Approaches to Improvisation

[James W]

Tend to think brain learning vs. ear learning is a false dichotomy.

But anyway for jazz musicians lots and lots of ear, brain and physical technique learning is required as a prerequisite of the end goal of forgetting all of that and just playing. I say 'forgetting' but what I mean is trusting that what you've practised has become second nature, rather than something that has to be consciously thought, which is like having to look over your shoulder.

[Christian Miller]

I think this is a bit silly, no one plays guitar completely by ear. When we start off, we learn the note names of the guitar strings, the names of chords, etc., etc. And even if you don't name the notes you play, you label them in some way, associate them with fretboard positions or patterns.

Who's the royal 'we'? You learned that way.

Most of today's players went to music school and know the theory syllabus they teach there. But to say this is necessary to play the music because that's what everyone has done is a circular argument, and there are counter examples.

The history has many examples of musically unlettered players and those who didn't know any formal theory as well as those that did. There are examples today this way in fact. Take the Manouche tradition, which constantly turns out beast players, of whom Birelli is merely the best known. Or someone like Andreas Varady. Or George Benson who is apparently very sketchy on being able to name chords even. These people are super talented, but there are less well known players who play music in a similar way. Just go and hang out in Samois, for example.

At some point Billy Stratitis will deny the existence of players like this, maybe say they are lying for some reason or other, but they are out there, tearing it up. He just hasn't met them yet.

The conclusion I have come to is no that 'theory bad' but rather that the true engine of musicianship lies somewhere else.

I mean aren't people at least curious about this stuff? And yet when I bring it up I get a lot of pushback. I guess the psychology is easy to understand!

Would you expect a classical guitarist to learn every classical piece in his repertoire by ear? Jazz can be just as complex harmonically.

This is a bit of a poor comparison because it's a tradition based (at least now) on written scores, which was not the case for jazz historically. Classical guitarists are mostly about interpreting other people's music (although many do compose and make transcriptions tbf). I don't think a good knowledge of common practice harmony is by any means universal in that world from my experience, or necessary, though some find it useful. My experience is that most roll their eyes at Bach chorale harmony etc. But they do get ear training and solfeggio and so on at school.

But if you go back to people who were adept at improvising like Giuliani, you'll find that he trained in the Italian school that I referenced above. So more 'schooled' but still primarily aural. The musicians of that era had excellent dictation skills etc.

I started out playing by ear, had no problem doing that with folk and blues music without instruction, but jazz was a different animal, I had trouble making sense of the chord progressions I was hearing, and learning theory helped me do that. It didn't make a huge difference to my single string playing because I could manage that pretty well by ear, but it greatly helped my chord accompaniment and chord melody playing.

This may have to do with the kind of jazz you started off learning which I suspect was the proggy stuff? While I think the idea that jazz is a different animal to folk and blues is a bit of false dichotomy, there's some jazz I think needs a theoretical understanding - and I think it starts around Coltrane's era with the Coltrane cycle and so on.

If you start OTOH with something like trad jazz or swing, you have much more of a chance. I'd been playing modern stuff already but playing that music was a real apprenticeship and taught me a tremendous amount. I learned hundreds of songs on the bandstand effectively, which of course was good for my ears, but also gave me more of an insight into the process (as well as introducing me to many ear based musicians!). Obviously it's not so helpful with Wayne Shorter or Trane tunes - but your bread and butter work as a jazz guitarist even now is not playing Coltrane tunes. It's playing GASB standards, which are largely based on the same harmonic language as pre war jazz. And that's true of bop for that matter (I still meet people who know Donna Lee but don't know Indiana or that it's based on those chords.)

I mean we can all hear 1-3-4-#4-5 right? Whether or not we call it that, or 'the Horse', a 'Dixie turnaround', an 'Ascending blues ending' or a '4'n'back' or whatever.

And that can totally be done by ear, because generations of players did exactly that. And actually the process for doing that is really well understood. Tristano systematised it from the practice of what players in his community already did. Of course he taught theory stuff as well, but he centred the aural learning in his teaching, and this has been a big influence on other educators. And it works.

