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Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas.” And “God Bless America.” And well over a thousand other songs. A big chunk of the American songbook was written by one guy.
Here’s the thing about that guy. For much of his career, he couldn’t read music. And he could only really play the piano in one key. One. F sharp, all those black keys. He taught himself to play on the black keys, and that’s where he stayed.
He once explained it like this: “The black keys are right there, under your fingers. The key of C is for people who study music.”
Irving Berlin’s trick piano
F sharp wasn’t the key the sheet music publishers wanted. So Berlin wrote on special pianos with a lever under the keyboard. Move the lever and the whole keyboard shifted, so he could keep playing in his one comfortable key while the piano sounded in whatever key the song needed.
He had a few of these pianos. He called them his “Buicks.”
He didn’t put the notes on paper himself, either. He played his songs and someone else wrote them down for him. A Smithsonian curator who has played one of the Buicks doesn’t think the piano changed the music itself. “It just let him translate what he was hearing in his head.”
One of the most successful songwriters who ever lived wrote by ear, in one key, on trick pianos, because the written-music part was never where the music lived for him.
He’s not alone.
Django Reinhardt, Jimi Hendrix and Erroll Garner
In 1928 a fire in Django Reinhardt’s caravan left the ring and little fingers of his fretting hand partly paralyzed. He taught himself to play again, mostly with his index and middle fingers, and came up with a completely new left-hand technique. He never learned to read music.
Jimi Hendrix couldn’t read music. Neither could Erroll Garner, the pianist who wrote “Misty.” Garner played by ear his whole life.
The list of people who shaped the sound of the last hundred years and never learned to read a page is long, and it’s full of names you’d hang on your wall.
You know what every one of them could do instead? Hear.
Hearing is a skill you can practice
Reading music is a filing system. A useful one. But it isn’t the music, and it isn’t what separated any of these people from the pack. What separated them is that they could hear a thing and play it back on their instrument.
And that’s a skill. You aren’t born with it or without it. It’s the kind of skill you can sit down and practice.
So practice it. Take a real tune you love and learn it by ear, the way every name on that wall did it. If you want a process to follow, here’s how I transcribe a bass line by ear, and here’s how to learn a jazz standard well enough to walk it without a chart.
Go deeper
Play What You Hear
Six lessons on learning songs by ear: sing it, find it on the piano, then play it on your instrument.
