Instantly playing what you've just heard.

[GuyBoden]

I've been testing if I can instantly play what I've just heard.


I failed, and the tests were only simple two bar phrases.


But, it's only a hobby and I really enjoy playing most days.

[ragman1]

Depends how complicated the two-bar phrases are. Coltrane at speed would be hard to pin down. If you only mean a few notes at a leisurely tempo then probably practice would perfect it.

[GuyBoden]

Depends how complicated they are.

I was testing myself using a list of random Sax samples, these simple phrases:
Download Saxophone Loops & Samples, 24-Bit Wav & Royalty Free | Noiiz

[Jimmy blue note]

I've been testing if I can instantly play what I've just heard.


I failed, and the tests were only simple two bar phrases.


But, it's only a hobby and I really enjoy playing most days.

I had a class in counterpoint in my undergraduate, it was classically focused. The last 10 minutes of the class were ear training and musical dictation-as it was called. At the start of the semester, it was simple intervallic phrases and they were tough. By the end, it was several bars with chromatic tonal shifts within. As my ear learned to discern lines as having distinct character and order, and for me, things I could actively imagine playing, the way I heard changed in a way that was not passive, but active.
It was pretty impressive to hear a chromatic line, envision the order by which the sounds related and sounded and write it out on the blackboard after one listening. At some point, I also became aware of rhythmic shapes, this helped a lot.
The more actively I learned to listen, the easier it became but it was cumulatively evolving and there were strategies where there weren't at the semester's start.

Keep at it. It really helped me to envision a phrase spacially and see it on an "air piano". Other people have different strategies which they individually developed. It's really useful. Keep at it; there's utility in that ability.

[rpjazzguitar]

I think it's a great thing to work on. Seems to me that a basic skill in jazz is to be able to imagine a line and play it instantly.

My test for students is to start on a random string/fret/finger and play Happy Birthday without a mistake.

I've noticed that I find it much easier to hear a line and play it than to hear something and name the notes.

[Christian Miller]

Paul Berliner talks about ‘shadowing’ where a master can play along with your improvisation a split second behind as you play it, anticipating what your are going to do.

Once upon a time people transcribed so much it didn’t occur to them to have a word for it.

[sgosnell]

George Barnes was a master at instantly playing back what someone else played. You can hear a lot of this in his recordings with Ruby Braff. Once he did it so accurately and persistently that Braff stopped the song and chided him.

[pauln]

When you teach yourself to practice, play, and perform by ear, you're pretty much playing what you are hearing in your head, whether the source is a recording, the band, or in your head.

[mr. beaumont]

All about ability to recognize intervals. Half steps and whole steps are pretty easy...other stuff...not so much.

Theres a great video of Ravi Shankar teaching George Harrison to play sitar by repeating phrases...he's kicking George's ass all over the place, and George is loving it because he knows he's LEARNING.

[Christian Miller]

George had that quality of grace about him.

Regarding ‘ear training’ - I’ve done quite a bit of that stuff but at the end of the day the process of transferring stuff I hear to the fretboard is intuitive. Fwiw.

People worry about that side of it, but honestly the bit that’s the greater challenge for me is hearing the pitches accurately IN MY HEAD. If I can do that, it’s not a problem.

(Well with Holdsworth, which I’ve been working on recently, say, there’s an element of mechanical problem solving haha in terms of where the notes are to be played. But the principle is the same for any music.)

Some ‘words’ in jazz I recognise right away - at tempo - mostly bop stuff. For someone contemporary there’s a lot more slowing down and repeating…

The putting it on the guitar stuff is a matter of throwing hours at it. Over time you make fewer errors. I think practicing basic scales also helps.

But most guitarists noodle aimlessly, and most try to play the thing before they fully hear the thing they are trying to play and put themselves off. It’s a common pattern with learners.

[Christian Miller]

The other thing people don’t talk about is that hearing individual notes is kind of the baby level. It’s still necessary sometimes when you need to spell stuff out (like some mad Julian Lage interval line no one else plays or something.)