[pamosmusic]

Tend to think brain learning vs. ear learning is a false dichotomy.

But anyway for jazz musicians lots and lots of ear, brain and physical technique learning is required as a prerequisite of the end goal of forgetting all of that and just playing. I say 'forgetting' but what I mean is trusting that what you've practised has become second nature, rather than something that has to be consciously thought, which is like having to look over your shoulder.

This is kind of obviously true and I doubt Christian would disagree.

I think people who really have no practical interest in or use for theory are pretty rare because ears that strong are pretty rare. But they do exist. Christian is citing a lot of folks, but speculation aside, Mark Kleinhaut describes himself this way.

As for Christians argument or interest in this being philosophical rather than practical, but I think it’s pretty practical actually.

I’m very much a brain person and tend to learn and teach that way, but knowing that this isn’t really the way people learned jazz for most of its history and knowing that there are people who mastered the music on this sort of totally separate path really does kind of suggest a hierarchy of importance.

I have a particular learning style, but I’m pretty well served by stepping back and learning by ear. At the end of the day I’m putting stuff in boxes with labels that make sense to me, and those labels are pretty traditional, but any time I spend without the labels generally leaves me feeling a little looser.

This stuff becomes unproductive when it becomes dogmatic on either end. There are folks out here who think theory is a barrier and roll their eyes and use scare quotes when they describe “harmony” and I’m generally pretty underwhelmed by those folks playing.

There are also folks out here absolutely insist that deep down everyone learns the way they do and describes the music in some analogue for the same terms they use, and those folks are often the ones who argue when someone says you can use natural 7s over dominant chords (transcribed Grant doing that yesterday btw).

My mom is a translator and it’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that words map easily onto the language you’re used to using. Casa=house, hola=hello. But that’s not how it works and it can throw you for a loop when you come across a word that there is truly no translation for in the language you use. You realize several million (or billion) people out there are actually not seeing and describing the world the way you are and understand on quite different terms in some cases.

[Tal_175]

These conversations often drift into the realm of vibes and philosophy, where terminology becomes a fixation. People can get overly hung up on the "names" of things. Sure, there are those urban legends about jazz masters who supposedly don’t know what C major is, but that’s not reflective of the real world of music education, let alone jazz education. Personally, I don’t care much about what a concept is called, but names have a utility. Also most serious students don’t want to be left in the dark when it comes to common musical parlance.

As for Christian’s views, I genuinely have no clear sense of his teaching philosophy. He has videos recommend exercises like sequencing phrases through the melodic minor scale, yet he also seems to dismiss guide tones as overly theoretical. Maybe he has a coherent framework where these ideas coexist, or maybe he’s experimenting with alternative approaches to pedagogy by challenging conventional wisdom. I’m not sure. That’s why I try to introduce concrete pedagogical examples into the conversation, but more often than not, it leads to a dead end.

[James W]

Wondering if you could flesh out what you mean by hierarchy of importance, Peter?

Because I'm of the mindset that if you can play, you can play and it sort of doesn't matter how you got there.

It's an interesting question. Among highly accomplished jazz musicians do people think they could identify qualitative differences between unlettered players and more schooled players?

There is also the danger of ascribing a person's exceptional abilities to something they didn't do - I have encountered the notion that the fact that Allan Holdsworth didn't read music contributed to how original his music is, for example. I think it's deeply wrong to think that. I think the more literate you are and the more theory you know, these can only be good things.

[pamosmusic]

I think if you’re talking about pedagogy here, there needs to be some recognition that people learn in different ways.

Good teachers probably do have concepts that you might regard as overly vague or philosophical. Having more rigid programs can be pretty counterproductive actually. If you’re too hung up on the technical pedagogy you forget about the student sitting in front of you sometimes.

As for the ear stuff —

I give students super concrete things to work on. I also make them transcribe pretty early and we work on things that don’t really fit into the frameworks we’re working on yet.

[pamosmusic]

Wondering if you could flesh out what you mean by hierarchy of importance, Peter?

Because I'm of the mindset that if you can play, you can play and it sort of doesn't matter how you got there.

It's an interesting question. Among highly accomplished jazz musicians do people think they could identify qualitative differences between unlettered players and more schooled players?

