You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 7 Ways to Improve your Ears/Ear Training - #17

Episode Date: September 18, 2018

Today, Peter and Adam list some useful ways to train your ears. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Brought to you by Open Studios. You're listening today. We're talking about listening. We're talking about ear training. We are.

We're going to give you seven ways to improve your ears through ear training. How else would you improve your ears? Yeah, I can improve your ears through eye training. Well, no, but some people think if you read about it or if you watch YouTube videos that your ears look. So, I mean, it's an important distinction to make, I think. I agree. Yeah. So seven ways to improve your ears.

I want to just say first, this is not one of the seven, but it's kind of a little model of mine. See if we can get the hashtag trending, and that's ABET. What you know about ABET, Adam. Always be ear training. I know a lot about it. Oh, hello. Hell, I like it.

I like your confidence. It's been your heart for like six months now. Yeah, no, I love it. I mean, and it comes from, of course, the famous Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross. I don't know if it started in that, but that it was pre-hashag. ABC. A, B, C, right. Always be closing.

No, but always be ear training. So I think, you know, hopefully we're going to sculpt these seven. And I'm just looking at the list here. We actually only have six. So we're going to have to come with an audible for number seven. But we hope that these are all things that you can be doing continually. We don't want to think about, you know, ear training as something that, you know, you schedule time for 17 minutes a day. And that's the only ear training you do.

We can do it throughout when you're walking around with headphones. When you're thinking about music, when you're sitting on an airplane, when you're away from your instrument, when you're at your instrument, there's always time to develop your ears. And it's such a crucial part of what we do as musicians, period, but especially jazz improvisation, composition, all those kind of things. Yeah, I agree. I think I do more ear training away from the instrument now than I did, you know, before. Just because now I spend so much time, you know, practicing technique stuff or specific things to the piano. but, you know, like you said, you can develop these techniques to really work on ear training away from the instrument. You don't have to have to do it all the time in your practice session. Now, that said, if you haven't put in those hours, right, now's the time.

Exactly. Oh, and I should just say, too, this is actually answering a question from one of our listeners. Oh, cool. Or actually one of our watchers. From Stein. From Stein on YouTube who put a comment for us. Did you know we get comments on YouTube? I do know because I check every day.

Really? I don't. I just saw it on here, but I'm very interested. interested and excited now that we're getting them. Yeah. And big shout out to YouTube. Google, of course, as always. Catch us there.

Big shout out to our audio listeners, too. We always shout out YouTube. I know. Because I'm pointing at him at the camera. But yeah, yeah. Exactly. Our core folks are our audio podcasts. Yeah, totally.

Our first love. Yeah. Okay. So number one is listen. Okay. That's weird. That is weird. But now this is really important.

Okay. I mean, this, like we joke about listen being number one. But it's always true for when we use it. That we're not joking about. But for ear training, you have to listen. That should be obvious, but for some people it isn't. Like they want to work on ear training first by going and plunking out notes on the piano, by playing, whatever.

Ear training is all about listening. That's what your ears for. That's why it's called ear training. So you've got to get into a higher level of listening. And you can't say, like, oh, I'm already a great listener because there's always, I mean, try to do that if you're in a marriage. You're in a marriage, right, Adam? Yeah, I'm in a marriage.

We're both in moderately successful marriages. Not to each other, but yeah. No, no, no, outside of this environment. But just go to your spouse sometime and say, this will be a great way to end a marriage. I'm a great list. I cannot get any better as a listener. I don't think those words have ever been said successfully in any kind of marriage. Yeah, that's a great way to commit suicide.

Exactly. Go to your spouse and say, like, I'm done listening. I've mastered it. I've mastered listening. I'm finished. Yeah, so we're always looking at improving our listening. And it's such a great thing that can. be worked on and done in an organic way every time you're listening you know that's great uh yeah listen

always number one and uh great advice there i think number two uh we have is to sing yeah singing is such a crucial part of all music you know whether you're a drummer or a bassist or a pianist um you know we play an instrument where we can literally plunk down like two dozen notes if we want to right but we have to be able to sing that'd be using a little elbow and arm act. Yeah, we could. And you could try to sing that. Right.

That's not better than it should have. Yeah, I can't really sing that. But you know what I'm saying? Like, singing is crucial to developing your ears because it's, first of all, it's the instrument, your voice is the instrument that you're most familiar with. Even if you play another instrument, it's something you're using every day with pitches as part of your speech. Yep.

