart.
WHAT “PLAYING BY EAR” REALLY MEANS
Playing by ear is not:
Magic “perfect pitch”
Random guessing until something works
Memorizing 500 licks and hoping one fits
Playing by ear is:
Hearing where “home” is (the root) and finding it quickly on your bass or guitar
Feeling when chords move and being able to follow the motion
Tracking the form of the song — verse, chorus, bridge — so you don’t get lost
Using your ear to decide if a note or riff belongs, instead of asking the internet
In plain terms: hear it, find it, follow it, make it feel good.
That’s the core skill. Everything else is detail.
WHY SO MANY PLAYERS STAY STUCK ON TABS AND CHARTS
Modern players have a built-in handicap:
Almost every song has a tab or chord sheet online
YouTube puts the “answers” on the screen
Apps show moving fretboards, colors, and training wheels everywhere
Those tools aren’t evil. The problem is how they’re used.
Used as a first step, they train one thing:
“I can’t play unless someone tells me what to play.”
You end up as a karaoke musician with an instrument:
Fine as long as the chart is in front of you
Lost the second it disappears
Terrified when the singer changes key
That’s not a lack of talent. It’s a training problem:
you’ve been strengthening your eyes and fingers while ignoring your ears.
Learning to play by ear means flipping that.
THE CORE SKILLS BEHIND REAL EAR PLAYING
Strip everything down and there are four non-negotiables.
1. ROOT NOTE SENSE
Can you hear the “home base” of what’s going on and find that note without flailing?
On bass, the whole band sits on your root.
On guitar, you’re still outlining harmony even when you decorate it.
If you can’t consistently locate root notes by ear, everything else feels like guessing.
2. CHORD FLOW AWARENESS
Beyond single notes, you have to feel movement:
“We were home… now we went somewhere brighter… now we’re back.”
That’s I → IV → V → vi and friends, whether you know the labels or not.
When you can hear common progressions, you stop treating every tune like a brand-new puzzle. Your hands start recognizing, “this feels like that familiar pattern” before you even name it.
3. FORM AND MEMORY
Hearing the right notes doesn’t help if you can’t remember where you are in the song:
Intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, tag
How many bars each section lasts
Where the hits, fills, and breaks live
Ear-led players internalize the map. Chart-dependent players stare at the map.
4. TIME, FEEL, AND RECOVERY
If your time is weak, your ear won’t save you.
If your feel is stiff, correct notes still sound wrong.
Players who truly play by ear:
Can sit on one note and make it groove
Treat wrong notes as information — move a fret, fix it, keep going
Trust that if the time and feel are solid, the harmony can be brought into line
That’s the gap between “I learned the notes” and “I actually sound like part of the record.”
HOW YOU ACTUALLY START TRAINING YOUR EAR
You don’t learn to play by ear by reading about it.
You learn by trying to match real music under constraints that force your ear to work.
Effective training includes:
Intentional limitations — working on one string, one area of the neck, or one rhythmic idea so your brain stops grabbing automatic finger patterns and actually listens.
Short, repeatable loops from real songs — not just sterile drills, but fragments from actual music you’d play on a gig or in church.
Call-and-response work — hearing a simple line or rhythm and answering it on your instrument by ear, not from notation.
Play-along time with recordings — letting yourself sound rough while you hunt, instead of waiting until you “know it” first.
Inside earPLAYacademy, these ideas are organized into orientation work, focused exercises, and song-based challenges for bass and guitar.
HOW LONG IT REALLY TAKES
Straight answer:
With 15–30 minutes, 4–5 days a week of focused, ear-driven practice, you can feel a real shift in a few months.
With consistency for a year, your entire relationship to tabs, charts, and “I can’t play that” changes — especially on bass.
The timeline depends on:
Whether you’re training your ear, or just repeating memorized licks
Whether you’re working on music you actually care about, so you stick with it
Whether you occasionally check your work (recordings, charts, trusted players) instead of living in either “never check” or “check constantly”
Good ear players are built by deliberate time, not born out of nowhere.
WHERE TABS, THEORY, AND EAR-TRAINING APPS FIT IN
Tabs and chord sites are great for verifying and filling gaps after you’ve taken a real shot by ear, and they’re terrible as step one.
Theory is powerful once you can hear what common progressions and intervals feel like; it’s overwhelming when it’s just vocabulary.
Ear-training apps are useful for sharpening specific skills (intervals, melodies, dictation) as long as they support song-based work, not replace it.
Healthy order:
Hear and hunt on your instrument
Check and name what you found
Organize it with theory and patterns
Use tools and apps to sharpen weaknesses you’ve already discovered in real playing
Reverse that order and you end up smart, busy, and still unable to play without instructions.
HOW EARPLAYACADEMY HELPS
earPLAYacademy is designed specifically for bassists and guitarists who want to:
Get off the tab treadmill
Train their ears on the kind of music they actually play
Become stand-alone musicians instead of “I can only play what someone hands me” players
The program gives you:
A clear orientation phase that resets how you think about mistakes, listening, and practice so your ear is finally in charge
A structured training path that moves from simple listening and note-finding into following real songs, recognizing movement, and creating your own parts
A mix of short exercises and longer play-along assignments, so you’re not just watching lessons — you’re actually touching the instrument
Guidance and stories drawn from working players and educators, not just theory books
YOUR LOGICAL NEXT STEP
If you’re done being a karaoke musician with a nice pedalboard and you actually want to learn to play by ear:
Make one decision: from now on, your ear is the boss.
On the next song you learn, try to find at least something by ear first — even just the main root or a simple figure.
Only after that attempt, allow yourself to check a chart, tab, or video.
When you’re ready to follow a proven path built around this process for bass and guitar, choose your access level inside earPLAYacademy, start at the orientation, and give your ears the reps they’ve never really had.
You don’t need more tabs. You need a trained ear.
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