Play It By Ear is a musical improv show presented by Dropout, hosted by Mano Agapion. In each episode, Zach Reino and Jess McKenna improvise a musical featuring between one (as seen in episodes such as 'Animal Style' and 'Elevator Pitch') and three guests (as in 'Space Rocks'). Periodically, Mano interrupts with a prompt or constraint that they must include in the subsequent scene or song.

Play It By Ear provides examples of:

• Aborted Declaration of Love: In the episode "Cornhole-In-One": "I'm talking 'bout you... nicycles!"
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: "Whimsy On Wheels" contains a prompt to give a Shout-Out to as many different streaming services as possible, but the singer seems to go out of his way not to include Dropout, the service that produces this show. The host even calls this out once the song is over.
• Fairy Tale Free-for-All: Using nursery rhymes instead, but otherwise used as the basis of the first episode, "Humpty Dumpty". In addition to Humpty himself, the cast includes Little Jack Horner, Georgie Porgie, Peter Piper, the cow that jumped over the moon (and the moon itself), and the kingdom's ruler, Mother Goose.
• Hysterical Woman: In the episode "Heebie-Jeebies," after claiming to hear voices from the bottom of the lake, Windella is told by her husband, Jebediah, that it is probably because she is a woman.
• Just a Stupid Accent: In the episode "Cornhole-In-One," the opposing foreign team, as is explicitly stated, has an unplaceable accent and speaks mostly English apart from multiple "foreign swear words."
• Paper-Thin Disguise: In "The Muck of Murkmere", Gerribald Henry's disguise is implied to consist entirely of changing their name to "Gerribald Henry Indisguise".
• Solo Duet: An imperfect example, but in the episode "Space Rocks," Ashley Ward must perform a duet with herself due to unfortunate improvised casting. She pulls it off, though.
• Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion: In the episode "Animal Style," Ross, Zach, and Jess are prompted to and improvise a song full of these.
• Twin Switch: In the episode "Heartbeat Hospital," Zach and Jess perform a duet about multiple convoluted examples of this trope.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Done in reverse in "Backwards Compatible", a Merrily We Roll Along-style episode where the story is told in backwards chronological order; the main characters all meet at a Friendsgiving hosted by a mutual friend named Chelsea, but as this scene takes place at the end of the play, the character of Chelsea is stated to be the woman whose bachelorette party they had been attending in an earlier scene, who had never been mentioned before or since. Everyone makes a point during the final number of reiterating how close they all are to Chelsea and how she, as the one who seated them together and prompted their friendship and everything that would come of it, will certainly be a focal point in their story going forward, unless they should just happen to drift apart over the years of course.
• Whole-Plot Reference: "The Muck of Merkmere" involves a character returning to his hometown to get revenge on the person that wronged him in disguise. Sweeney Todd anyone? Even one of the songs "Tighten It" — in which the anti-hero confronts the villain and attempts to kill him while tying the villain’s cravat — has been referred to as "The Muck of Merkmere"'s "Pretty Women".