You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - The Basics of Ear Training

Episode Date: December 2, 2020

It's another live edition of You'll Hear It where Peter and Adam take your questions. On this episode, Peter and Adam discuss their approach to ear training, how to hear inner voicings, and a very bluesy question.Interested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Wednesday's Open Studio Live Events:1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)6:00 PM - Edu Ribeiro + Dafnis Prieto | Drum Conversations + Q&A on YouTubeFor the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Exactly. Some folks are making requests for a certain gentleman. I don't know if he's allowed out. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? I don't even want to. Is that his name? He goes by many names. What, what?

It's a little tribute to our good friend, Byron. Byron lovely, a former fan of the show. I say former because there's no way he listens to this anymore. He's out of Milwaukee, right? Milly Wauke. I like those little changes you were playing that. Oh, you're just messer. Just messer.

So this is a good, we were. just messing around, but highly recommend, I mean, if you've got a pod suite and a friend, even better, but finding some type of situation where you can just challenge your, whoa, okay. Okay. I think it's got to be okay. Okay, I'm going to fix that as I. So where we can challenge ourselves to hear something that we don't know what's happening without thinking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. So you have to, a lot of times people spend more time talking about, I don't have good ears or I can't play something by ear. Then saying, you know what, let me try to play something by ear. It's like saying, I'm a bad cook. I can only cook with recipes. Really, if that's all you've ever done, until you've tried to cook without a recipe,

just to make something up and failed, utterly failed. And then tried it again and utterly failed. And then tried it 10 more times and then maybe slightly less failed. All of a sudden, you can contradict your original supposition about yourself. So this is how you develop your ears. You have to put yourself on the ledge. You have to go out on the diving board or you're not going to be able to jump into the deep end. That's right.

Mike is actually asking how did you guys approach ear training? Well, Mike, that's an ongoing thing. And actually here at Open Studio at the Daily Guy of Practice session, we've been doing, I think they can just see the cordy now. Oh, okay. We've been doing this ear training. Micah, and we could do a little bit of it right now. It's so, so useful, and it's a technique that I learned in my ear training class by the great Armand-Dinelian, what I was at the school. Who? Spell, spell that name,

buddy. Armine like Armenia. Danilian like Danilian. Like a chameleon. Like a chameleon. Now, he's a great pianist and a great teacher, and, you know, we can do a little bit of this, but it helps to have a friend that can help you do this. It's super easy. And we could... I've got a friend. That's right. That's right. That's right. So we'll kind of go off what we were just doing So Micah and we can And just, I would like just to say now If you're near a piano Sit on your hands

Do not hunt and pack these chords out Or try to figure out the root or anything Use your ears, use your mind That's what this is all about So if I give you this and say This is an A flat major seven, right? I want you to tell me, see Well no, I'm going to tell you this one

This is our starting point I'm just going to give you one other chord After this and you have to tell me what it is, okay? A flat major seven. What's this? Two more times. A flat major seven? Can you hear the bass note and can you hear the quality of the chord?

In other words, is it major, is it a major seven? Is it a major seven? Is it a minor seven? Is it a minor seven? Is it a minor seven? And one more time. Right? Peter, what do you got? Well, that would be an A flat major to an E flat major. That's right.

A flat major seven to an E flat major seven. Let's do two chords off of it. Can we just kind of just point out one thing? Yeah, please do. Everyone can have a different reference point. It doesn't matter. But eventually you just kind of know it by instinct. But you can make a connection like, I was thinking like.

Linking up those dots. Right. Certainly helps. Play a little connect the dots. Like music is harmony, the way it moves, the way chords move is never static. There's always a progression of things. The way Armin used to teach this is via cadences. Right.

So if you learn musical cadences, you can hear it as all. whole, right, as like a whole thing, which we'll kind of work on here. So again, let's do two chords after this, right? A flat major seven. Yeah. And then we can do, okay? So again, we'll do an A flat major seven, and then we'll do two chords after it. What are they?

