| LearnJazzPiano.com archives: playing by ear | |
| mco246 -- 08/02/2005, 11:15:51 -- #17167 | |
| Hi, I am an amateur. Some people can actually play by hearing where they want to go next, others like me, primarily play by “visualizing” the next note.. Its sort of playing by what notes are closer, avaliable, easier to reach, etc… I probably have a very vague idea of what the phrase I am going to play will sound like, but sometimes even I am surprised of what comes out..(could be very unpleasant..) How can I improve my “playing by the ear” and actually hear where I want to go? | |
| JB -- 08/02/2005, 12:24:03 -- #17168 | |
| Sing it. | |
| Dr. Whack -- 08/02/2005, 14:20:30 -- #17180 | |
| Amen. Try just singing lines over tunes, then try finding those lines with your fingers. Try not to fall into the gap of "letting your fingers do the walking" and hoping it sounds good:) | |
| 7 -- 08/02/2005, 14:49:07 -- #17187 | |
| Maybe the following articles will help: Creating Melodies using "The Suggestive Method" The natural path to melodic construction. http://Jeff-Brent.com/Lessons/suggest.html Melodic Tendencies Note choices based on psycho-acoustic factors http://Jeff-Brent.com/Lessons/MelodicTendencies.html | |
| JB -- 08/02/2005, 15:51:31 -- #17196 | |
| Hal Galper's 'Forward Motion' book is also excellent for this sort of thing too. Here's something i use with my students (derivation of Hal's exercises)... Start with a very simple chord sequence: eg.|| D-7 | D-7 | Cmaj | Cmaj || the left hand plays a simple voicing eg. middleCDFA ... BCEG ... and the right hand matches one of the L.H. notes on beat 1, doesn't matter which one and it should vary as you repeat the sequence.. so eg. RH. plays only beat one: D . . . |A . . . |C . . . |E . . . |F . . .etc D-7 . . |. . . . |Cmaj. . |. . . . |D-7 . . This is very easy to play, but the point is you should strive to 'hear' the note your going for *before* you play it. Imagine the next pitch as loudly as you can, then play it and check that you were right. The more vividly you imagine the pitch the better. Don't put any notes inbetween until you can do this well, and when you do make sure your still hearing your target note clearly. Use this exercise over some simple tunes. The R.H. notes above contain much of the harmonic content of the chord sequence .. take away the L.H. and you can still hear the chord change, even with one note. More with Less... You should aim for this in your solos, no matter what the changes are. I'll upload a file to demonstrate this a bit more clearly (when i have time...) I hope you find this useful. :-) | |
| JB -- 08/02/2005, 15:54:19 -- #17197 | |
| Oh.. forgot to say, make sure your playing these things in a very strict tempo right from the beginning... kind of obvious but it can easily be forgotten as it's 'just an exercise'. (by me anyway :)) | |
| Styles -- 08/02/2005, 21:59:52 -- #17215 | |
| A method from Building A Jazz Vocabulary: In accordance with JB, they suggest several intervalic/melodic excercises and singing them. So with enough practice, I suspect that steady practice will give a new found lyrical meaning to the tones you select. good luck | |
| mco246 -- 08/04/2005, 08:17:39 -- #17266 | |
| Everyone, Thank you so much for your responses. This has been helpful. Michael | |
| mco246 -- 08/04/2005, 09:58:09 -- #17269 | |
| Does anyone know any useful exercises for improving relative pitch? thanks! | |
| 7 -- 08/04/2005, 12:15:38 -- #17275 | |
| Does anyone know any useful exercises for improving relative pitch? Transcribing is good. There are also several ear training softwares and even ear training websites available. | |
| Jazz+ -- 08/04/2005, 12:51:42 -- #17277 | |
| I saw a program on the Learning Channel that showed how cases of wild children , those who had been isolated without any exposure to language, could not after age 6 learn to speak proper sentances. It proved the theory that there is a "window of opportunity" in the brain up untill about age 5 or 6 to learn and master the spoken language. After the age of 6 the part of the brain that handles speach stops developing. I wonder how that relates to playing by ear. | |
| Dr. Whack -- 08/04/2005, 13:03:23 -- #17278 | |
| Hmmm... I would doubt the findings of a study like that. Could it be the fact that those kids were wild in the first place as a result of some other mental/physiological issues that were the reason for their lack of development? I had the rare opportunity to spend sometime at a neurological rehab facility a couple of years ago. It is truly amazing to see how the brain wires new pathways to accomplish tasks - at any age. Now it may be more difficult at a later age, but it's almost never impossible to learn new things. | |
| sdm -- 08/04/2005, 13:36:07 -- #17279 | |
| Looks like science is still mixed about this: http://www.feralchildren.com/en/critical.php | |
| SolArt -- 08/04/2005, 17:49:45 -- #17293 | |
| I've read somewhere quite a while back that you could take a piece of meat & throw it as far as you can into the wilderness & a feral child could find it using their nose alone! | |
| sdm -- 08/04/2005, 18:34:00 -- #17295 | |
| It was downright disturbing looking at that website. This shouldn't happen!!! | |
| Mike -- 08/06/2005, 21:25:12 -- #17372 | |
| The study draws wild conclusions from the data. The only conclusions that can be proven from the study is that the feral children had problems with language. To jump to the conclusion that the brain therefore has problems learning language after 6 years old is ridiculous and I am sure almost all good neurologist would disagree. I have first hand experience. I had a brain aneurysm hemorrhage at age 43 and by the odds should not be alive. When rehabilitating I had to be re taught how to walk, talk, take a shower, and most sickeningly had to relearn 30 years of piano study in months to get back to work. When I fist sat at a piano I could not make it through even one tune. Anyways point is. My brain had no problem learning language at this age even though knowledge of it had been erased. | |
| 7 -- 08/06/2005, 22:35:41 -- #17373 | |