And to get in touch with that. And then to be able to hear yourself, sing a part away from your instrument that you usually kind of lean on visuals and technique and things like that. That's the important part. It pulls you right out of that. It pulls you right out of any kind of looking, especially for piano. It's so visual. Yeah. We can see everything. And that's very useful for a lot of things. But for listening, it helps to sing. Well, and I think it pulls you out of the visual, the physical, physicality of the instrument. And then it really pulls you back to number one as far as listened very quickly too, because when you're singing, that's a way to both test

your listening and to attune your listening for the purposes of the ear training. So if you're walking around and maybe working on some intervals, maybe being able to identify them, as you sing them, you're using your ears by listening to kind of attune and figure out what you know and what you don't know, what you can sing accurately, what you can sing accurately, what you can hear accurately and what you can. And it gets, I mean, this gets into an area that's a little bit difficult to discuss fully. And that's why we have music. That's why we have all these, you know, interesting little parts of music that put together the things that we have to be able to learn to hear. But singing and listening, I think, is, it's so much easier to get into that sort of deep

listening state by when you're singing. Now, that does not mean you have to necessarily enjoy your voice. But, you know, the building blocks of ear training, you have to be able to hear them and you also have to be able to sing them. One more little pitch, though, for singing. And you mentioned enjoy your voice. Like, I have a terrible natural voice. It's not terrible, but it's not great. But there's nothing more joyous for me than singing.

I love singing so much. Like, if I had the time, I would definitely join some kind of choir where I could sing with people because there's nothing more satisfying. I encourage people, like my students, I encourage them to sing to get into some vocal things. Yep. Even if you're not that great at it, because it's so pure, music. It's great.

And it's so fun. I mean, I remember when I went up to Juilliard, I was required to be in the choir for a short time. And because I guess it was like the piano, I don't know, it was something when you were a piano major, I actually wanted to play in the orchestra. You had to do ensemble. And I wanted to do the orchestra.

I played violin. But of course, I wasn't nearly good enough to play in the Juilliard Orchestra as a hack violinist. So I went into the choir kind of begrudgingly, but I had such a great time. And there were some vocal majors. It was not all, it was not like a pro-level choir, but there was a lot of great musicians in there.

And like you started getting kind of competitive. Like I want to really nail these parts, but you're part of a section. Yeah. And so you've got that great mob mentality going where some nice things can really happen. There's just no better feeling than seeing with a big group of people like that. That's such a cool thing. Absolutely. All right.

Okay. So that's number one. Number two, listen and sing. And I really think, you know, unlike some of our lists, these were starting out with the big guns. Like those are kind of overarching concepts you want to keep in mind. So next I'm going to say transcribe solos. as a great way to work on improving your ears. So we always talk about the,

and we've done some nice episodes, if I might say so myself, on transcription in general and talking about how you can expand the vocabulary and all these things. But we always talked about the, and we shouldn't even necessarily look at it as a byproduct because it's probably the most important thing you get,

especially in the early stages of learning solos and transcribing. And that is the great ear training that's built into that process. As long as you don't like go out and I hate to even say cheat and just get a transcription written. Don't do that. Yeah, because you're not, I mean, if you listen to the solo a lot and you did that sparingly, you could probably still get some air training. But you're going to get that real bread and butter kind of important ear training.

If you just do it the hard way, you know, and just go and just listen. I mean, we're talking note by note until you can identify. You're just guessing. And then it does start to get easier. Well, that's, and just exactly what you said, though, for the first few solos you do, the most you're getting really is the ear training of that. I mean, you're getting that information that you're learning, but you might not even realize it,

but the bigger thing is the year training. Yep. And so number four kind of is a natural progression from that, and that's to transcribe away from your instrument. You know, I talk about this with students all the time, and I used to do this when I was young with pop tunes, because it's so easy to hear. Yeah, it's a great way to start.

You start just by listening to the bass on the pop, the pop song. And if you don't have perfect pitch, pick a key, you know, pick, pick C all the time to start if that's easy to think about. Or think about Roman numerals. Think about that's the one. You know, I know that's the tonic and there's the four, there's the sharp five, whatever, and try to pick out the chord changes. Yeah, get that relative pitch, get those, those relationship with the root movement. Get the root first, then try to try to guess the quality of the chord of the change. Is that major? Is that major seven? Is that dominant seven? Is that minor chord is that a diminished chord see if you can get the core changes and then you

know if you feel like you get let's say all of a Beatles tune or whatever go check it against the internet you know go check it against the real changes yep see how well you did yeah I mean because really ear training is you know at its essence I think is building up the identification of the basic building blocks of music especially in the area of harmony and melody and and and somewhat in the area of rhythm as well but it's really getting you know the intervals and then the combinations of intervals that make up harmony, the melodies, be it a root movement or an actual melody, and then the combination of all those being able to identify those.

