Holy ****, my (musical) ears are bad

[RJVB]

He said “No.” and explained that you can’t be using your ears and applying concepts such as intervals/scales at the same time. Just play by ear…

And yet I think that's exactly what you're doing when playing from a chord sheet or (from a more familiar, early music universe) playing a figured bass. Some players really have an enormous mental capacity for such things. I'll never forget those lessons I once took with someone who took his violin like a tiny guitar and started plucking chords from the figured bass PLUS my part all while explaining what he was doing and why. Me I can't even continue playing when I have to answer a simple question, unless maybe something that's really gone into my fingers ...

[Ukena]

[...] Hmmm, so what about those (rock, blues, presumably jazz too) guitarists who seem to be able to recognise even complex chords from hearing them?

I can recognize many complex chords by ear, having learned and played much of the GASB by ear. But I am not very good at recognizing intervals, especially those greater than a fifth. Also, if I am playing a head with which I'm familiar but haven't yet played on the guitar (or playing it in a different key), I'm not yet often able to find, say, where a sixth down is from the note I'm on.

But I'm working on it...

[Christian Miller]

In my experience we tend to recognise by ear what we play. So play/listen and it’s a virtuous circle (at least for guitar stuff.)


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[jackalGreen]

Hmmm, so what about those (rock, blues, presumably jazz too) guitarists who seem to be able to recognise even complex chords from hearing them?

Well, I'm not so sure that even the heaviest of jazz guitar players and composers really "recognise" every tone in a chord. At least that I ever played with.

They've just got a lot of experience and so, in some way, there's a superimposition of their known patterns over what's being played, together with enough ear to fix the wrong notes.

As an example, I had a pretty steady job for a while with a jazz guitarist who was coming from lots of heavy dues paid in rock/prog rock kind of things.

He had like eight CDs out at the time and played all the time around town...like five nights a week, even though he had a day job that started at o-dark-thirty. MF just loved to play!

But he had his own book of tunes, and they were all originals. He could and would play standards or whatever was needed, though. 99% of the gigs he had were "his" so he kind of dictated the terms, except we got to be regular collaborators and he let me do my little Real Book standards things and all that....it was just a duo most of the time, cause our drummer was in demand and in about eleven different bands at the time.

Did he *know* tin-pan alley standards or jazz standards? No. But he could comp and solo over them after about one chorus of looking over my shoulder or maybe I'd write some chords on a bar paper napkin. He just had fantastic ears. He'd follow me...I'd follow him...I don't remember any single time over that period when there was a clam or a real clash of harmonies.

Basically, just playing to the audience, but mostly playing for ourselves, which happily turned out to be much the same thing.

So, he only knew, really, his own tunes and could look at my LH and see whatever standard tune I started up, whatever basic key it was in, and, of course, he knew just blues in whatever style, with all the variations in turnarounds and all that.

On a lark one day, I actually wrote out some lead sheets to his compositions, off his albums. It was crazy stuff, like 11/16 time, and just impossible stuff to write out. Took me a long time, and I think I only did about three or four tunes of his, which I gave him my copies of.

No, he wasn't fussed. I think the only jazz standard he knew was "Joy Spring," which he said took him a long time to figure out on guitar, but, he could still play.

Personally, I'd recommend just playing along with recordings, when one isn't live and in stereo on the stage....probably something of a lost "art" with technology coming along and backing tracks getting so sophisticated.

That said, if you really want to learn to sight sing (fretless instrument!)...I'd just work through the Edlund books. That's more an abstract goal than becoming a better player or performer, IMHO.