| All of the languages I have mastered (French, German, Swiss German and Spanish) I learned as an adult. French took me two years (I was in my early twenties), German took me five years (I was in late twenties/early thirties) and Spanish took me three years (mid-thirties). I might add that I was living in France when I learned French, in Switzerland when I learned German, and in Spain when I learned Spanish - so I was immersed in the languages and forced to use them all day every day just to survive. In addition, during my last years in Switzerland and my years in Spain I was employed (initially part-time and then full-time) by language schools. Here are some facts about "second languages" that I picked up while working in the language teaching business: There is consensus that the earlier one learns a language the more likely one is to aquire an authentic accent (and the older one begins learning a language the less likely it is to ever sound like a native). However, the actual concepts of grammar, spelling, etc. are not acquired by children until they are formally taught these things these much later in school. The ability of children to communicate fluently and effectively in any language usually occurs before the age of five. However, their understanding of and ability to use their mother tongue is still imperfect until begin receiving formal education. IOW, little kids still make mistakes when speaking. Their command of the language is of course entirely related to the level of education that their parents have. If the adults the children interact with have a substandard command of the native tongue so will the children. Many adults are functionally illiterate in spite of having completed school. A suprisingly large number in fact. While an adult native will have no accent, if his/her schooling (or intellectual capacity) is subnormal they will not have anywhere near the same command of the language as a non-native speaker who is reasonably intelligent and yet only began intensively studying (and consequently mastering) the language as an adult. How does this relate to music? Music has many parallels to language, but in the end music is not language. It is not necessary to sing or play in order to make sure that your basic needs are fulfilled or to express pain, illness or all the other things language is required to communicate for survival. If something needs to be communicated, adaptable humans will always find a way to do it. I would would think that any feral child could learn any language with the proper schooling. Maybe they wouldn't have a "native accent" and would be highly inclined to make the same types of mistakes that all non-native speakers make - but when there's a will, there's a way. I find it impossible to believe the conclusions offered up in said article. | |
| SolArt -- 08/07/2005, 14:39:08 -- #17383 | |
| Ich finde die Deutsche Grammatik sehr schwierig, Sieben! Hast du mein' Witz gelesen von Oktoberfest im HUMOR Zimmer? Wow Mike, I'll bet that was a REAL pain in the neck to re-learn the piano. It must 'ov been truly frustrating. Could you share a bit of that maybe? At least your fingers kept their abilities though (were in shape), isn't that right? | |
| 7 -- 08/07/2005, 14:48:50 -- #17385 | |
| Ich habe schon deine "Witze" gelesen, aber verstehen habe ich nicht. Möglich daß ich einfach zu blöd bin. | |
| Mike -- 08/07/2005, 14:51:29 -- #17386 | |
| Actually it was a gift. I have had the extremely rare occasion to learn firsthand that the true joy of Piano is not the playing but the learning. I have had the rare privledge and Joy of learning how to play Jazz Piano twice in the same lifetime. I am not sure exactly what you mean about the fingers, but basically the answer is NO. My fingers did not keep their abilities. It is a complicated subject, but the brain can be thought of as being similar to a computer in some ways. Some of the files were completely gone, some were irreparably damaged, some were only partially damaged, and some were just slightly damaged, and some were just lost or disorganized. Trying to figure out the status of each file was the bigest task of my Piano rehabilitaion. So I say to my brain... "Retrieve file "Misty"". My brain brings something forward and I have to evaluate it and seeing as my memory is damaged I have to write down my evaluation on paper.... The file "Misty" is 1.)missing 2.)irreparably damaged 3.)slightly damaged 4.)temporarily lost etc So I know when I go on a gig whether I can play this file or not. That is what it was like from one viewpoint. | |
| 7 -- 08/07/2005, 15:33:11 -- #17388 | |
| I know what you mean about "the journey being more captivating than the destination itself". When in the midst learning a number that I've always wanted to know, it's quite easy to slip into the "zone" and experience that delicious state of mind and being. But then once the piece has been mastered, it just becomes another tune in the jukebox to be pulled out at will. The patina fades, and often a little sadness comes along with that realization. As the fires of the creative process ebb, the artwork forged in the flames of artistic passion takes on solid form and then, accepting the reality that it is now "done", the artist puts it up on the dusty shelf to join its brothers and sisters. You have the pleasure of seeing your finished work of art, and yet the wistfulness of knowing that you will never be able to "re-create" it again. Maybe that's why improvisational musics have such an allure. The creative process can recur and be expanded upon with each performance, with the promise of achieving that ever-elusive alpha state tantalizingly dangling just a breath away. | |
| Mike -- 08/07/2005, 22:24:12 -- #17389 | |
| Yes I think that is a big part of what it is about improvisation. You start out each improvisation saying ... I am going to learn how to improvise on this tune and then the fun begins because learning is where the fun is. Very rarely do we start an improvisation saying ho hum "I guess Ill do something amazing once again that has never been done before and make it up on the spot." It is always a learning experience although sometimes we think we did a good job and we say " I think I've finally got that one learned". | |
| SolArt -- 08/08/2005, 15:14:51 -- #17407 | |
| 7, butt ='s bud... | |
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