There is also the danger of ascribing a person's exceptional abilities to something they didn't do - I have encountered the notion that the fact that Allan Holdsworth didn't read music contributed to how original his music is, for example. I think it's deeply wrong to think that. I think the more literate you are and the more theory you know, these can only be good things.

Ear and no theory can make good music. Theory and no ear? Not so much.

Pretty much everyone is working with a combination of the two, but one has to be a little bit primary. Theory to train the ear is good. Theory as a substitute for the ear is not so good. A lot of the time we go a bit far and end up in that latter area.

[Christian Miller]

These conversations often drift into the realm of vibes and philosophy, where terminology becomes a fixation.

Absolutely not. It's a practical consideration for me. What do I emphasise as a music teacher? How do I teach (not just the what)?

As for Christian’s views, I genuinely have no clear sense of his teaching philosophy. He has videos recommend exercises like sequencing phrases through the melodic minor scale, yet he also seems to dismiss guide tones as overly theoretical. Maybe he has a coherent framework where these ideas coexist, or maybe he’s experimenting with alternative approaches to pedagogy by challenging conventional wisdom. I’m not sure. That’s why I try to introduce concrete pedagogical examples into the conversation—but more often than not, it leads to a dead end.

Yeah re the videos - people like that stuff and want tabs and pdf's and so on and I have gone with it. Some stuff I do think has to be taught that way, especially stuff that's technically hard, but in a lot of cases people would be better off trying to learn the stuff in my videos by ear. I mean you can slow it down and see my fingers, seriously, lol.

Really people should be doing that work themselves. The reason we are where we are is because that is really not a good business model. Cor bless Patrick Bartley.

In any case if you read carefully what I have said above, you might notice there is no contradiction. I don't think theory kills the ear or anything like that. I do think people fixate on the theory. People on this forum certainly do.

My philosophy is I want people to sound better. Almost as a rule it involves people connecting their ears to the process. For a lot of people I think this is deeply intimidating because they've spent their musical lives being told where to put their fingers. So what you realise, is that it boils down to people becoming actual musicians. That's a big deal. I don't want to sound patronising - it's more that the skills pretty much every guitarist developed in say, the 1960s, are no longer developed because people don't need to puzzle things out (however imperfectly) from LP's. There's a YouTube of some friendly guy telling you how to play Purple Haze with the exact correct fingerings just a search away.

In lessons I tend to play or sing ideas and get people to play them in different places and through changes, and encourage them to learn tunes and heads by ear. Later solos. I tend to find that most of the students I have are not confident at doing this, so increasingly my work goes towards teaching them to do that in a step by step way.

What I've realised is I don't tend to teach my beginner kids that way, and that bothers me. I need to revise my approach because all the problems I see with my child students are based on me being overly score based and there's issues with the order of the information as presented in the teaching resources I use. I'm planning to make some changes to the first few months of my teaching new students. I'd say my group teaching is in advance of my one on one at this stage.

There's no difference between the two, BTW. It's all the same thing, the only difference is the material.

[Christian Miller]

Well, early on it seemed like you were disagreeing with using a conceptual construct like guide tones as a tool for training ears for harmony in your response to my post. Did I imagine that? Do you consider that fixation on the theory?

I don't really consider the 'guide tones stuff' kind of stuff fixation on theory. It's an example of schemata theory, in fact. Which I'm kind of obsessed with it.

Fixation on theory to me is more in things like discussions about Wes Montgomery outlining a B triad on a G7 for instance. My tendency is to think 'Wes did it, and it sounds cool' and then practice it on some chords, rather than going into some sort of justification.

But I'm wondering how important that type of schema categorisation is, and how it should be used in my teaching practice.

But at the same time I think - is there another way of going about this? Is me writing an 11 page pdf handout for my next video on common harmonic modules in jazz standards in fact trying to solve a problem for which the traditional solution was - 'learn more tunes'.

I mean the info in that pdf is the product of me learning a few hundred jazz standards, so clearly the old fashioned way works right? I'm looking at the Jerry Coker Hearin' the Changes book now, and I'm thinking 'what use is a list of 20 standards that start on the III of the scale?'. I genuinely have no idea. Maybe it's good?

