You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Hear the Changes - #22

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

Today, Peter and Adam give some advice after a listener asks for a how-to on hearing the chord changes in a tune. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Peter. What's up? What's this chord quality? That's up. A flat, esoteric sharp 11, 9.30? That's right, actually. Ugh, got big ears, baby. I'm Adam Manus.

And I'm Peter Martin. And you are listening to the You'll Hear at podcast. Daily, Jazz Advice, coming at you. Coming at you from beautiful open studio headquarters here in Snowy St. Louis. It's Snowy everywhere. OS Life, what's up? But especially Snowy right here in St. Louis. I don't know what he was doing just there, but enjoy it.

That was OS Thug Life. OS Thug Life. Yeah. Jazz lesson, Thug Life. That's a real thing. Yep. What are we doing today? We are taking a listener question and we're going to turn it into 11 minutes of jazz entertainment.

Like magicians. Okay? All right. Just prepare yourselves for pure gold listeners. That's right. Yeah. So, no, this was a question, I think in YouTube maybe. We're getting little comments down on YouTube.

We're getting some nice engagement. We've got folks listening and watching. there. Yeah. Oh yeah, I know. I know all about it. Okay. I'm there all the time. Yeah. So this is from Riley and he says, hey guys, could you do a how-to on how to on finding the changes to tunes? I have decent ears and I can pick out melodies and baselines, but I can't get the changes. Thanks if you read this. Yeah. Yeah, we can do that. Okay, cool. And we did read it, so you're welcome. Yeah. So this is a good question. you know what they're asking is maybe like if you don't really know jazz theory and maybe a little bit more on the beginner side in terms of actually playing jazz you know how do you go about

getting the kind of more complex harmonies you know and I don't want to read too much into this but perhaps the the writer has been able to pick out things by ears maybe different styles maybe some pop tunes some things that were a little bit simpler harmonically but is having trouble with the changes, the chords with jazz. But I love the spirit of let's try to, you know, they're not asking like, what's a good book that's going to show me exactly what a C-7, sharp 11 and all that kind of stuff. That doesn't, I mean, it matters, but I love this kind of attitude about like picking out the melodies and the bass lines.

And that's the exact. You know, in the question is already the answer. Yeah. I have decent ears and I can pick out melodies and baseline. That's where it starts. And that is easier to hear the both sides, the bottom side and the top side. That's right. The inside is harder, but the fact that you're willing to try to do that is great because that's where the progress is going to come.

Yeah. And in fact, it helps, I think, to think about it from an outside in perspective to start from the big movements and go down to trying to hear little things. Because, you know, if you can hear the melody in the baseline, you can make some assumptions, right? Like, we know that a lot of jazz tunes end in a cadence of a 251 progression. So if you hear it, exactly. So if you hear a two as the baseline, you might make the assumption that it's possibly a Dorian sound, a minor seven sound, right?

And then if a five follow that, there's a good chance it's a dominant sound. And if it's the one of the key, there's a very good chance it's a major sound. Yeah. So I can hear a two five and not have to break down exactly what's in it to know that it's probably, you know, minor seven, dominant seven, major seven, right?

Because that's usually the pattern, unless it's in a minor key, which is easy to hear. And then from there, I think you could break it down to smaller movements. One place I like to start with my students on ear training is the four kinds of triads. Being able to hear the difference in major, minor,

and then augmented and diminished. Those four things can get you really far. Yeah, absolutely. And if you think about them, you know, as you're learning those four triads, also trying to hear the intervals, even if you're not consciously thinking about exactly what they are, but the differences,

because all those are made up of major thirds and minor thirds, different combinations. So major triad, of course, is a major third and a minor third. And you might think, well, it's the major third part because it's a major triad. But when you move that up to like an E minor triad, it's the same as the major, but the minor interval, the minor thirds on the bottom, the major thirds on the top. That's right.

And it starts to give you another way of hearing this kind of inside harmony. That's right. And, you know, Riley, you might start with that. Maybe you have this handle on this, It never hurts to do like a flash card situation where you have a friend play some chords and you try to guess major, minor, augmented, diminished. Because what you really want to do is not be listening, you know, you want to be able to do it without listening for every interval to just know the sound of augmented.

Like that's an augmented sound. Right. You know, I don't have to know exactly the intervals. I'm just hearing those two major thirds on top of each other as one thing. Yeah. And I think that if you get a little bit of the intervalic, I guess it's called, you know, the intervals at the same time as you're getting the chords. I mean, look, when we talk about chords, normally we're, and being able to identify them and hear the harmony, hear the changes as the question asks, we're talking about a minimum of three notes normally.

So, but the great thing, it's always made up of intervals. So if we get those two, that's going to help us as we're starting to identify melodic lines. You know, it's always the horizontal, the vertical versus the horizontal. Yeah. But also in terms of making combinations of, you know, for upper structure chords and the more complicated stuff can actually be simpler. if you think about them as, so you've got your augmented triad as you reference.

With the seventh, yeah. With the seventh. That's going to be kind of a complex chord, but if you think about augmented triad, two augmented triads, and you can hear that, it doesn't matter that that's a C-7, sharp 11, flat 13.