Peter's already got everything on the first. Am I allowed to do this? Is this helping or hurting? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Again, A flat major seven. Let's do one more. What is this?

And then what is this? got it you got it so the answer to that is bonus a flat major 7 right a little a flat over b flat yeah right or uh b flat 11 suss or whatever you want and then an e flat minor 7 you know minor third minor 7 now i don't know if professor armand armen armen sorry uh taught it this way but now are you thinking before you get to the point like like what are the steps to get to where you

just hear it and you recognize it because you've heard it so many times, like probably you or I and a lot of people. Or like the intermediate steps, how much do we want to sort of intellectualize like major, minor, augmented, diminished, root movement? Like, what are the steps to get there? I always tell people I've had more like success thinking about it in blocks, just thinking about the texture of the, right? I don't know how you feel about that.

I like that. I'm not thinking about individual notes on this. Right. I just know this from every single Suss chord reference I've ever. ever heard, you know what I mean? So you are listening to the quality like as a static point like what that chord is.

Yeah. But there's also the process of like where you're coming from so that you know at least what type, not only what type of chord but what the actual chord is. Yeah, so I'm also defining the Roman numeral thing here. So if I hear this, if I would hear this, right, if I would hear

right, I'm going to hear this as the one. Yeah. Right. So when you do this again four, five and I'll hear that 13. now and then one. And then again, too, if you could learn some basic piano voicing, this goes a long way. Because even if you're not listening to a piano, if you know some basic structures of voicings, whenever an orchestra plays this chord, you know, oh, that's that six, nine voicing, right? You know, or you know, oh, that's that major seven voicing with the fifth on top.

It's like you start to recognize the feel of voicings themselves. Yes. Yep, yep, yep. and then there's the now if you either pay attention or even learn a little bit of bass on the piano or on an actual electric bass or acoustic bass or whatever or just really start to kind of key into

the melodic movement and how it informs the actual harmonic form of a progression like this or a cadence that can really help and that's really just about being able to hear stuff from around here and lower so you heard him do the oh actually I think you did

you had the fifth on top. Yeah. And then, so you can get the qualities of the course, but if you can hear that whole step as an interval, wherever it's going, and then, you know, minor third, that kind of thing, that's going to, you're going to be able to start to kind of process by elimination. If you know that that's a whole step,

now, as far as a cadence, where can we go? Whereas, like, you almost are guessing where all the different parts, that's what I was thinking of you were doing. You're going to hear that, but what if it goes? to like oh we went oh yeah you know you have to understand those false cadences too right sure but yeah so that would be all the different B major 7 D flat major 7 yeah oh G flat major 7 yeah and then what about this oh oh I know your own cadences yeah so like you're you're starting to to practice ear training

think about, try to hear all the different possibilities if you don't have somebody there to test you and then to play it and see if what you were hearing and you can sing it if you're not sure that you're really hearing it and then play it to make sure that it matches. Picketstone, Alex, are you saying that Armin has a book? I didn't even know Armin had an ear training book. Armand Hammer has a book about baking soda.

Are you familiar with that one? I did not know. Armand Hammer and philanthropy. If Armin has an ear training book, you should all get it because he's one of the best teachers I've ever had. And he's a great player too. Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, there you go. Training the ear, volume one. Get it. Now, let's just us talk about how to train here, and then you relay stories from him as opposed to us referencing the book. Maybe we'll throw that in our recommended.

We have to check it out. Also, I... Maybe someone will get it for us. By the way, I don't know, I haven't told you this, but I have on deck. I'm going to be recording my own open studio five-minute ear training course

here coming up in December. Really? because I just called Armin to see if he would We're going to do the same thing. Damn it. Giving it away. Rob asks, what's up, Rob, from just down the street here,

hey guys, for a horn player, also known as a horn player. No, here in St. Louis, that's known as a horn player. Harn player. Well, it depends on how far south you are. For horn player learning jazz piano. Dance.