Maybe learning more tunes is better? You get gigs for that.

Maybe the most important thing is tell students that the GASB standards repeat a lot of patterns and ideas and that I want them to tell me what they notice playing through the repertoire. But honestly, I don't think most people know enough tunes to do that.

Does learning lots of tunes also necessarily lead to that kind of schematic categorisation? Seems likely. We are pattern seeking animals. Also having names for some of these modules can help with quickly communicating the changes of a song to bandmates. So, "Honeysuckle Bridge in F", rather than laboriously saying "then it's F7, then it's Bb, then it's G7...." But I don't think people think of that as theory. Jimmy Bruno doesn't.

[GuyBoden]

Jazz is an event driven language, an iterative process that involves feedback and repetition. Object orientated not procedural.

You need a vast repository of event driven language prior to runtime execution. Continuous integration.

[Mick-7]

Who's the royal 'we'? You learned that way .... the history has many examples of musically unlettered players and those who didn't know any formal theory as well as those that did. There are examples today this way in fact. Take the Manouche tradition, which constantly turns out beast players, of whom Birelli is merely the best known. Or someone like Andreas Varady. Or George Benson who is apparently very sketchy on being able to name chords even. These people are super talented, but there are less well known players who play music in a similar way. Just go and hang out in Samois, for example.

I wasn't talking about formal theory, just very basic musical knowledge, the names of chords, etc. I have a hard time believing there are professional jazz musicians under 90 years old who don't have such rudimentary knowledge. And the people who started playing an instrument at a very early age are an exception.

This may have to do with the kind of jazz you started off learning which I suspect was the proggy stuff? While I think the idea that jazz is a different animal to folk and blues is a bit of false dichotomy, there's some jazz I think needs a theoretical understanding - and I think it starts around Coltrane's era with the Coltrane cycle and so on.

Actually it was bebop, I didn't find prog rock all that interesting, found it bombastic.

I'm looking at the Jerry Coker Hearin' the Changes book now, and I'm thinking 'what use is a list of 20 standards that start on the III of the scale?'

Memorizing tunes, that's about it.

[wolflen]

I wasn't talking about formal theory, just very basic musical knowledge, the names of chords, etc. I have a hard time believing there are professional jazz musicians under 90 years old who don't have such rudimentary knowledge. And the people who started playing an instrument at a very early age are an exception.

Reminds me of a Joe Pass vid..someone asked Joe what chord he was using in a tune..Joe paused for abit and a bit more..finally he said the name of the chord.

I have the same situation at times with a tune I have played many times..I know it well..but I have to "think" "..what chord is that?..a minor7b5 or a 9th..?"

I realize this is taken for granted that pro and experienced players "know" what they are playing but some time the "..how did I do that?" comes to light.

[pauln]

What I've realised is I don't tend to teach my beginner kids that way, and that bothers me. I need to revise my approach because all the problems I see with my child students are based on me being overly score based and there's issues with the order of the information as presented in the teaching resources I use. I'm planning to make some changes to the first few months of my teaching new students. I'd say my group teaching is in advance of my one on one at this stage.

There's no difference between the two, BTW. It's all the same thing, the only difference is the material.

You have the means to experiment with your new students. I'll watch for reports.

In the beginning I played nothing but single string lines of pitches for the first two years, teaching myself the lead solos of popular music on the radio. Later, I found chords easily constructed because they are made of pitches. I've always thought the teaching of chords first sets up for difficulty entering single string playing because pitches are not made of chords. Also because the first chords taught "aren't really chords" but a collection of first position fingerings labeled as but barely pretending to act as proper chords... their main purpose getting the new player through the natural hazing period of physical discomfort (but at the cost of a "useful little lie" about the nature of real chords).

Are there any other polyphonic instruments taught "chords first"? If reading is part of teaching, doesn't that suggest reading single notes before chords? Less physical hand development needed for single notes vs chords? More immediate familiarity with the upper finger board with notes first, chords later?

