The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #1

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    Ear training is essential for most musicians.
    How important is having a good ear to play jazz music?
    Does everyone approach this topic with respect?

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  3. #2

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    Maybe I should bombard you with strawmen, false dichotomies, and ad hominems since you brought up ear like you do with theory. :P

    Yeah no. I try to process what the music is doing when I'm listening, do some transcribing, and do some ear training exercises. I'd like to be better at fundamentals like naming chord type but that's kind of hard when you often can't hear the chords clearly in jazz recordings. Building the innate connection between the general structure in the music I hear, in my head or from others, and play is the priority.

  4. #3

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    And isn't it so that while training your hearing, you're learning theory at the same time?
    Or does ear training help you understand theories?

  5. #4

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    How important is having a good ear to play jazz music?
    It depends on what "good ear" is for you as opposed to "avarage/medium ear"?

    If "average ear" is to be a able to hear melodies, chord progressions, solo/melodic phrases, rhythmic phrases/ideas and play them back on your instrument, and a "good ear" is to be able to identify random 10 note clusters, then you could argue that medium ears are essential but good ears are a nice to have?

    But I guess most people might consider that definition of "medium ears" to be good or decent ears?

  6. #5

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    Quote Originally Posted by kris
    And isn't it so that while training your hearing, you're learning theory at the same time?
    Or does ear training help you understand theories?
    I think so. It focuses your understanding of theory to more the accurate application of the actual music.

  7. #6

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    Quote Originally Posted by orri
    It depends on what "good ear" is for you as opposed to "avarage/medium ear"?

    If "average ear" is to be a able to hear melodies, chord progressions, solo/melodic phrases, rhythmic phrases/ideas and play them back on your instrument, and a "good ear" is to be able to identify random 10 note clusters, then you could argue that medium ears are essential but good ears are a nice to have?

    But I guess most people might consider that definition of "medium ears" to be good or decent ears?
    Surely you have to agree that you have to train your ears all the time to be the best .
    Calling good or average is not important .... it can also be perfect.

  8. #7

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    Surely you have to agree that you have to train your ears all the time to be the best .
    There is quite difference between "to be the best" and "to play jazz music" (which is what was asked in the OP).

    I've met plenty of amateur musicians who went through some music education programme in their childhood and/or youth but during adulthood they play sheet music arrangements in big band once a week.
    They just stay in their comfort zone, but they also find fulfilment and meaning in this type of music making.
    This qualifies as "to play jazz music" to me but they are complacent and don't seem to have much ambition to get much better (they have other carriers and family etc), and in some cases they'll panic if they need to rely on their ears rather than their sheets.


    I think there might be a point where more time spent on ear training gives insignificant improvements to your playing.
    If you're able to identify 8 random equal tempered notes in a cluster, will you play better jazz if you can identify 9 random microtonal notes i cluster?

    There are perhaps other things to spend time on which might improve your playing more?

    But yes, I do surely agree that ear training is important for serious and ambitions musicians.

    My understanding is that many (or most?) professional musicians in the most advanced levels, routinely work on their intonation just to maintain their ability.

  9. #8

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    The most important thing is to hear anything and develop it skillfully... I don't mean complicated clusters.

  10. #9

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    A closely related rabbit trail: what does ear training entail? There are YouTube videos with titles like “Improve Your Ear in Two Minutes!” but I’ve never seen one that’s helpful.

    I bought Rick Beato’s Ear Training Course. It’s a slog. Maybe slogging is necessary for improvement. But it’s the only part of my practice that I’d call Definitely Not Fun!

    Tomo Fujita has an ear training course, built on solfège. That’s pointlessly complicated, IMHO. It’s enough to recognize a first inversion; I don’t see any advantage to calling it “mi so do.”

    So when we talk about ear training, what are we talking about?

  11. #10

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    Quote Originally Posted by StuartF
    A closely related rabbit trail: what does ear training entail? There are YouTube videos with titles like “Improve Your Ear in Two Minutes!” but I’ve never seen one that’s helpful.

