You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 7 Ways to Boost Your Ear Training - #16

Episode Date: February 15, 2018

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I'm Peter Martin. And I'm Adam Manus. Welcome to the You'll Hear It podcast. Today, we're going to give you seven ways to boost your ear training. Only seven? What about like 10, 12, 14? Well, we were going to do that. But remember, we said they're going to lose track of them. They're going to lose interest.

You know how people are today. They only want seven of everything. You've really thought this through. I mean, I'm trying. I'm trying. Okay, let's jump right in. Okay, first of all, we're going to skip over the whole part about how important your training. Are we safe to do that, you think?

Yeah. It should be a given that. ear training needs to be an essential element to your development. Right. Okay, so we'll skip over that. Number one, learn and practice your intervals. This is the foundation of melody and harmony and really developing your ears. So that means at its most basic level of knowing that this is a...

Third. Well, what kind? Oh, a major third. There we go. I was not expecting a quiz. That's a minor third, I think. Okay. Major third.

Okay, and now we're going through this because I'm going to encourage you to find a friend, phone a friend, contact a friend, because once you learn these intervals, you need somebody to test you. Now, I heard that they have some nice apps that'll do this if you don't have friends or have the inability to make a friend. Interesting. Yeah, but basically you want something that's going to tell you, like you want to be able to identify because if somebody starts here and you know where they are and you're going to play, with them or play after them or whatever, all the things we want to use ear training for in jazz, you want to be able to pull out that stuff together for the harmony or for the string of melodies, but it all starts with this basic harmonic building block of the interval.

That's great. Intervals are so crucial. I still think in intervals whenever I listen to anything. Our second principle is to sing along with recordings that you know and love. This is the easiest way to start developing your ear because if, you know, the key to this is with recordings that you know and you love. So the idea is that you would already know the melody and you just want to sing along with it,

having it in your head for hopefully years. What's great about this, though, is that even if you don't have a great voice, when you sing, you can practice sort of finding the pitches, practice thinking about the intervals you're singing. All this stuff is very important for your training. Got it, got it. Okay, number three, learn some basic

piano and or guitar. I don't mean to be dictatorial about that. I don't even mean to say the word dictatorial. Not knowing is that a word or not. But, you know, this is the thing. If you play piano or guitar, you have an advantage in terms of

developing your ears because when we talk about different harmonic formations, you can actually play them, listen to them, sing them, and kind of quiz yourself and help yourself develop. If you play an instrument that's just a single line instrument, it's a lot harder to do that. You can simulate it, but it's so much easier if you, you know, and look, you don't have to

become a master of the piano, just like when you're singing along for the ear training, you don't have to have a beautiful voice. If you can just play a basic blues, the shell harmony and the root, this is just two notes in the right hand, and one note, the root in the left hand. I can even get fancy here. Eight. Okay, six, two. You know, if you can learn to do that, you're going to be able to do do... And learn the voice leading that's so important in this music. I mean, in all kinds of music, voice leading is important.

But it's the foundation of what you need to be able to develop in terms of your ear training to become a great jazz player. It's super important. That brings this to number four, which is to learn solos by ear. You know, when you're transcribing, you can easily now go online and find almost any famous solo. But learn your solos by ear. And, you know, we kind of talked about this

in our episode on, I think it was 11 ways, no, 15 ways to transfer? No, it was seven ways. Oh, the seven, okay, interesting. We talked about how, you know, before you even sit down at your instrument, you should be able to sing the solo, and it goes along with that. Learn it by ear, be able to sing it in your head at least, or play it in your head the solo you're trying to transcribe. So important.