So I noticed for number five, you have apps, but everything's in capital letters. Does that mean it's like another, like another A-bed? Is this like always practice perfect? No, no, no, no. I just meant actually get an app as a way to improve your ear training. And like this is something I didn't really do because they didn't have apps when I was coming up. I don't know if you knew that. I didn't have it.

Oh, you didn't have me either? Okay. I mean, we had appetizers. We did. That's right. Appetizers. No, but I think that there's some really good apps, and unfortunately I can't actually recommend anyone. Although we had talked about this, this little quick could be a nice little segue to our sponsorship, which is coming up shortly, which, as you know, we always do between number five and number six on our.

Oh, do we really? Yeah, well, as of today. Well, we might as well, we might as well, we got to talk about the apps first. Okay, so but apps, are you familiar with any ear training apps? Because there are some good ones out there. And these are things that, like, would quiz you on intervals and core qualities. Yeah, I used to have one when, like, you know, when I first got, when my iPhone or whatever, the first sort of round of these. Like when you go crazy, just like every app.

I remember getting iTunes gift cards at Christmas time and, like, using them to buy all the bunch of stuff that I never would use. You were never bored, were you? Never bored. No, I have a couple of good, like, rhythm training apps, but I don't have. any ear training apps right now. Yeah. Well, maybe some of our listeners could, but I mean, it won't be hard for you to find, but the general idea is like you can have a friend back in the days when kids had friends instead of phones. You could have a friend that would test you, quiz you on it. Because certain things

as you're learning, especially I'm thinking about intervals and just what you mentioned before, about identifying the harmonic quality of chords. As you learn them, you need somebody to quiz you, but an app could do it as well. Cool. Right. All right, so that was number five. And now we are Between number five and six, and you know what that means. That means I'm putting my headphones on, big dog. That's sweet sound of Sean Weil. That's right. Sorry, that's Bjorn Ranthier.

So, this podcast is sponsored by Open Studio. That's right. And we want you to, you know, step away from the YouTube. Not you, YouTube. Not you, YouTube. But, you know, those videos that kind of take you nowhere, you're looking for jazz information, you're looking for the answers, you're looking for some practice. inspiration. You go from video to video and then you know you get some nine-year-old kid in his

basement with a keyboard that doesn't know what he's doing and then maybe you get something else which is great but it's not long enough and doesn't address what you need. So we want to invite you to come over and learn from the pros at Open Studio where every video is curated and vetted and based on real you know verified knowledge from the from an actual jazz pro. Yeah we have the real deal folks over here. We have People like Diane Reeves, Chris McBride, Sean Jones, Warren Wolf. I mean, you... We're talking about Grammy-certified winners up in here.

Yeah, there's a lot of Grammys on that wall over there from our artists. And this is the thing. If you've been thinking about coming over and joining us, you know, one thing that we... A great way to come in is to all access pass. Yeah. Which is, you know, starts at just $20 a month, and you're going to have access for that month or for that year

to every single course that we have. And we've, you know, curated certain packs. You also get access to all the packs. Did you know that? I did know that. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you can learn about the blues or learn about bebop from all of our different artists, not just on your instrument.

Of course, you're probably going to be most interested in. If you're a trumpeter in Sean Jones's two wonderful courses. But there's things to learn from everybody. Yeah. I love those packs, by the way. The curated packs of lessons from everybody. It's really cool. If I'd had those packs in this podcast, when I was growing up, man, I would be the bum.

And some apps. Man. have so many Grammys. Anyway, so join us at Open Studio. Go to openstudio network.com. Nice. Yeah. And we're back.

That was fun. Our first sponsorship. Our first sponsorship. I wonder how we got that sponsorship. Exactly. But, you know, we just want to be clear on here when we go into sponsorship mode. So you're going to hear us drift into the wonderful world of sponsorships. And, you know, really our philosophy on this, of course, and it's always going to be this.

We only talk about it, sponsor, accept sponsors, of sponsors. products that we, products or services that we have vetted ourselves and use ourselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you know, we were talking about the meandies. I haven't tried meandies. So you're not. Hey, but meandis folks, if you're listening. We will try it.

And if we approve you, we may accept you as a sponsor. Yeah. Number six. Number six is to have a friend quiz you. Have you ever tried meundies? Oh, no, not like that. You're training. You're training.

