You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 7 Practice Hacks for Better Ears

Episode Date: January 9, 2020

Today, Peter and Adam walk you through 7 steps you can take to grow your active listening skills.7 Practice Hacks for Better EarsListen to learnSing!Get a Methodist (or Baptist) hymnal and sing your partLearn a soloLearn tunes in different keysScore study with the trackTranscribeBONUSCalling all pianists - get the Piano Access Pass today! Save money with this bundle featuring every piano course ever from Open Studio, including teachers such as Peter Martin, Geoffrey Keezer, and Helio Alves. For more info, go to https://www.openstudiojazz.com/piano-access-passAre you going to the JEN Conference? If so, stop by and say hi to us! From January 7 - 10, Peter and Adam will be doing special live You'll Hear It's, giving away special prizes, and answering any jazz or music questions you want to ask them. Just look for the Open Studio booth (Booth 718) and get your daily jazz advice in person.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Peter. Hey, do my ears look weak? No, they look good. They could be better, though. Have any hacks for that? Yeah. I do. I'm Adam Manus.

And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to You'll hear it. A podcast about listening and learning all about music. Oh, he was on it today with the new... No, that was wrong. What are you talking about? Well, it was close. A podcast about listening and playing music better.

He got overconfident. I did, and you didn't notice. That's okay. But we're all that and more, right? Are we more though, really? We can't be limited to a tagline. It's a daily podcast, man. We give them what we can.

It is. We try our hardest. So, yeah, we're excited to be here. We absolutely are. We are sponsored by Open Studio. Oh, yeah. Go to Open Studio Jazz and check in our courses. Look, a lot of people asking us at the beginning of the year, like what's the best

course for me and all that kind of stuff. And it's been fun to help folks. We have a lot of knowledgeable people here in the studio. So if you want to call us, you can call us. I'm going to put the number out there. I'm going to put your, I'm going to put your cell phone number out on the airways. Is that okay?

Peter, please don't do that. No, okay, or not. But the phone number here is 314-329-7201. You didn't think I knew that, did you? I didn't think you did that. That's impressive, actually. You can give us a call. We call that going old school.

By the way, right now Andrew and Rachel and Dan are like, oh. Yeah, but you can give us a call. You can send an email. You can send a text. You can send a fax. You cannot send a text or a fax. That's true. You can Skype us.

You can't do that either. You can't Skype us. No, but there's a lot of ways to contact us. If you want to just talk about courses or just talk about life. That's openstudiojazz.com. So today we're talking, that was great, by the way. Thanks. I didn't know where you were going and you went somewhere.

And I still didn't get there. Yeah, yeah. Today we're talking about seven practice hacks for better ears. Now, I've known some hacks in my day. Yes. I've sometimes been accused of being one myself. That's a different kind of hack. Yeah.

So ears. Remember how afraid we were. when we started this podcast, like two years ago about using words like hack and, you know, life hack and different. And now we just throw it around like it's like we're Casey Nice at. Exactly. Seven hacks were better. Yeah.

Anyway, I digress. So what do we mean by better ears? Better ears, better formed with the correct angle coming from the head. See, mine are kind of pinned back. That's not what we mean. Like a bat. That is not what we need a better. No, no.

We mean big ears. What we say in the big ears. say in the business of big ears. Being able to hear, being able to extrapolate important musical content that's actionable as you're playing and listening to music. Now, I had an email the other day from someone asking, do I need perfect pitch to be able to play jazz, right? The answer is yes. No, the answer is no. No, the answer is no. You don't need to

have absolutely perfect pitch. That's right. The more we can work on our ears, the more we're able to hear things and recognize them, identify them. I think that's the key. Yes. is the more we're able to do that, the better musicians were going to be in general. Yes, and when we say better ears, big ears, great ears, we do not mean somebody who is a fan of music

that's like, I've listened to all of, you know, Taylor Swift's, and I can sing along, and I know all the words, everything. I'm such a great listener. Like, you can think you know the music, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about knowing the nitty-gritty of it.

It's not like, I know this car on the inside out, but can you take apart the engine and rebuild it and all that kind of stuff? That's a different level, right? Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. So that takes us to number one of our seven practice hacks for better years.

And you know it's funny we call them practice hacks. These are really foundational principles. I was going to say, we're kind of a hacking about this stuff. But it's fun. Anyway, okay, so number one is listen to learn.