    I bought Rick Beato’s Ear Training Course. It’s a slog. Maybe slogging is necessary for improvement. But it’s the only part of my practice that I’d call Definitely Not Fun!

    Tomo Fujita has an ear training course, built on solfège. That’s pointlessly complicated, IMHO. It’s enough to recognize a first inversion; I don’t see any advantage to calling it “mi so do.”

    So when we talk about ear training, what are we talking about?
    Excellent question.
    Since this is a jazz forum we are talking about ear training for jazz musicians.
    There are courses that force you to sing and that is very good.
    I had ear training at a music school, but there are very good computer programs for everyday work on musical hearing.
    EarMaster Pro 7---It is interesting software.and it has a lot of potential.

  12. #11

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    I work on a new tune every 2, 3 or 4 weeks. When I do, I learn the head/melody by ear. On top of that, I use a phone app called Functional Ear Trainer pretty much every day.

  13. #12

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    So, I went from straight major scale, to 123, 234, 345, 345 patterns, to thirds, to arpeggios. By the time I got to arpeggios I knew what sounded right and what was a mistake. I could tell the II III and VI should be minor and the VI diminished. For me ear training was a side effect of getting my technical skills together. Hearing the right notes over and over. Doing it in 12 keys made it abstract so I could hear intervals.

    Transcribing is easier now too. It's like there is a road map. I can hear something and know it's going down a fourth, but I don't use those labels in real time.

    As far as chords, I struggle. All with due time though.

  14. #13

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    Quote Originally Posted by CliffR
    I work on a new tune every 2, 3 or 4 weeks. When I do, I learn the head/melody by ear. On top of that, I use a phone app called Functional Ear Trainer pretty much every day.
    What tunes are you working on? There are easy ones you should be able to do in a week. C Jam Blues, Song for My Father, Chitlins Con Carne, Bags Groove....

  15. #14

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    Oh, yeah, I typically learn the head or melody within a week. Actually, much quicker now than when I started. (Although there's typically a couple of mistakes in my transcription, or poor rhythm, that my teacher Christian will correct for me.) But I work on the tune overall, comping, soloing etc, for 3-4 weeks, receiving feedback from Christian each week to improve things.

    At the moment I'm working on Yesterdays, particularly on getting phrasing close to that of Wes now that I've figured out the notes.

  16. #15

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    I hum random intervals when I walk the dogs. Like this... 1 6 5 7 1 b3 1 etc.

  17. #16

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    I'm doing online ear training right now and practicing chord quality. I chose to practice every type. Half the time all I hear is a clank of dissonance and I can't begin to try to classify it until I ask it to arpeggiate the chord.

  18. #17

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    Quote Originally Posted by StuartF
    Tomo Fujita has an ear training course, built on solfège. That’s pointlessly complicated, IMHO. It’s enough to recognize a first inversion; I don’t see any advantage to calling it “mi so do.”
    I've been doing plenty of solfege sight singing exercises using movable do. It's a method to practise singing directly from sheet music without an instrument.

    You'll start to associate the feeling and the sound of a scale degree with a syllable.
    Since it is movable Do, the note Do will always feel home. The note sol will always be the fifth and it has a certain stable (dominant?) sound/feel within the key, ti feels unstable like it wants to resolve up to Do. etc. Each note has a sound/feel that you'll start to associate with its syllable.

    I play with a bass player who studied classical singing in some music collage programme, and said they also learnt a hand sign for each of the note/syllables, to further reinforce the sound with a body movement (I googled it and found out it is called the Kodaly method).
    As a guitar player I do also feel that I have some sort of an association between the sound of a scale degree and it's finger position within a scale fingering shape.

    I don't know who Tomo Fujita is but I think in order for a solfege method to start to make sense you have to spend some time with it. I would guess that you should relatively fast starting to associate "Do" to the feeling of being home in the key, and gradually each of the other notes start to become more familiar.

    But this is just one method. You can develop the ability to recognise the sound of each scale degree using other methods.