Well, and I feel like I, you know, shame on me. I kind of gave this away last time with the apps and that this is the other side of it. But this is great because, you know, your friend can be like the greatest app that you ever had because they're going to, you know, adjust things as they go to specifically, you know, what it is that you need.

But yeah, that's kind of what I learned. It's a blindfold test. You know, we do it all the time with, you know, here on the podcast now, the blindfold test. It really does help you kind of retain that information. Yep. So finally for number seven, we have what I think is the most crucial part

of developing your ears and training your ears, if you really want to be able to hear harmony and melody, you have to focus on intervals, intervals, intervals. So I have it three times, intervals, intervals, intervals, and interval. When I was at the new school... But not four. It's not that important. Not that important. When I was at the new school,

I had a wonderful ear training teacher. I tested out of all of the stuff that was like the required courses, except for ear training, like, three, And I was pissed that I didn't test out of that. But I'm glad I didn't because I had this great teacher, Armandinilian, his wonderful jazz pianist. And he really helped see the importance of hearing intervals and understanding some of the traditional like Western harmony and how that helps, you know, your jazz playing and hearing the tune. It's a little controversial to talk about Western harmony. But you're talking about about 15 years ago, so we're okay.

Yeah. We're going back in time. Yeah, no. He would like, no, of understanding how cadences work and key changes work, and that understanding is the foundation of jazz too. I mean, it's a foundation of all Western music. Yep, absolutely. All right, good stuff. So we got just quick recap on our seven ways to improve your ears through ear training.

Number one, listen. Number two, sing. Number three, transcribe, as in learn solos. We always say transcribe. What we mean is learn by ear. Yeah, we don't mean right. We don't mean write it out. That's for nerds. No, do that too. That's good too. Okay, number four, learn tunes and work on your ear training away from your instrument with like easy pop tunes,

things that are accessible where you can start to get those roots going and stuff. Number five, apps. We have no recommendations, but we're welcoming them. Number six, find a friend, phone a friend, and have them quiz you. And number seven, intervals, intervals. Nice. Well, That was awesome. Yeah. All right, good. So I know we said we're going to do some of the ratings and reviews. Did you know that we are still an official five-star podcast?

Only five stars? Well, it's just a little controversial because I don't think we've only gotten five stars, to be honest with you. I remember a couple of ten and a half ones, I think. Well, we did get those. We got infinite one time, didn't we? Yeah, that just kind of screwed up the whole thing. No, but officially, as we know on Apple Podcasts, you can only put down five. But some people early on put down less than five.

But our average, for some reason, is at five still. And we didn't game that. Like, that's just what happened. That's great. Don't hate the player, hate the game. That's right. You know what I'm saying? That's terrific, though.

Thanks for everybody for leaving the ratings and reviews. We do read them. We love them. Appreciate them. You can also go to you'll hear.com. If you want to ask us a question or suggest a topic for a future episode, we're always down for that. Go to you'll hear it.com. You can leave a voicemail.

You can write out a question. You can just pop in and say, hi. You can also get one of our awesome You'll Hear at T-shirts. That's right. Yeah. Did yours? Oh, yeah. Yours did come, but you're not wearing it today.

Oh, yeah, my cassette shirt. The cassette shirt. The big George Michael. I mean, it's coming up on holiday time. So I just want to put a thing out for the listeners. If anybody wants to treat me to one, I'd be down with that. I know that sounds weird because I'm part of the thing. I don't have one.

We don't have any. So we had a couple days ago, we had a review, a rating and a review, five-star, rating and the subject is the description is great way to start the day exclamation point I'm a recent subscriber but listening every morning really sets my mind in a musical and creative direction for the day ahead that's nice I really enjoy how you guys convey a lot of experience and useful info on a universally relatable level if you could consider doing a pod on the different kinds of jazz

scenes around the state's world that'd be sweet keep up the great work and that's from Ultra KKR 6 from the USA. I love it. You know, tomorrow we have our solo analysis Wednesday, but maybe Thursday we can do that. That would be nice. Yeah, no, I like it. So, yeah, please continue to give us ratings and review seven stars, you know,

preferred, but whatever you're feeling, you know. We don't want to do a thing like, you know, like an Uber now. You know, do you rate your drivers after you do an Uber. I think it's just polite at this point. Did you know they're rating you as a passenger as well now? Are they really? They are. Yeah, so there's a little tip for tack going on.

I'm trying to be less. inebriated when I get on Well, this is the thing. We're asking for ratings reviews. We're not going to rate the listener, though. You guys are all seven stars in our mind. That's right. Cool.

Cool. Well, until tomorrow. You'll hear it.