[Christian Miller]

I wasn't talking about formal theory, just very basic musical knowledge, the names of chords, etc. I have a hard time believing there are professional jazz musicians under 90 years old who don't have such rudimentary knowledge. And the people who started playing an instrument at a very early age are an exception.

Why? I mean none of us learn as fast as when we are 5 years old, but I don't buy a fundamental distinction. I think one big thing that changes is we trust ourselves and our intuitive ability to learn less, and feel we need more 'pedagogy' and 'structured learning' because that's what society tells us we need to learn. But that sort of 'sink or swim' immersion is still powerful and effective.

We confuse learning with the needs of the education system's organisational need for assessment and a clear syllabus, and it's easy to see why. (Those are not bad things per se, btw. But not all learning happens this way, perhaps not even most learning.)

One book that had a huge effect on me is Situated Learning by Lave and Wenger, a study of traditional apprenticeships. As my MA supervisor said - it's a hard book to assimilate because you end up questioning the whole point of formal education. But these debates are still live in jazz education circles. Everyone laments the apprenticeship system. It seems a lot of time is spent by educators to try and recreate aspects of it within the academy.

Actually it was bebop, I didn't find prog rock all that interesting, found it bombastic.

Sorry, I meant progressive jazz.

[pamosmusic]

I think with young kids, the big difference is inhibition. They just really don’t care that they’re beginners and they don’t care that we use games to teach them and they don’t particularly care if they sound bad. They also have some developmental hang ups with abstraction (we teach arithmetic at that age but we don’t teach solving for single variables, for example), so they can’t really be bothered to learn the conceptual framework of harmony in many cases. But they can still learn harmony because they don’t particularly care how it works. They just care that it works and get amped when they sound good.

Im not a neuroscientist, so there is almost certainly some neuroplasticity stuff that feeds into or amplifies this stuff. But adults kind of CAN approach music in the same way. It’s just really hard for us to do that. Part of the reason I’ve been enjoying drumming so much is that I stink at it and I can sit and kind of power through some of the stink and learn like a beginner.

I take a lot of rhythmic stuff from the drumming back to the guitar. I’m trying to be better about taking the Being Okay At Stinking And Not Asking Too Many Questions back to the guitar.

EDIT: correcting a weird autocorrect. First sentence should've used "inhibition"

[PickingMyEars]

Education? Now you're talking my language.

Talking about music might get me kicked out of an internet forum. Talking about education, on the other hand... that's really dangerous.

I've done a lot with cogenerative dialogues--check out Christopher Emdin. Collaboration that encourages and confronts the dialogic-that teacher student relationship. I just had a conversation with my new admin team around SEL and building community. In the states, we have these classes called "advisory" or "AVID." That's where Social Emotional Learning lives, unfortunately. I've fought against that model for years. SEL needs to break out of the silo and be integrated into all classes or it's completely pointless.

What does all that mean for music education and the semiotics raised here? Maybe if we label too much, we fall into that traditional mode of "teacher as expert" and student as "receptacle." There's ties back to... dare I say... Paulo Friere. That mode of teaching is passive and doesn't encourage learning as much as it encourages memorization. You think AI is the monster robbing students of "the lift" of learning? Look at the history of education and think again.

Traditional teaching takes the struggle out of learning. Think lecture halls and graphs that demonstrate the best poets--love that movie, even if it ain't perfect. If every step and every word is mapped out, then there are no opportunities to make mistakes. I always remind my students (and myself) that there is no learning without mistakes. Productive failure vs. unproductive success. Otherwise, we are just regurgitating what we already know. That's not learning, that's... let's ask ChatGPT

SEL in all classrooms is a reminder that students need to feel safe enough to make mistakes. They need to feel safe enough to learn from each other (if you are teaching in a classroom or group setting). Risk taking doesn't happen without trust, no matter who that dare-devil may be.

Christian, reevaluating your instruction is the sign of a good teacher. I use my student's direct feedback (cogenerative dialogue) to reflect upon my pedagogy and praxis every two weeks of every month of the school year--and the summer on my own. Every student is different--and if we teach exactly the same every time, we aren't meeting the individual and collective needs of our students. Using "what works" doesn't mean teaching on autopilot.

