The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
  1. #1

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    I think this is very true:

  2.  

    The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
     
  3. #2

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    There are three things presented in the video
    - vocabulary (chord names) represented by the boxes of his chart
    - theory (chord changes) represented by his chart's regions and paths through them
    - ear (not sure what he means) He says "you can hear complex stuff, but it makes no sense to you". He says this is because it's outside his current vocabulary and theory. He can't play complex stuff until it makes sense to him, only making sense after analysis, adding it to his vocabulary (naming it), and adding it to his theory (assigning the connecting paths).

    But he is clearly using his ear to determine or recognize if what he hears is within his sets of names and changes (whether it makes sense or not), and he is clearly using his ear to verify his analysis of what he has captured and can now play the complex thing he heard (that now it makes sense).

    We who play by ear are very aware that we do so, and underestimate the amount of any theory we might employ. Maybe Sean plays heavily by theory but is understating how much he plays by ear?

    Of course the music he is working with is not just complex. I have played with two church musicians that each had over 25 years of four service Sundays in their hands, majestic, mystical, and magical - they played sounds I had never imagined possible from a key board.

  4. #3
    To me, vocabulary isn't only the individual chords but common progressions and how they are usually voiced or voice-led within a style. For example V-I's, ii-V-I's, vi-ii-V-I's, iii-vi-ii-V-I's, their secondary dominant variations etc. also bluesy chord changes are all part pieces of vocabular that can be recognized by ear.

  5. #4

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    When we talk about "hearing" this stuff, we're talking about the cognitive processes involved with auditory comprehension rather than "hearing" as an acoustic response to vibrations in the air. The is important because we can't train our ears to hear differently or to hear more- we are really talking about training our brains to process, interpret and understand the information being captured. Hearing a major, minor or dominant chord as those entities is a cognitive process and probably relies on many of the same networks involved with hearing and understanding language forks to different processes. We can learn how to do that processing. Ear training courses leverage this.