You can get very good at this even with relative pitch, Charles Banacos was famous for training students in this for example, but I wonder how much this has to do with everyday music making.

I suspect MUCH more important than ability to decipher random notes in a tone cluster is the ability to instantly recognise the “cliches*” (I don’t mean that negatively); some are unique to a player or composer, others are widespread. Common Parker licks are one. Standards progressions like IIIm7b5 IV7 IIm7 IVm6, common grips like x 3 2 4 3 x, descending whole tone runs, triad pairs in tritones, that sort of stuff….

(Every form of music has these. In my studies of c18 music it’s exactly the same. But it’s noted that there was no ear training class in C18 Europe. It was unnecessary.)

They should jump out at you, you hear them and a light goes on in your head, and it lights up on the fretboard.

Blues licks and 12-bar progressions are examples that might be familiar to those not fluent in jazz.

This requires exposure, a lot of it. It goes hand in hand with improvisation. This is best done in childhood like the Manouche guys (or the child students/inmates of the old conservatoires) but you can do it as an adult. I did. Helps to know what to do though.

(of course there’s another level for some which involves getting away from all that stuff - but that’s the next thing haha.)

*shemata, modules, Lego bricks, musical words, gestalts, patterns, formulae, tropes etc

[Christian Miller]

I had a class in counterpoint in my undergraduate, it was classically focused. The last 10 minutes of the class were ear training and musical dictation-as it was called. At the start of the semester, it was simple intervallic phrases and they were tough. By the end, it was several bars with chromatic tonal shifts within. As my ear learned to discern lines as having distinct character and order, and for me, things I could actively imagine playing, the way I heard changed in a way that was not passive, but active.
It was pretty impressive to hear a chromatic line, envision the order by which the sounds related and sounded and write it out on the blackboard after one listening. At some point, I also became aware of rhythmic shapes, this helped a lot.
The more actively I learned to listen, the easier it became but it was cumulatively evolving and there were strategies where there weren't at the semester's start.

Keep at it. It really helped me to envision a phrase spacially and see it on an "air piano". Other people have different strategies which they individually developed. It's really useful. Keep at it; there's utility in that ability.

Sounds like you had a great teacher there!

Your comment reminds me of my friend’s struggles at a conservatoire. He’s a real practical musician, jazz player, composer, sight reading section player, you name it. Anyway he is down to teach harmony and counterpoint to undergrads. His ethos is as you might imagine, about making music. But he can’t get a room to do the classes because the class is assumed to be theoretical, paper exercises from Fux or chorale harmony and can therefore be done online.

This is depressing. No musician wants to be doing what is essentially a math class, and yet here we are. It’s no surprise every classical performance conservatoire graduate I’ve spoken to has negative recollections of harmony classes as irrelevant intellectual exercises. Debussy could win the prix de Rome in fugue as a teenager writing straight to paper against the clock in a classroom, but he could already hear what he was writing in his head because he’d been doing it since childhood.

Another friend teaches talented kids at the junior branch of a famous classical music school and amongst other things such as free improv, and jazz, they improvise from figured bass - apparently it’s never occurred to any of their teachers to teach this stuff as a way to make music.

This is very odd to people like me who haven’t done a classical music degree, because the first thing we jazzers want to do with a new scale, or a voice leading cycle or something is to hear it, and start trying to make music with it.

(This also why I don’t like the word theory; but I think most non-classical musicians understand that theory is to be turned into practice.)

Of course this ‘paper theory’ idea is a very persistent attitude and comes from the fact that most classical musicians never really engage in ‘the construction of music’ (as John Mortensen puts it.) But I think many younger musicians are more used to informal music making and jamming even if their main thing is classical, they have to play different styles and settings because the classical performance world is both becoming more eclectic and also becoming less culturally central.

the tl;dr has got to be that if you have to get theoretical ideas into your ears, and this is often missing from mainstream music edu.

