Garage Band Theory Extras! There’s lots of stuff in Garage Band Theory Extras and it’s all free.

If you bought the print edition, send a note to ds@garagebandtheory.com and I’ll

send a link for your download.

Tools the Pros Use to Play By Ear and these PDF’s are adaptations of the examples that accompany the text.

In the 📖 printed book there’s hundreds of examples but usually could only show notation and a guitar tab 🎸.

These are the expanded versions – there’s six volumes and each has hundreds of pages of tabs –

banjo, bass, guitar, mandolin and ukulele, notation for everyone else 💯.

There’s lots of stuff in Garage Band Theory Extras – but I think the one that can have

the biggest positive impact quickly is the Notation files ♪ - because they let you hear

every example in GBT

Learning to ‘play by ear’ 👂🏻 implies ‘listening’ and that’s what these are for

If you watch and listen and hum along a few times before you play, it will save lots of

time, long run. You do NOT have to be able to ‘read music’ to listen to them.

Learn to listen to things and then play along 🎻. Put your instrument down, click ‘play’ –

and watch, listen and hum along. Slow ‘em down, speed ‘em up. Easy to repeat the

whole thing, or select a section and make it loop when you want to learn it.

You’ll develop basic reading skills too 👁️‍🗨️, obviously, but that’s almost a bonus. Reading

music is not a goal for everyone, certainly not required for GBT - but it IS a very

good thing to be familiar with a sheet of music and this is an easy introduction.

1. There’s PDFs intended to be easily readable on a music stand – large fonts for the chord names and numbers, same for the tabs.

There’s jazz, blues, rock, folk, traditional Irish, bluegrass, nursery rhymes and Christmas songs as well as some Bach & Beethoven. There’s scales and chords, and chord charts for lots of well known songs, lots of 4 & 8 bar progressions and always

shown in more than one key.

There’s tablature for banjo, bass, guitar, mandolin and ukulele as well as standard notation for keyboards and transposing instruments. 500+ pages for each instrument.

I use MuseScore on my laptop, it’s free and works great for the ‘basic’ stuff that’s in these files. Register and get access to the excellent well moderated forums. It’s available for android but I haven’t tried it.

There’s a folder called MuseScore Basics that has links to some good introduction and instructional videos, instructions for opening a file and a few other functions that are useful for playback and practicing.

I looked at a few other Notation programs (not recently) and all the programs I’ve seen are pretty easy when it comes to the basic ‘playback’ functions you need. Most, if not all will recognize the included MusicXML files. Start/stop, changing tempo, setting loops, volume etc. aren’t difficult and it’s well worth the effort so you can watch, listen and hum along

IMPORTANT:

I want it to be understood that I am NOT collecting email addresses for marketing. These downloads do require an email address, but BookFunnel’s system delivers the books without saving the recipient’s email address. The notation files are delivered by PayHip and it’s easy to unsubscribe.

I’ll notify if there are significant edits or updates and there will also be occasional free promotions that will let you gift the Bundle to friends, but that’s it

The notation files are delivered by PayHip and you can choose to be added to the mail list or not.

I’ll notify if there are significant edits or updates, and there will also be occasional free promotions that will let you gift the Bundle to friends, but that’s it. Learning to play by ear requires listening, and with GBT’s MuseScore & MusicXML files, you can listen to all of the examples.