Q. I have a pretty good musical ear. I can hear individual tones but I'm not to the point that I can easily hear intervals or chords. When trying to find them on an instrument, it's trial and error until I finaly find it.
One cannot be a performer if they can't recognise these things on demand.
A. It won't happen overnight, but practicing daily will improve your aural skills immensely. The most important part of ear training is audiation, which is a fancy word for your musical imagination, the tape recorder in your mind that holds the melodies that you hear. I'm sure you've had a song stuck in your head before. The trick to ear training is getting all of the musical rudiments (intervals, chords (arpeggiated, of course), scale degrees (using numbers or solfege syllables), and rhythms) stuck in your head one by one, over and over until you never forget what each one sounds like.
I don't recommend using well-known songs for identifying intervals. Here's why: Let's say you use "Here Comes the Bride" for an ascending perfect fourth. This is scale degree 5 ascending to 8 (or 1 an octave higher), or "sol do". Now that you've learned it, you can recognize that pattern whenever it happens. What will happen if you hear scale degree 3 jumping up to scale degree 6, though ("mi la")? (Listen to the beginning of Brahms's Intermezzo for piano in A minor, Op. 76/7 (http://music.barnesandnoble.com/search/product.asp?z=y&PWB=1&EAN=90266388622 click on track 6). This too is a perfect fourth, and sounds VERY different from "sol do"! Would you recognize that as a fourth? Only if you had also learned to hear that one too! Another different-sounding P4 is 7 to 3 ("ti mi")! When I teach ear training, I teach all of my students (and make them memorize) an interval drill that groups together all of the scale-degree combinations that form a single type of interval. My students sing this etude at the beginning of every class.
A far better approach to ear training than using intervals is using scale degrees. When you practice ear training, do identification drills, always singing what you hear (in a comfortable octave) after listening and then after you've learned the correct ID for the rudiment. Also do dictation. Try to write down melodies that you hear (and have the music for so that you can check your work when you are done). Finally, do a lot of sight-singing. Find melodies that you've never heard before and find out how they sound by singing them from the music. Try to avoid using the piano to help you sing, until you get lost. Then back up and find where you went astray using the piano. There's a difference between producing the right pitches for yourself and matching the pitches you hear. (You must be able to do one before you can do the other, of course.)
There are lots of great online ear training resources. One is http://www.good-ear.com/, and another is http://www.musictheory.net/. I'm sure you can find others on your own. Good luck, and let me know if I can help you in any other way!
How do i make a melody on the piano ?
Q. I know chords but who do i make a melody. Like i know by ear but how do i know what i can and cant press
A. Choose whatever key you want to compose your melody in. C is usually the easiest, since it's like a car with good wheels: It has no sharps or flats.
Then get a tape recorder, and sing your melody into the recorder, and when you're done, play back what you've sung, and then play the same notes on the piano, and there you are.
It's as easy as 10 - 20 - 30.
When you're done, you'll know why composers like to get paid for their work.
Best wishes,
Is the music written for some instruments usually in a particular key?
Q. As a guitarist, I know the majority of music written for classical guitar is in the major keys of C, G, D, A and E, and minor keys of Dm, Am, Em, and Bm. This is due to the tuning of the open strings, making chords in those keys easier to play.
What other instruments have characteristics that make them better suited to certain keys?
A. There are basically three reasons for many instruments seeming to be 'limited' to certain keys.
[i] As Delicio says, most modern instruments have few physical limitations to the keys that are available to them, but this key preponderance still applies.
[a]Custom. Key preponderance can often be mainly due to 'tradition'... Players inherit a preference from their forebears, perhaps.
[b] Laziness. e.g.Guitarists seem to love the key of E, their bottom note (I think). It is apparently 'easier' to play in this basic tonality? Pianists seem to adore C major or A Minor, as they find these keys 'easy' to read. etc.
[c] Facility. Although, since the advent of equal temperament, there is little musical justification for a preference for only a few keys, some keys are somehow much easier to play in. (I'm not sure that this is always completely true in many cases, and that the real reason is really [b])
[d] Mood. e.g. as the chief character of the Organ is one of 'majesty', the use of the lowest pitched pipes on the pedal best achieves this mood. Thus, the keys close to the bottom note (C) are more popular for 'grand' music for that instrument. The same idea, perhaps, applies in similar ways to instruments such as the Guitar, the Cello, the Bassoon, etc.
[e] It is perhaps sad that the vast majority of art music we hear is by dead composers. These composers, so often, lived when there WERE physical limitations to the keys available.
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[ii] Some widely used instruments actually have severe physical reasons for avoiding certain keys.
[a]The most obvious are the Bugle and the Bagpipes, perhaps.
[b]However, many other 'old' instruments, such as the Recorder or the Krummhorn, apparently have physical limitations which almost preclude certain keys.
[c]Fretted instruments, always hard to play 'in tune', may have certain reasons for the avoidance of certain keys apart from those in [i] (I'm not sure of this).
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[iii] Practicality.
[a] If an instrument is found to 'sound better' in some keys than in others, for any reason, it is easy to see why certain keys are rarely used. The reasons, of course, are often due to the limitations of the performers, as in [i]
[b] Brass instruments, theoretically completely equal tempered, have a 'better sound', it is claimed, if the key is related to the actual length of their tube. At one time, it was rare to come across a work for Trumpet in any key other than D Major! The use of valves to alter the fundamental length of the tube [gradually] removed this limit. ( The most pitch-flexible modern brass instrument, the Trombone, still is said to sound 'better' in some keys than in others.)
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The present situation.
Imagine trying to accompany the bugle with a piano. It is to the credit of performers (and composers) that the extreme pitch limitations of the bugle or the bagpipes have been disguised so adroitly. [By all rights, neither instrument 'belongs' to the contemporary music environment.]
With the advent of atonal music (over 100 years ago!), several of the above instruments were reeling. (Imagine, e.g., the bagpipes trying to play Webern.)
It also exposed the illusion that we had actually achieved 'equal temperament'. Our old ideas about preferred keys had persisted, it seems.
As we are exposed so much to 'rock' and 'pop' music, where notes are frequently (and painfully!) as much as a quarter-tone out of tune, our communal sensitivity to pitch accuracy simply has to have fallen. Perhaps, in the end, this insensitivity to intonation precision will even begin to extinguish the preferences for certain keys?
Interesting question.
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