The first step would be to make sure that the guitar is tuned according to the standard (for some bands, you have to tune your guitar based on their tuning, which may be one step lower or higher, or in some cases Drop D or other types of special tuning). Otherwise, you’d end up with okay chords, but at some parts it won’t sound exactly the same since if your guitars are tuned differently, then you could be using a powerchord equivalent, but the actual chord is an open string. I don’t know if that made actual sense, but anyway, just to clarify, you can usually do a single chord (G for example) in several ways. They will be equivalent, however, there is a notable difference between the sound generated from an open G and a powerchord G.

The 5-10 minutes playing by ear is just for getting the chords while listening to the song. It could take longer especially if the band is using more complicated chords (the type like A7, A9, etc etc… I don’t really memorize those chords, most of the time, I don’t know the name of the chords I’m using but I continue anyway because it sounds right).

An important skill for playing the guitar would be to commit the sound that you’re hearing to memory (if you’re able to hummmmmmm the sound with the right pitch then you’ve got that skill). Hummmmmmm that sound and go over the different frets of the guitar on the 6th string (the biggest string on the base) until you get a similar sound.

Depending on the number of the fret that sounds right, here are the values:

fret 0 (open string) – E

fret 1 – F

fret 2 – F# or Gb (Yes! F# equals Gb!!!)

fret 3 – G

fret 4 – G# or Ab

fret 5 – A

Fret 6 – A# or Bb

Fret 7 – B or Cb (Again, B is just equivalent to Cb)

Fret 8 – C

Fret 9 – C# or Db

Fret 10 – D

Fret 11 – D# or Eb

Fret 12 – E