Number one is always listen, but what do you mean by listen to learn? Listen to learn. That's kind of what I'm talking about. Like learn how to take the engine apart and put it back together. Don't just listen as a fan. Listen as a practitioner. Listen to the intricacies.

Listen to the details. listen to learn the actual chord progressions, the intervals, the melodic pattern, like all the ends, the harmonic pattern, the form, like know all that stuff, the theory,

know it back and forth, don't just know how to sing along with it and know what the music video looks like. You can do that too. Am I getting dogmatic? No, you can do, all of it is good. It's good to be dogmatic.

It's good to be open. I like it when you get dogmatic. Hold up, man. You can't be both. Of course, 100% can be. I can be dogmatic for a week and then be like, yeah, I'm going to laugh. Oh, I know, but not at the same time. You can't be like, you got to learn everything.

Oh, you learn whatever you want. All right, so that's listen to learn. What do we got for number two? Number two is to sing. Yeah. Now, singing is, I think, super important to, I mean, first of all, singing is the most foundational way we can make music. It's the first way humans made music.

It's the voice. We all have a voice. And I really, man, I can't encourage you to sing what you're playing enough. Like, we learn all these songs, right? If you're a jazz musician, you learn all these great American songbook songs. Learn the words. Learn to sing them. Even if you're not a great singer, you're going to learn so much about phrasing about how to play that melody on your instrument.

Because you've got to breathe. You got to breathe. And you have to put some kind of phrasing on the song. And it's so much easier to recognize when we sing it than anywhere else. You better recognize. But also, not only that, not only just for the practical application of learning things, but for your ears, singing helps us. singing helps us be able to recognize pitches and those intervals in such an important way. You know what I mean?

Like, it's so important to be able to sing what you can hear. Yeah, and you do not, we can't emphasize enough that to develop your ears by singing, you do not have to be a good singer. You just have to have a good heart and want to try. I really attribute a lot of my early ear development to, I sang a lot of, not a lot, but I sang in choirs kind of from elementary school kind of on, just even when I was in Julian I sang in the choir. You were the choir in Julian?

Yeah, not the... Well, actually, no, I wasn't... There was only one then, I think, at the time. But pianists had to be part of an ensemble. And if you didn't play... I mean, I played violin, but I couldn't get in the orchestra. You were kind of put into the choir. But it was such a learning experience.

And so I think because even though I didn't have and don't have a great voice, I was always... I enjoyed it so much so much. I was willing to be part of that. That I developed my ears a lot from that. Man, if I had any free night of the week, I would totally join a choir. Yeah. It's so much fun. There's no other experience like...

singing with other people and trying to blend. I mean, it's really a fundamental human thing. Well, that leads us right to number three of our seven practice hacks for better ears. I love this one. And that is to get a hymnal. And we have Methodist or Baptist, but we're open to any of the world's culture, cultural religious hymnals, right? Those are the ones we know. Well, I'm very familiar with the Lutheran hymnal.

Oh, the Lutheran. There's a lot of bach in that one. It's good stuff. Right. Sure, sure. So any hymnal and sing your part. And so if you're with one of these, I mean, I kind of, these are the only ones I know. Methodist and Baptist, but it's always sopran,

out of tenor bass, so just pick where your voice is. And then there's a couple ways we've talked about this before. You might play the other parts, you might while you sing, that's kind of the best way to do it if you can. Well, you know, Rachel Morgan, our dear friend over here, hit me to YouTube videos that only do this, where you can see the score and you can sing along with the video like you're in the choir essentially.

It's like music, choir minus one. Yeah, it's awesome. I need that. All right, cool. What do we got for number four? Number four is to learn a solo. What? Why would you do that? Well, because that takes some work.

It takes some ears. Okay. Yeah. And you know what? I'm going to amend this, not even learn. And you're talking about transcribing someone else's solo, right? Yeah. So it's not even, I would say, if you've never done it before, you don't even have to learn a whole solo.

