Piano by Ear

I learned piano by ear. Later I learned the pentatonic scales. That is the entire extent of my formal musical knowledge and it was enough to make everything.

By ear first

Learning by ear means you start from the sound and work backwards. You hear something, you hunt for it on the keys, you miss, you adjust, you find it.

It is slow and it builds one specific thing very well: the connection between what you can imagine and what your hands can do. You are never playing a symbol on a page. You are chasing a sound you already have.

The gap is that you cannot name anything. You know a shape works; you have no idea what it is called. Which is fine until you want to talk to another musician, and then you are pointing.

Then the pentatonics

The pentatonic scales were the one bit of theory I went and got, and they were the right bit.

Five notes instead of seven. The two removed are the ones most likely to clash, which is why a pentatonic is famously hard to play a genuinely wrong note in. For someone building beats with no theory, it is a set of training wheels that never need to come off.

It gave me a frame to put the by-ear stuff into. I could hear it; now I could also find it on purpose, repeat it, and move it somewhere else.

An iPad and GarageBand

All of it was made on an iPad and in GarageBand, mostly in the back of a bowling alley between shifts.

No interface worth the name, no treated room, no monitors, no theory beyond five notes. People wait to start until the gear is right, and the right gear is always one purchase away. Mine was a tablet.

It was enough to learn on, and learning on it is the only job the first setup has.

Why it still shapes the record

Working by ear makes you trust your ear over the rules, which is useful when the influences on a record run from Modest Mouse to The Mars Volta. If I knew more theory I might have known which of those combinations was not supposed to work.

And it is why the music is the part I will not hand to a machine. Hunting for a sound with your hands until you find it is not an inefficiency in the process. It is the process.