Monthly Archives: March 2010

Want to play it? Hear it first!

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It may sound like a contradiction, but if you want to create music when you play you must be able to hear the music first – in your head. This goes doubly if you want to improvise, compose or play by ear!

Ever noticed how great jazz improvisers often sing along with their own solo? Or how rock guitarists’ mouths move as if they’re singing out each note they play? These players know exactly what sounds their instruments will make before they move their fingers to make it happen. It’s no coincidence that this is a habit shared by many of the greats!

But, you may be thinking, I play from sheet music – what does it matter if I can hear it in my head or not? It makes all the difference in the world! Yes, you may hit the right notes at the right time – so does an old pianola machine! But the pianola won’t play with expression, feeling or freedom… and I can guarantee it’s not enjoying itself!

Hearing what you’ll play consists of two parts:

  1. Hear internally what you want to play
  2. Know how to bring those sounds out into the world

Let’s look at those two in more detail.

1. Hear internally what you want to play

This is what experts refer to as ‘auralising’, and it has many different aspects. The simplest is probably to make up a tune in your head. If you’ve spent any time playing music, this won’t pose you any problem. To auralise more complex music requires a more sophisticated ear.

Everyone knows the classic story of Mozart as a child, writing down an entire 8-part choral piece after hearing it performed once. For most of us, it’s more likely we’ll be able to manage short arrangements of 2-4 voice harmony, or a melody with supporting chords – and even those will take some practice!

The better you can create (or recreate) music in your head, the more musical power you have at your fingertips when it comes to playing, improvising or writing music.

2. Bring out those sounds on your instrument

This second part will be harder for most people. Forming the connection between what you hear in your head, and the notes on the page or controls on your instrument takes a lot of practice.

The most effective way to do this is with an intermediate stage – rather than go directly from your imagination to your manuscript paper or instrument, figure out what you’re hearing in your head in terms of theory, and know how to bring that theory out on your instrument. For example, instead of trying to play the chords you hear in your head directly on guitar, you understand that the chord progression you’re playing, and you know how to play chords in that progression on your guitar.

Train your ears to bring life to your playing

The way to build up both of these skills is to train your ears. Of course, when we do ‘ear training’, we’re training our brains more than our ears! By learning to recognise the concepts underlying the sounds we hear (such as notes, intervals, and chords) we increase the power of our musical imagination (step 1) and take a large step towards recreating those sounds on our instrument (step 2).

Like ‘music theory’, the phrase ‘ear training’ can be a big turn-off for people. For hundreds of years, ear training has been a fairly slow, and often boring process. And sitting at a piano, banging out notes again and again and trying to improve your listening skills has never been as fun as picking up your instrument to play real music!

Fortunately we live in an age of incredible technological innovation, and we’re beginning to see this impact ear training in a big way. There are computer programs and apps for your phone to lead you through the training process and personalise the course to suit your needs. There are online lessons and video tutorials. There are powerful music creation tools which can be used to help you train in interesting and fun ways. You can train wherever you are, whenever you have a few minutes to spare, and enjoy yourself along the way.

Over at EasyEarTraining.com we’re exploring the new ways to train your ears and get more out of music. Here’s a few ideas to get started with:

Don’t waste any more time!

Instead of practicing scales for the thousandth time, or learning a new piece by rote, take a bit of time to explore what ear training can bring to your musical life and the exciting new ways there are to open up your ears using the technology all around you every day!

What Is The Most Difficult Aspect Of Learning An Instrument?

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I was playing a gig about a month ago and on break this guy and his wife approached me and says “Man, I thought I knew guitar but the stuff you were doing I couldn’t even follow”. Well I said to him that I’m using a garden variety of chords and instead of learning chords in the way that most guitar players do which is, to look at a chord diagram and put your fingers here or there to form some type of chord, I told him I approached it differently.

I told him what I do is look at the entire tune including the melody and find spots where there is a strong beat or an accent and VOICE the chords with the melody note on top. So he says WAY COOL, but how do you do that? I told him to check out my COOL CHORDS videos that describe my approach to chords and how to voice them with the melody note on the top voice.

Well now I want to change the subject here and ask everyone to leave a comment here. I want some feedback from the music community and I pose this Question;  What Is The Most Difficult Aspect Of Learning An Instrument?

If you comment please also include what instrument you play, so let’s get down to it and tell me what your problems are so that I can create another article or video addressing this.

How To Be Productive During Band Rehearsal

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You might find this article useful if you plan on starting a band or feel like you need to get more out of your band rehearsal. Over time you can make rehearsals as productive as possible.

Before the Band Rehearsal

band rehearsal 300x225 How To Be Productive During Band Rehearsal

band rehearsal

Be prepared and make sure that everyone in the band knows what tunes your going to rehearse.

Practice you own parts of the music with a metronome or drum machine making sure that you play all of your parts well and avoid making mistakes. Play it slow enough so that you can assimilate the material before getting it up to tempo.

If you have a solo then prepare your ideas and record them or write them out. If its a jazz band then you must be able to solo with ease spontaneously over the chord progressions. Record the chords and play them back and try out some ideas ahead of time. You might even send your ideas to the other band members so they have an idea of what you are trying to do especially if you have a complex solo that involves all of the band. The concept here is that your not looking for notes or other options during rehearsal that should be done at home.

Get enough sleep and warm up ahead of time.
Playing scales and arpeggios etc can help get your head together and get your juices flowing.

Turn off your cell phones and make all of your important calls beforehand and get all of the basic stuff like changing strings etc. out of the way.

Don’t come to rehearsal drunk or stoned.

During Rehearsal

Keep your family life out of the rehearsal room. It’s really a drag when someone in the band comes it pissed off. If your in a bad mood then it rubs off on everyone else and the music suffers. If things are irritating you, find the reasons for that , and calm down. Your band members may not be the source of your bad mood. Negative energy is a real band breaker.

Set up your sound.

Study the sound of your instrument and learn how to make adjustments inside the practice room. Fix you E.Q. and make sure you don’t play too loud. Have someone tweak your amp for you while your playing having this problem fixed in the beginning will help you hear the overall sound of all the instruments and not make you deaf in the process.

When your working on new stuff, have an open mind about everyone’s opinion even if your about to play a tune you wrote yourself.
Have common courtesy, when some band member has to work on the part they play together and it doesn’t involve you, don’t make noise with your instrument it gets very distracting to others.

If you get a great idea, stop and write it down or record it immediately because no matter how good it might be it will vaporize as time passes.

Try to record the rehearsal especially if your creating a new tune. You might find some other ideas from that material as well.

When everything is grooving along and the band is nailing it, move around and jump around or whatever don’t just play it with your mind because that’s how it will come out on stage.

Squeeze everything you can out of the rehearsal don’t go into endless jams (unless you know it will benefit the overall band work), don’t take a cigarette break every 5 minutes.

After rehearsal..

Go for a drink with the band and talk about everything you did in that rehearsal. Talk about what you could do next. Give yourselves some ideas for the next rehearsal. Have a good time and enjoy the people your playing with and anyone who’ll hear the band will notice that.