Any tips for how to figure out. inner voicings. I can only hear out of voices, top line of bass, but how do you get started on transcribing voicing? So, you know, actually what we were just working on, that kind of ear training, I think, will help a lot. But always there's the, you know, the, any kind of four-part corral, hymnals, Methodist hymnals, Presbyterian, Bach four-part. You know, if you play three on piano, I know you're saying horn, but you're learning jazz piano. So that's going to start to acclimate your ears to hearing on the inside. Then you need to take it to kind of two jazz harmonies.

So I think if we think about things, let's see if we get this going, but not that. If we think about, no, yeah, exactly. Okay, some basic shell plus one or what is that root shell pretty? What do we call that? Yeah, root shell pretty, man. That's our jam. So we got F713. So if you think about the melody that maybe you're feeling like you can hear better like that.

And then that's at the bottom. In the middle is the shell. You want to be able to sing those. And then to the place you're going. You know, just be able to hear something before you play. You know, all the things you are is good for this because that can kind of back you into a nice four-part, you know, kind of sloppy Joe Jones

So that's a good way to start hearing it And then you know as far as transcribing voicing That's always tricky because there's no guarantee it's going to be four That's really just trial and error And then also learning different pianists Like you know So like being able to hear Okay he leaves that that that fourth voicing

Is he going to three notes or is he going to four You got to kind of try it stop it try it stop it And the great thing about that is as you're doing all that You're really training your ear So I think about all the hours, the 100,000, the 10,000 hours I spent transcribing, you know, McCoy Tyner, Witt and Kelly, Artino, all these people. It wasn't so much the licks that I got. It was just like the information, the ear training, you know, that ear training, that process of going through it that really, really helped. We got a question from Philly 23.

What's up, Philly? I don't see. It says, happy holidays, piano jazz dudes. Can we play on the 2-5 of the 4 chord of the blues? That, for example, you were playing an F to go outside. So if you're talking about like, if you're an F, so just doing a 2-5, it doesn't really take you outside. I don't know that is really outside of the harmony.

You could do a tritone substitution and a 2-5 to that, you know, like an F-sharp minor 7 to a B-7. So if you're on F, you could do that, right? Just like a F-sharp, minor, 7, B-7 into your B-flats. So like a tritone sub of what he's talking about, the 2-5 of the 4. I think so. I think that's Philly 23 maybe clarify. Is that we talking about?

Yeah, because if you're going straight, that's just that. Right. Yeah, there's nothing too far out for that. Yeah. Yeah, I like that one. I'll even sometimes go. So now we're going to go from the 1 to the 4. Was that from the half step below?

Half step below. Yeah, that's a good one. legal. No, no. So let's redo that because that's really good. So you're going like a little E minor 7 A7. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. I want to do it again. I'm going to see if I can do it here. I think I've overdone it.

That's cool. You might recognize the from. Oh, that's where I've heard that before. Yeah, and this is a little thing I well, Peter Bernstein described it as he heard me do it on another tune something similar to that. He's like, man, he's like, that's a great little compositional thing.

He said, you take in a simple bluesy melody and put some fancy chords underneath it. But it was such a, I was like, yeah, but I mean, it's a really good compositional tool to use when you're juxtaposing one thing that's unusual with one thing that's super traditional and somehow it kind of meets in the middle. There's a lot of different examples of this. We talk about, you know, in like two horn riding, big man ride, all different ways to approach this. but basically, you know, the melody. And then, whoa. And then hit him back with a little bit of, you know, straight blues. Not that there's anything wrong with you staying in the straight blues, but, you know.

Hey, man, some of these notes don't work down here. The Rhodes notes don't sound good on the 88 keys. No, they don't even work. It goes on to the E. Don't even worry about it. Don't even worry about it. Not even necessary. That's how we're.

realistic these sounds are. Exactly. Would it kill them to go just a couple more? I know, I know.