[frabarmus]

Instantly playing what you've just heard... for me, sometimes it happens, some(most?) times it doesn't. (Also depends on the complexity of what you've just heard).
It does happen much more, for instance, when I'm "in the zone"... but as far as I know there are no tricks (or "mechanical" ways) to get there... (not that I know of... well, knowing the fretboard perfeclty well, is one way, I suppose...). I just feel grateful when it happens... and then, again, if I stop to acknowledge it ("Wow! This is magic, I'm in the zone!!") then I lose it and I'm out of the zone once again...

[Christian Miller]

Instantly playing what you've just heard... for me, sometimes it happens, some(most?) times it doesn't. (Also depends on the complexity of what you've just heard).
It does happen much more, for instance, when I'm "in the zone"... but as far as I know there are no tricks (or "mechanical" ways) to get there... (not that I know of... well, knowing the fretboard perfeclty well, is one way, I suppose...). I just feel grateful when it happens... and then, again, if I stop to acknowledge it ("Wow! This is magic, I'm in the zone!!") then I lose it and I'm out of the zone once again...

haha I know that one!

[BradGuitar]

Yep, I've certainly learnt to live with the fact that my ears work better on some days rather than others... and I have no idea what days that'll be!

[GuyBoden]

All about ability to recognize intervals.

I was taught to recognise scale intervals by ear as a teenager during music lessons, but I have to admit that was in 1982, I've not seriously practiced them since.

I'll try this online interval guessing game:
Music Interval Ear Training: Interactive Piano Training Tool


Thanks for everyone's response.

[AllanAllen]

George Barnes was a master at instantly playing back what someone else played. You can hear a lot of this in his recordings with Ruby Braff. Once he did it so accurately and persistently that Braff stopped the song and chided him.

Great stuff!

[Christian Miller]

I was taught to recognise scale intervals by ear as a teenager during music lessons, but I have to admit that was in 1982, I've not seriously practiced them since.

I'll try this online interval guessing game:
Music Interval Ear Training: Interactive Piano Training Tool


Thanks for everyone's response.

I mean you could. It's probably not a complete waste of time? But I spent ages doing that and it never helped me much.

That type of thing tends to be used to help kids who done no aural training in six months pass the Aural component of their ABRSM Grades. 'It's Star Wars, it's the Simpsons! etc'.

I think the best use of time is always to learn more music by ear.

If you absolutely want to do ear training exercises, I'd recommend Functional Ear Training. This is how Banacos taught it. Bruce Arnold's site has that stuff on its but it's pricey and fills your music player with crap. There's an app called 'functional ear trainer' which does the same thing. I find that this type of thing is more helpful for sight singing than fretboard stuff though. YMMV.

the difference is FET goes on scale POSITIONS not the intervals between them. Positions sound a lot more consistently the same than intervals - the major sixth between 1 and 6 sounds different to the one between 3 and 5, for example. If you can sing a phone number, or recognise one by ear, for instance, that's FET. There's a famous and brilliant story involving this and Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck.

Moveable Do solfege (and Kodaly) is another type of FET (solfege can become a bit ... uh, Daddy's Special System). That said, I know some Hungarian musicians who are INSANELY good at relative pitch though and they all come up doing Kodaly.

Visualising the piano keyboard is a type of visual FET a lot of people seem to use.

I'm not Mr Mega Ears, but I'm reporting what I found helpful and I'm better than I was.

[pamosmusic]

Yeah I think learning stuff by ear eventually gets you to interval recognition and stuff but starts with probably a more realistic representation of what your ear does in real music.

Like how often do you hear musicians flat out copy what someone else is doing?

It’s more like mirroring contours, registers, skips or steps, timbre. Things like that.