If you can just hear it as those, you know, that that's the beginning of it, really. You can learn the theory and stuff later. but to go back to Riley something that you talked about picking out the bass and the melody you can also let that be the guide like if your bass note is F

and your melody note is A natural probably a major chord right right if your bass note is D and your melody note is C sharp we know that that chord has a major 7 whatever it could be minor

major but that's easier those two things are easy to find once you know that I have a D and a C sharp. You know that no matter what it is, I just have to hear that third in the triad and then maybe any alterations. And that's a great point. So you've got D and C sharp, you know, and, you know, if you added one of these different chords every week to be able to hear it in like different keys and identify it in a month

or so you'd have all of them. But you could even do it in a few days if you want to push things long. But those kind of things. And I remember being like not able to hear the difference, but I would just try them. And then I would hear if it clash and then try something. else. And this is why it's great no matter what instruments you play. At least you can get a little bit of piano or guitar so that

you can actually play this harmony and demonstrate it kind of to yourself and train your own ears. Totally. But if you think about that major, so that's just a major seven. Major with a minor seven. And then you start to hear the difference and you play that and that's how you can then diminish.

Yeah, so that's your four basic triads added with that major seventh. And look at first it's going to be like you're not going to know what they are but but anyone even if you think you don't have good ears can tell if something sounds different that's right you know it's not like i mean if somebody's colorblind i guess you can't tell that what the different colors but you can see that they're different it you just can't identify them and so i think that a lot of times when people say i don't have good ears it's like you just haven't focused in on those those foundational things um yeah

some people are born with with better ears than others but it's a lot of work on it too i know like my father has incredible ears and you could play something and he could just sort of play back on several different instruments. But I also saw him work on that a lot. So he started with a nice talent on that but then he extended it and made it functional on different

instruments and then practiced it and became familiar with it in different styles and then all of a sudden you've got good ears. I love that idea of playing the differences with the one the melody note on top and the bass note. Same thing and doing those four different triads underneath to hear the difference and be able to recognize that. Another

way to work on this. I did this a lot, especially when I was younger, is to listen to music and try to guess what the chord quality is, even if you don't know the key, or maybe find the key on the piano at the start, and then you have a reference point. You know who's good to do this with is the Beatles, right? Because it's, especially for a beginner, the harmony doesn't get super complex, but they definitely use a lot of all four kinds, right? They use a lot of major, minor, diminished, and augmented. And they even use a lot of minor six and things like that for you to hear.

It's just challenging enough to really be useful, I agree. A little bit beyond your basic pop tune, but not quite on the level of like a Phineas Newborn album or something. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, but it's good because if you're going to get your ear training from Drake,

you're probably going to get two chords only, which is fine, nothing against Drake, but you're not going to get, yeah, if it's a minor, the chances of a minor six. And look, it's important. The minor six, minor, you know, Dorian, I mean, minor seven, when you get into the more advanced things, especially the sort of clusters, to be able to identify those basic little changes, you know,

differences. Absolutely. And then you can build on it. And look, and don't try to learn, you know, be able to hear all the changes within a week. It's not going to happen. Yeah, yeah. You can't rush it. But be systematic about it and make sure you're hitting.

Like, I realized I did the same thing, and a lot of people have done this, because the diminish is so hard to understand and to hear. I always kind of push that back when I was younger to really learning because I was scared of it. Yeah. And so to this day I've had, I mean, I'm finally getting to the point where I'm sort of confident all over diminished. But it's important, you know, and it goes along with our whole concept of practicing

of doing the hard stuff first. Now, don't push the hard stuff to the end because you actually need more time with the hard stuff. That's right. That's right. And as a reminder, patience with this is key. Yeah. This is a lifetime pursuit.

If you're going to be a musician for the rest of your life, you can work on this for the rest of your life. Not to put it off. Yeah. But you don't have to get it all in the first week. No. Just keep working at it for the rest of your life. That's right.

Until you die. And we won't go to you. Exactly. Exactly. Then you can stop, you know. One other area, and I'll just touch on a little bit, we can get into it another episode because it's its own world in terms of hearing changes. So like we've talked about sort of the chords, you know, the triads building up from that

and the intervals. Shell plus the root. So we're not even really necessarily thinking about the melody. But that would just be with your bass note and then trying to hear the third and the seventh no matter what kind of chord it is. So it's still three notes, but we got a little more separation. here we're not, you know. Yeah.

Again, all of them. So that's something else. We'll get into that in another episode. We'll call that one the shell game. The shell game. It's like a little three card money thing. That's right. Well, thank you, Riley. Thanks for leaving a question in YouTube. We haven't been getting a lot. I would know because I'm always

there. I literally spend the most of my day in YouTube just making sure that our comments are just trying to find the comments is what you spend most of your time doing. We're on point. Thank you, Riley. And to anybody else please leave your question in YouTube if you like you can go to also you can go to you'll hear it dot com you can leave a speak pipe voicemail

you can leave a question there you can buy a you'll hear it t-shirt gets some swag we just had I just actually got a phone call from someone I don't know how they got my personal number I have to change that but that purchased a cassette edition yesterday was very excited and awaiting

delivery on that cassette edition of the you'll hear a t-shirt I think this is only the second one and I have the first concession he was a little bit like you know, I don't know why it's called cassette because there was no cassette on it, but it would look cool anyway. So that's up for the wearer to judge. The cassette edition, for those of you, not in the know,

has just, it's in huge letters. It says, you'll hear it. Right. On the front. It looks great. Yeah. I think it looks fantastic. It just has nothing to do with the cassette, but it looks great.

Well, until tomorrow. You'll hear it.