Hey Scott!

This is really what's keeping me busy for the past few years, playing by ear and getting it right and realistic. My experience with it is that I sometimes can play the entire song right away, and sometimes I just can't get it right. In my room I don't have an audio device to listen to songs, so I have to play it solely by ear. Sometimes I just can't get a song right, like I had with Celebration from Kool and The Gang, so I bought the 'deluxe' sheet music from Warner Brothers (for a stunning $14 - how about that, is that normal?!). Now it's sounding brilliant, because the VA-7 already contains a style specificaly made for that song. After I got the sheet music, I listened to the song again, while looking at the sheet, and thought of some specific details of the song and implemented that while playing.

I also have to say that it's most of the time songs in C,F,G or Em and Am that I can play right away.

And tablatures always come in handy when you need chords for a certain songs - sometimes wrong tabs get spread on the net and that's awful. Example: All I Want For Christmas by Mariah Carey, found on several tabsites.

My 2 cents'