I could go on, but I already have enough fans here

[Christian Miller]

I think with young kids, the big difference is inhibition. They just really don’t care that they’re beginners and they don’t care that we use games to teach them and they don’t particularly care if they sound bad. They also have some developmental hang ups with abstraction (we teach arithmetic at that age but we don’t teach solving for single variables, for example), so they can’t really be bothered to learn the conceptual framework of harmony in many cases. But they can still learn harmony because they don’t particularly care how it works. They just care that it works and get amped when they sound good.

Im not a neuroscientist, so there is almost certainly some neuroplasticity stuff that feeds into or amplifies this stuff. But adults kind of CAN approach music in the same way. It’s just really hard for us to do that. Part of the reason I’ve been enjoying drumming so much is that I stink at it and I can sit and kind of power through some of the stink and learn like a beginner.

I take a lot of rhythmic stuff from the drumming back to the guitar. I’m trying to be better about taking the Being Okay At Stinking And Not Asking Too Many Questions back to the guitar.

EDIT: correcting a weird autocorrect. First sentence should've used "inhibition"

I very much enjoy sucking at things, which is just as well really.

Plus, n00b gains are the fastest!

In a way with guitar you can always be a n00b because there’s always something you can find that you are hopeless at and therefore make massive progress in the first 80 hours or whatever it is.

If you can find a way to reduce yourself to a beginner in the practice room, that’s the way you make the most progress.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Christian Miller]

Education? Now you're talking my language.

Talking about music might get me kicked out of an internet forum. Talking about education, on the other hand... that's really dangerous.

I've done a lot with cogenerative dialogues--check out Christopher Emdin. Collaboration that encourages and confronts the dialogic-that teacher student relationship. I just had a conversation with my new admin team around SEL and building community. In the states, we have these classes called "advisory" or "AVID." That's where Social Emotional Learning lives, unfortunately. I've fought against that model for years. SEL needs to break out of the silo and be integrated into all classes or it's completely pointless.

What does all that mean for music education and the semiotics raised here? Maybe if we label too much, we fall into that traditional mode of "teacher as expert" and student as "receptacle." There's ties back to... dare I say... Paulo Friere. That mode of teaching is passive and doesn't encourage learning as much as it encourages memorization. You think AI is the monster robbing students of "the lift" of learning? Look at the history of education and think again.

Traditional teaching takes the struggle out of learning. Think lecture halls and graphs that demonstrate the best poets--love that movie, even if it ain't perfect. If every step and every word is mapped out, then there are no opportunities to make mistakes. I always remind my students (and myself) that there is no learning without mistakes. Productive failure vs. unproductive success. Otherwise, we are just regurgitating what we already know. That's not learning, that's... let's ask ChatGPT

SEL in all classrooms is a reminder that students need to feel safe enough to make mistakes. They need to feel safe enough to learn from each other (if you are teaching in a classroom or group setting). Risk taking doesn't happen without trust, no matter who that dare-devil may be.

Christian, reevaluating your instruction is the sign of a good teacher. I use my student's direct feedback (cogenerative dialogue) to reflect upon my pedagogy and praxis every two weeks of every month of the school year--and the summer on my own. Every student is different--and if we teach exactly the same every time, we aren't meeting the individual and collective needs of our students. Using "what works" doesn't mean teaching on autopilot.

I could go on, but I already have enough fans here

I find it interesting that in American standard English "instruction" is regularly used as a synonym for "teaching". We don't really use 'instructor' so frequently here (at least not in music) - we might say 'tutor'.

They are not, of course, synonyms. I don't instruct my students. I teach them.

Although there's a funny one with what you might call 'pedagogical questioning' that I use a lot in lessons, most kids seem to get on with that approach and I prefer to telling kids what to do all the time lol, but there's always one kid that looks at me with genuine confusion and says 'Why are you asking me? You're the teacher.'

Ultimately the opportunity for exchange in the Critical Pedagogy tradition doesn't always exist, because many children just want to learn the instrument and don't have strong ideas about what they want to learn and how - but it's nice when it happens. Everyone learns different. I suppose some kids like to be told what to do even haha.

