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Everyone tells me to play as long as you can. Sometimes, it goes in one ear and out the other.

My goal is always to keep my ears as wide open as possible.

Keep your ears open, your eyes open, grab everything you can, react, and learn!

I'm blessed with a good pair of ears. That's how I fooled my piano teacher. I'd watch his fingers and I'd listen to it, and I just kind of basically learned it by myself.

I have a pretty good ear.

To me, the object of practicing is to allow you to play what you hear. But you're always hearing new things, so you never get to the end of it.

And if you don't have your ears open, you're not going to be able to figure out what you should be doing.

I was improvising before I was reading music. I was just trying to play things on the clarinet by ear. I think my ear is one of my greatest assets.

The best training is to play by ear: trial by fire.