Playing by ear. my guitar teacher can do it, and it really annoys me!!!!!!!! is there any tips on how to get to be able to play by ear faster, or do I just have to wait till I get better and learn it naturally?

I can tell you that one think that will help is learning and memorising all the notes on the fretboard.Learning scales ,notes,along with how they are constructed will be your best way to improve.Put some work into the Theory threads on here by Andrew and it would be a great start

Ahhhh ear playing... yeah so this is a very good topic because it relates to a very, very important part of learning guitar, which is learning songs by ear. Doing this can help you with many different aspects of guitar, especially songwriting. It helps to develop an ear for music so instead of having to look up the notes or online tabs, you can steadily quicker, just know, what will sound good. Thats what I would suggest if you want to get better. Just like 15 minutes or so a day of learning songs will help a ton!

Its something I should write a lesson on - maybe my next will be on this subject

Good idea Andrew!

I must say, if you want to learn a song by a band you like, try doing it by ear, you will learn more that way. Thats what ive been doing, and i can recognize a pretty good amount of notes (nowhere NEAR perfect pitch though )

I think it will hel you.

My old guitar teacher could play by ear extremely well. He had never heard of Master of Puppets before and I brought it in so we could transcribe it. When the "spider riff" came on he just listened for about 10 seconds then started playing it on piano, never heard the song before.

Learn the fretboard, learn the scales, learn the names of the musical intervals. After that, try to actively listen to any piece of music you hear and pick out the musical intervals. Even if perfect pitch (hearing every note without a root to compare it to) is very difficult to obtain, it's not really necessary. What matters is good relative pitch, meaning if you hear the root note you can pick out the other intervals related to that note.
I just started getting a good ear in the last 6 months or so, after playing guitar for over 2 years. I noticed I was able to sit down and play a pretty easy metal song (The Four Horsement) pretty much by ear entirely, except for solos. It's been progressing steadily since, even though I'm not doing dedicated ear training.
Anyhow, hope this helps!

I guess I should do more of this you guys make it seem pretty attractive.

PLaying by ear comes with time off course, you can`t rush it. You must practise ear exercises for some time and develop your ear to that extent that you can easily play whatever. THis exercises are actually really fun to do, but you have to put them in your daily routines and that my frined takes time. Off course if you wanna play by ear it is mandatory to some extent that you have a thorough theory knowlegde and reasonable amount of techniique.

Ear training you say?

I practise it using http://www.earmaster.com/ , earmaster is a neat piece of software- i believe it still has a free trial period too.

Any other software users?

Awsome! that earmaster is good software! I will be using it every day, and start trying to learn songs by ear a bit every day. thanks for the advice!

this also goes into the current brain research thing in the forum. it takes time. you have to play guitar enough to know all the sounds of the frets but also long enough that your brain begins to tie together sounds with motor actions.

after i download it and try to open it it says you must be logged in as an adminsitrator or something else.
what should i do