  19. #18

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    An interesting topic for a player who has never gone through the kind of ear training that music students or choir singers get. Which is not to say that my ear is utterly untrained, since I suspect that seventy-odd years of attentive listening to music, whether or not while playing, must have had some benefit.

    Ear training implies both a systematic approach and a specific set of outcomes. In the context of choir singing, solfeggio would enable the performers to reliably sing what's on the page--there's a behavioral element. [On edit: I see that this has been addressed in a post while I was drafting this.] The ability to recognize scale tones, in- and out-of-tune, seems crucial for accurate string-family playing--another behavioral outcome.

    So what does this imply for the aspiring jazz player? If I don't have a chart for a tune and no one calls the key, I find it difficult to discover the key, even if I know the tune or recognize the harmonic form. I'm not sure whether that's something I could be trained to hear without sneakily plunking by sixth and fifth strings at what I recognize as the tonic. (Oddly enough, I can much more reliably identify the key of a country or folk tune--maybe because there are fewer likely candidates, and it's easier to read hands in folky jam circles.)

    Actually, I can imagine a simple protocol involving a keyboard or just my guitar--what does B-flat sound like? E-flat? And so on. This would be different from recognizing intervals or hearing chord qualities, though a keyboard would help with that as well.

  20. #19

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    Quote Originally Posted by CliffR
    Oh, yeah, I typically learn the head or melody within a week. Actually, much quicker now than when I started. (Although there's typically a couple of mistakes in my transcription, or poor rhythm, that my teacher Christian will correct for me.) But I work on the tune overall, comping, soloing etc, for 3-4 weeks, receiving feedback from Christian each week to improve things.

    At the moment I'm working on Yesterdays, particularly on getting phrasing close to that of Wes now that I've figured out the notes.
    Oh good, I didn't know you had a teacher, and a very knowledgeable one at that. Stick with it and you'll be giving me advice in no time.

  21. #20

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    I think functional ear training (eg moveable do solfege) is more useful than intervallic for tonal melodies.

    I think I got something out of it. Nothing beats working out music by ear though.

  22. #21

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    Quote Originally Posted by CliffR
    I work on a new tune every 2, 3 or 4 weeks. When I do, I learn the head/melody by ear. On top of that, I use a phone app called Functional Ear Trainer pretty much every day.
    Do you think the app helps or do you just get better at using the app?

  23. #22

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    I had ear training in university music school: identifying intervals, identifying chord qualities, combining that to identify extensions, and sight-singing. The end result ear-wise is to be able to identify chords as "colors" rather than having to hear each note individually and determine the chord by analysis. A non-musical analogy would be that you can identify an apple, a cherry, and a raspberry as "red" without having to think beyond that, or that the leaves on plants are "green" even though there is a difference between the color of a pine needle and a fern. Similarly, major, minor, aug, and dim chords are "tonal colors" that I don't have to think about. Eventually ma7, ma9, sus, dom9, dom13, and various altered doms also become "colors" that you recognize without logical analysis.

    The ability to identify intervals is the start; both harmonic intervals (both notes played concurrently) and melodic intervals (both notes played successively). You can then use those skills to hear melodies, sing melodies, and identify extensions to the basic chord sonorities of major, minor, aug and dim.

    We also learned common chord progressions and had to play them on piano in 12 keys: I IV V I, I IV V vi, I vi IV V I, I vi ii V I, iii vi ii V I, and variations that used secondary doms, TT subs, etc.

    And we learned to hear and play form. All of the above was combined in "musicianship" classes where we would hear a piece, analyze its form, transcribe sections of it, talk about the performance, and even discuss simple things like how to take a bow*...

    I did a lot of learning things by ear before I took any classes, which helped to speed initial progress: I could already do a certain amount of pitch identification and chord-quality identification when I started harmony classes, so those first steps were a matter of learning names for things I already knew. Someone once said to me "Eventually, you use everything you have." And that is true of music: there's no "one way" or "best way" to do anything musical. Just find the ways that work for you and hone them. Eventually, you'll start putting things together in other meaningful ways.