[James W]

I recommend practising sight-singing, with the guitar in one's hand to check the accuracy of what you're singing. Then practice audiating by singing one note then imagining the next two, three or four etc. (depending how confident you feel) notes before singing the note after to check that you're imagining things correctly (also with guitar in hand to check all of this). This I think is how you develop the inner ear.

Also, I've recommended this before, but there is a book called The Complete Musician which also comes with two workbooks, the second of which is all about building one's musicianship through ear-training etc. It is very thick and absolutely chock-full of useful exercises. I've used it on and off for some time, but a resolution of mine is to use it every day, so recently I've been singing and playing some two-part counterpoint, singing one part and playing the other and swapping them around... There are exercises that I skip, these are ones that one can figure out solely by looking at the page (e.g. add a note to this diad to make it an inverted triad etc.) because I am more interested in the exercises that develop the ear and develop one's ability to know what written music actually sounds like, and what heard music looks like! (As I think Schumann said every good musician ought to be able to do). I did a fairly traditional classical music degree but there was no ear-training involved...

[CliffR]

I've used an app called Functional Ear Trainer on my phone for ages. (Along with transcribing melodies and bebop heads.) It was working great until I got to the point where I'm really struggling to distinguish between the flat 6th and the flat 3rd. I'm thinking it might be time to switch to my second favourite hobby of skydiving.

[pauln]

Just my opinion as a life long ear player...

I see mention of how knowing the note names on the finger board and recognizing intervals helps in playing by ear.

If you are hearing a pitch and identifying it's interval name

- from the tonic of the key
- the degree from the tonic of a scale assigned to the chord
- from the root of the present chord harmony
- from a chord tone
- from the previous note you just played

and then using any of those interval names to reference the identity of the note name of the pitch you are hearing, and then finger that note from knowledge of the note names on the finger board... that is not playing by ear.

Playing by ear does not require identifying anything with names and does not feel like a calculation. When practicing, even one who plays by ear may pause to explore and examine all those things above out of curiosity or comparison, but when playing by ear, none of that. I realize I'm describing this in negative terms; very difficult to describe aural phenomenology.

[BradGuitar]

I think the best use of time is always to learn more music by ear.

The end of the thread in one sentence IMO.

This is the big one for me and certainly where my ear made the most progress (and continues to). I wonder if there can be a little too much faith placed in things like interval recognition exercises/apps and the hope that they will magically transform our ears? They have their place, certainly for naming intervals/relationships etc, but does that really translate effectively to playing what one has just heard? These days I’m not so sure…

I remember watching a Janek Gwizdala video/rant about transcribing that really hit home. His point was to transcribe everything at tempo because you can’t slow things down on the gig (although he did concede one is allowed to repeat phrases/sections IIRC). He argued that if you can’t hear something at tempo, one’s ear isn’t ready for it yet and it’s the most honest feedback loop you’ll get. As much as it might hurt the ego, one has to start from a place that is where their level really is.

When I think about the people I know with the best ears, they’ve done it by listening to and learning a shitload of music and I’m pretty certain it’s not by doing exercises attaching a theme tune to a particular interval… although people do find that helpful I suppose.

[rpjazzguitar]

I have found (for myself only) that naming things is a different skill than hearing things.

If I hear a line, I can play it immediately if it's not too complicated. To name the notes I may have to visualize my fingers.

When I try to play a song in a new key, on a good day, my fingers find the right chords without any interference from the likes of me.

So, I can clearly hear and play things I can't name.

But, if I'm playing a song and the pianist plays an unfamiliar chord sequence -- and I want to match it -- the mechanism may change. I may end up thinking about names for things and trying to figure out how they fit the tune. It's all a kluge.

If I had one thing to do over again from the beginning, it would be to get into ear training early -- I never heard of it until I'd been playing for many years.

[RJVB]

In my studies of c18 music it’s exactly the same.

Lol, in my practise of that music I ended up surprising myself being able to have this kind of fun with the "grown-ups"; echo their (simpler) diminutions in a passage that was handed around but also errors they happened to make. That's actually even more fun