Right. Such a good tool to be able to hear. And then, I mean, you can transcribe it then. There's no problem with that, but we're not kind of including that here, because you're not really developing your ear, I don't think, when you're transcribing it. You're developing an important skill of being able to notate music

and to understand and to see it on the page, but that's separate from ear training. Yeah, the better you get at being able to hear the solo and transcribe it in your head and learn it in your head, the easier transcribing is going to be. Now, once you know your intervals, you can sing along with some solos that you like,

you've learned some solos, and you've got a little bit of basic piano or guitar skills rolling, then you're ready for something that I think was one of the most valuable things that my father taught me, who's a great musician and has incredible ears, some of the best ears of anybody that I know. So I always kind of listen to him, catch that there. But when I was young, I remember he procured a Methodist hymnal. Now, I don't know if this is particular to the Methodist religion, although my father is half

Methodist, half Baptist. His mother and father, my grandparents, were Methodist and Baptist. So I don't know what that means that he chose the Methodist hymnal. But the idea is, I'm pretty sure this could work with Baptist or even Catholic, perhaps Jewish, perhaps Muslim, I'm not sure. So I'm not saying a preference for the Methodist, but that's what I learned it from. But basically, I'm going to say however you can get your hands on, a basic hymnal, and what you're going to do is go through and play that four-part harmony, and now that's why I say you've got to know a little bit of piano or guitar so you can do this. And then you're going to leave out the part that, that's a four-part harmony. And is your voice. If you're a tenor, as am I, as you can hear, if you're a bass, if you're a soprano,

whatever the range is, you're going to leave that note out after you play through it once, and then try to sing the part and see how your ears are. Now, you might think this is about reading, but it actually isn't, because if you play it first, you're going to have to hear what it is that you're seeing. So you might, and the reason I say grab a hymnal, you know, actually, if you've been going to Methodist Church since you were a little, maybe grab something else so that you're not familiar with it because you don't necessarily want to already know it. You want to grab one that you don't know

and see if you can sing along that part. It's a great challenge, great way to develop your ear. That's an awesome tip. That's a great way to be able to hear those inner voice things especially. That brings us to number six. And this one is a little bit different. This one is to learn common cliche cadences and common chord changes.

And this doesn't involve your ear, but be able to recognize common things. You know, when I was a kid, I would always be able to recognize, like, do-op changes, ice cream cone changes. I knew that progression was always a 1645, or the little brown jug. You know, I could hear that. I knew what it was, you know, as a whole, not just as individual notes, but you kind of understand what that is as a whole. And then when I was in college later, I had a great ear training teacher and a great pianist named Armand Deneleon. And Armin would always teach us these more complicated classical cadences, the Neapolitan 6.

And now whenever I hear that, I don't have to know every note. I know exactly what's going on, even before it's finished. Right, right. Absolutely. It's patterns in music that you can apply to your ears that exist and are going to be repeated because they work. Absolutely. All right, that's great stuff. So the last tip we have for you to boost your ear training is to really learn to listen.

to the bass. Now, this may come in the form of the actual bass player. It might be the bottom of the piano. It's the root note. Sometimes it's not even played, and you still need to hear it. But I find that, you know, look, we want to be able to hear every instrument and every register, but there's always going to be that learning curve of getting to that point. So if you can learn to hear from the bottom up, a lot of times as you develop your ears,

they're able to fill in harmony that's in the middle and melody that's up top. going the other direction is a little bit harder. So if you learn how to really listen to the bass or the bottom of the piano or the bottom of the orchestra, a lot of times you can build quicker up. And so one little trick with that with the bass is like learn what the strings are. Like when you hear the bass player go down to there, you've got to know that's an E.

And I mean, you'll start to be able to actually develop kind of base perfect pitch based upon that and then you apply it to your instrument. But hearing that quality of the harmony, like if the bass player's like, And you know that's E, and then you hear the pianist like, that's not that hard to kind of learn that that's a sharp 9 flat 13, like just from repeatedly testing that out and stuff.

But if you don't know where the foundation of the harmony is, it's not going to matter if you know it's in the middle. That's right. But, you know, ear training is definitely all about... You'll hear it. That's it for today's episode of the You'll Hear It Podcast. For more information or to hear more of these podcasts, go to openstudionetwork.com

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