    If your community college offers music classes, I would recommend that over YouTube simply because being shown things in a unified way is so much more effective; it's the difference between having someone show you how pieces of a puzzle fit together vs just dumping a jigsaw puzzle onto the tabletop and saying "everything you need to know is here." There are great teachers lurking in community colleges, and the classes are free or relatively cheap.

    That was my path, (by ear on my own => CC music => 4-year university music) and it worked well for me.

    HTH

    SJ

    * Edit: It was a very traditional pedagogy presented by a symphonic conductor. There is protocol for entering/exiting stage and taking a bow in an orchestral performance. Not so much for jazz :-)
    Last edited by starjasmine; 03-24-2023 at 09:49 PM.

  24. #23

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    If I could do it all over the beginning, I would include intensive formal ear training.

    That said, at this point, I notice some things which lead my thinking in a certain direction.

    If I hear a melody and it doesn't jump around too much, I can usually play it without error. Anywhere on the neck, any key.

    But, if you ask me to name the notes, I have to think about my fingers. I'm much more likely to make errors on naming than playing.

    Chords are something else entirely. Playing the chords to a tune I recognize but haven't played before is much harder.

    So, I work with Irealpro in multiple keys to try to improve my abiity to hear chord changes. I have worked on interval recognition before, but it seems to me that I need to spend the bulk of my time working on recognizing chord changes.

    Anyway, the point is to assess what you're weak at and design a focused remedial program.

  25. #24

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    As you will see below, my view of this is waaay different than the consensus so far (10 to 1 against!). However, boldly forward...

    "Best" is easy; it is your life's history of already having attentively listened to all the music you have ever heard... if that does not describe how you did it, you missed out on the best way and might not expect too much from external "learning how to hear music" methods. Another way of saying this is that "ear training" is not a separable thing; if it isn't a continuous thing with you (always ear training when practicing, playing, performing, or in the presence of any music) you haven't found the inner process, still distracted by external names, numbers, or symbols.

    "Ear" is an internal process of recognition of musical pitch, scale, scale degree, chord type (tones, extensions, alterations), progression change, form, etc.; it is not the identification of those things' names, numbers, or symbols.

    "Training" with software may not help with recognizing the sounds from real instruments, and using slow-down applications may be teaching your ear to hear more slowly - hearing slow and playing faster than you can hear, by definition, lacks the most important musical ability: quality control. You want to hear fast, always faster than you can play.

    Unattributed quotes I consider in the "ear" domain (2):

    - able to hear melodies, chord progressions, solo/melodic phrases, rhythmic phrases/ideas and play them back on your instrument
    - Nothing beats working out music by ear though

    Unattributed quotes I don't consider in the "ear" domain(22):

    - Ear training is essential for most musicians
    - ear training is important for serious and ambitions musicians
    - and do some ear training exercises
    - naming chord type
    - while training your hearing, you're learning theory at the same time
    - ear training help you understand theories
    - focuses your understanding of theory
    - you have to train your ears all the time to be the best
    - they'll panic if they need to rely on their ears rather than their sheets
    - I think there might be a point where more time spent on ear training gives insignificant improvements to your playing
    - My understanding is that many (or most?) professional musicians in the most advanced levels, routinely work on their intonation just to maintain their ability
    - Half the time all I hear is a clank of dissonance and I can't begin to try to classify it
    - If I don't have a chart for a tune and no one calls the key, I find it difficult to discover the key, even if I know the tune or recognize the harmonic form
    - I typically learn the head or melody within a week
    - I think functional ear training (eg moveable do solfege) is more useful than intervallic for tonal melodies
    - identifying intervals, identifying chord qualities, combining that to identify extensions
    - identify chords as "colors" rather than having to hear each note
    - pitch identification and chord-quality identification
    - learning names for things
    - intensive formal ear training.
    - name the notes
    - multiple keys to try to improve my abiity to hear chord changes
    Last edited by pauln; 03-25-2023 at 02:04 AM.

  26. #25

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    It is enough to spend 30 minutes a day on hearing exercises. But it must be done systematically.
    This is the guarantee of making progress.