[GuyBoden]

Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA)

A small minority of the population may suffer from PDA.

PDA Society - Pathological Demand Avoidance

[charlieparker]

I've transcribed a fair amount of stuff and I can sing lines over songs but they sound basic to me. Like very diatonic and not enough chromaticism.

But when I'm improvising jazz, I find it very hard to rely on the ear. For rock blues using the ear is fairly easy. I just have to know the sounds of the major scale, blue notes, and some sevenths.

With Jazz hearing the notes of each chord change and knowing where they are of each chord change is a challenge so I end up trying to drag my brain into the business by using the shapes of each chord as a collection of notes.

Lately I have been just trying to compose lines so I can spend more time slowly trying to find sounds I like.

[supersoul]

With Jazz hearing the notes of each chord change and knowing where they are of each chord change is a challenge so I end up trying to drag my brain into the business by using the shapes of each chord as a collection of notes.

I practice playing single note lines through changes, trying to outline the changes so the changes can be heard. Usually just steady 8ths, and it can sound pretty dull, like the exercise that it is. But I find it helps me when I'm actually improvising, because I already have those lines in my head and can think more about telling a story or whatever. It also makes playing out/chromatic sound more natural.

[Mick-7]

I've transcribed a fair amount of stuff and I can sing lines over songs but they sound basic to me. Like very diatonic and not enough chromaticism.

But when I'm improvising jazz, I find it very hard to rely on the ear. For rock blues using the ear is fairly easy. I just have to know the sounds of the major scale, blue notes, and some sevenths.

With Jazz hearing the notes of each chord change and knowing where they are of each chord change is a challenge so I end up trying to drag my brain into the business by using the shapes of each chord as a collection of notes.

Lately I have been just trying to compose lines so I can spend more time slowly trying to find sounds I like.

A good practice is to arpeggiate the chords in real time over the chord changes (say with a metronome) and connect the arpeggios with diatonic and/or chromatic neighbor notes. This will help you hear and respond to the chord changes better.

[Christian Miller]

Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA)

A small minority of the population may suffer from PDA.

PDA Society - Pathological Demand Avoidance

I had a student diagnosed with that. We got on great and he did fabulously. Not teaching him any more sadly as he's moved on from the school.

But I don't tell my students what to do - or at least I try not to.

I'm firmly of the camp that good SEN teaching practice just feeds into good teaching practice.

For my ADHD students timed interleaved practice regimens (Bulletproof Musician) seem to work well. My reasoning - let's see if I can get you to focus for 3 minutes, because that's all you need.

I only found out about focus timers being a thing later. But this style of practice was not based around considerations of ADHD students - it's meant to be good for everyone.

But I really enjoyed practicing in three minute bursts myself when I did it for a while, which probably says something about me haha. In this very spotty but super directed practice stuff saw me through periods where I couldn't sit at the guitar for hours with small kids and so on. I could grab 15 minutes here and there, and work on something meaningful but very narrow. Or maybe - three things!

The trick of it is to divvy up the work to be done into sufficiently narrow slices. But that's one of my hats as a teacher, of course.

[Christian Miller]

I've transcribed a fair amount of stuff and I can sing lines over songs but they sound basic to me. Like very diatonic and not enough chromaticism.

But when I'm improvising jazz, I find it very hard to rely on the ear. For rock blues using the ear is fairly easy. I just have to know the sounds of the major scale, blue notes, and some sevenths.

With Jazz hearing the notes of each chord change and knowing where they are of each chord change is a challenge so I end up trying to drag my brain into the business by using the shapes of each chord as a collection of notes.

Lately I have been just trying to compose lines so I can spend more time slowly trying to find sounds I like.

Nick other peoples stuff and fake it till you make it. It's easier and sounds better.

Let go of the need to be creative or original. That's something that happens to you, not something you make happen.

AA Milne explains this very well in the Pooh stories.

Also Bartley gets it -

- the first few minutes haha.

[Mick-7]

The trick of it is to divvy up the work to be done into sufficiently narrow slices. But that's one of my hats as a teacher, of course.

So then, you don a 3 cornered hat while teaching? "Arrr, walk the plank, me lad!"