Yeah. Start off small. Start off with a phrase. Make sure it's a musical phrase, though. And then start off with a chorus. Yeah. And then move on to a solo when you're ready. But the more work you do on this, on transcribing a solo, the more work you do, the

more your ears are going to develop, the faster it's going to be. You should, if you haven't done this at all yet, you need to start including this in your daily practice regiment. Right. Get down and give me 20 solos right now, son. I'm so stuck on that, that concept. Yeah, you really want to be a drill and drill sergeant. I have been all month at our boot camp. Okay, so that's great. So that leads right into, oh, you kind of change the order. I like that. Well, yeah, we just change it up. Learn tunes in different keys. Now, this, I think along with learning solos is one of the things that's kind of built in. It's almost like a full proof. That's why we call it a hack,

like way of improving your ears. If you take a tune, especially if you're a little bit aggressive in trying to take it to different keys, not transpose. We didn't say transpose it. Learn it or really just try to play it in different keys. You can break it down. If you're a pianist with just the root movement and the melody, all the different ways we talk about do it. But playing in different keys is not about learning to transpose. That's a byproduct. It's about developing your ears. That's awesome.

What is this? Number five, six. Number six. Number six is score study with the track. So this is something I've been doing for the last few years that's I've gotten more into arranging. More arranging, more arranging. I've noticed an unintended benefit of this is my ears have gotten better.

And that's score study. Go to IMSLP.org, bring up a heightened symphony. And then go to YouTube or Spotify, whatever you want to find your music, listen to that Haydn's Symphony and read along and as you're reading you start to really

you can kind of hear what you're seeing and so I think for people especially who might be visual learners or that's one of your triggers to help retain things it really really helps

I agree that's great good stuff so for number seven this is our last one we've got transcribe no wait I feel like we did that but no we said learn a solo

we did say learn so learning a solo is really different you can certainly combine these But I would say transcribing, I don't know, like I always ended up doing this more. I transcribed some souls, but I did way more learning souls by year and that never writing them down. Because it just, it seemed like so much of the benefit you were getting was sort of front loaded with the learning of it. And then the amount of work that you did to write it down. That's a different skill, notational skill, which is great.

But transcribing a tune, kind of like as you're learning, I think is really good. I did this with a bunch of munk tune sort of grand staff, right hand and left hand, treble and bass clef. because it gets you to really hear and look you could actually you could transcribe you know hymns or choir you could transcribe anything I mean one axis I love is trying to transcribe like the blakey horns

oh yeah three horns and you have to hear because sometimes there's some real close movement so you're learning the intervals you're learning the melodic lines you're learning how it interacts with the harmony it's great and then getting it down on paper kind of gets you interacting with it a different way I used to think like do everything by ear only to develop

your ears but I think a certain amount of, and you've got to be able to write music and visualize it anyway as well, but doing it away from the souls with the tunes and just anything that you like, I think is a good way to do it. All right, now we have a bonus, but before we do, let's recap a little bit. Number one, we had, listen to learn. Number two, we had sing. Sing for your supper.

Number three, get a Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, or other hymnal, and sing yo part. Number four, learn a solo. Yes. Number five, learn tunes in different keys. Number six, score study with the track. Number seven, transcribe. Today's episode was brought to you by Open Studio. Go to Open Studio Jazz and check out our piano access pass.

Yes, you check out everything, but especially the piano access pass. It's new, but it's kind of our bestseller. So we're taking our cues from the marketplace as we should. Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, we got a bonus. Yeah, what's our bonus? Oh, at first I thought this was Watch the Movie Perfect Pitch.

I love that movie. You've seen that? I have. It's great. Yeah, we do a review of that on B-Sides. It's mildly delightful. Yeah, yeah. That would be our second Anacendric review on B-Side. That's right.

Yeah. B-Sides, also known as you'll hear it take on Anacendric. You just talk about Anac-Kendrick movies. No, but this bonus is to be born with perfect pitch. This is a great hack for better years. That sounds funny, but it really is. That's the best hack of all. It's truly a hack.

It's the laziest way to do it. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I hear different numbers of like one in 10,000 people. are born with perfect pitch from the scientific community. But apparently we have two people that are allegedly part of the Open Studio office and family here, the staff here, which is only eight people, with perfect pitch. So that's like, I mean. And it's not you or me.

Definitely not you or me. That doesn't take a lot of math to see. It's not one in 10,000, but it's 20%. So anyway, we're going to do a test on that. But yeah, look, if you're not special. If you have perfect pitch, you really just need to learn to transcribe. and yeah, the rest of it you kind of got it. So there's your ultimate hack.

Until tomorrow, you'll hear it.