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potato tomato
Originally Posted by Mick-7
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08-26-2025 07:14 PM
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So you hear a line and transcribe it and then go “ah shucks too long,” and scrap it? Originally Posted by Mick-7
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Yeah what’s the difference? Originally Posted by Mick-7
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The difference is I stopped trying to memorize phrases, just learned them. And I didn't make a study out of them: transpose them, alter them, etc. But once I learned them, I could do those things by ear. I realized that ear training is the most important musical skill for improvisors because the better you can hear, the less need you have for such technical strategies. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Can you demonstrate? Originally Posted by Mick-7
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I sometimes treat ancient pop hit tunes as "licks", but don't use them as such. When playing something simple but brilliant just before a try-hard solo-take,
it... hm.
I don't use them in impro but they are a tool to bring the base of thinking to the place that works, musically. Hard to explain. Worth a try surely.
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The lick (and yes it's a lick) is too long for the purposes of the thread, IMO. Actually I don't know why anybody would learn a ii-V-I lick except in the very beginning if they are unfamiliar with the style. I would think of the lick as consisting of three versatile building blocks that can be connected with other ideas in various contexts.
- The first one is an octave displaced major arpeggio (with a diatonic approach). Someone could've taken this from Donna Lee or Honey suckle. This is a four or five note building block that can be used in a ii chord, IV chord, V chord or a minor7b5 chord for example.
- The second one is an idea every jazz musician plays in every friggin solo at least eight times. #9-b9-1-7 -> 3rd. It's a four or five note resolution cell. You can start a dominant bar with any dominant idea (like the cell above) and use this cell to finish the bar with a resolution. This is a sticky one. Be careful. You may start finishing your sentences with it without realizing.
- The third one is another four note cell, an arpeggio from the third.
I work on language using building blocks like these. Work on one building block at a time applying it to different chords, scale degrees in different positions, string groups etc. Once you have accumulated a bunch of them the creative part begins which is coming up with longer lines by connecting them in various ways. There is no magic formula. The longer lick in question is just one instance of connected building blocks. There are billions of ways you can construct good lines like that. Often times you just need to use them to start a line as a jumping off point.
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Ear training is without doubt very important, but so are chops - no point in having great ears without being able to execute the ideas you have. Originally Posted by Mick-7
I'd be interested to hear how you distinguish memorisation from 'just learning' something.
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Yeah I’m with you there. I’m honestly really skeptical of the “I don’t have to do x because I play by ear” crowd. Originally Posted by James W
First because it’s a really myopic view of how to use your ear. For example, not needing to tinker around with the Honeysuckle Rose lick to be able to play it is one thing. But how do you know what you’re going to expose your ear to by taking it apart and rearranging it? So by rejecting some kinds of practice because you play by ear, you’re often shortchanging your ear and not really giving it the chance to do everything it’s capable of doing.
On top of which, being able to hear something doesn’t mean you can play it. We underestimate the degree to which ear training is often just repetition.
Also I’m not convinced we can really “hear” things in real time that we don’t have our chops around yet.
Someone said something on another thread recently … playing by ear is great, but only if you’re hearing good stuff.
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My thoughts too. The honeysuckle motif for instance is a huge one. Have a look at Donna Lee for example and see how it’s used. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
What was the Scott Henderson thing? “Never copy more than nine notes.”
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It misunderstands how the ear works in music. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
Actually it misunderstands how music works. Music works the phrase level. You can’t play music note by note. (Well maybe someone like Webern, but that’s not the sort of thing we’re discussing.)
I mean I think we can conclude Bird had a good ear and yet his music is full of little characteristic licks, some quotes, some his own (maybe)
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There's some mention by Cecil of figuring out how to play it in a musical context, but to me figuring out the mechanics (fingering and picking) is the more important step.
CAGED shapes help me organise, chunk, and memorise licks across string sets.
For example, I might have a line/melody that seems to be somewhere in between the 'E' shape and 'D' shape. If I need to play it this line/melody higher, I just think, "Ok what does it look like if this melody falls in between the 'A' shape and 'G' shape all while keeping the picking exactly the same as before?"
Sometimes I organise licks/heads according to 3 notes per strings instead of CAGED shapes.
Mechanics are so critical for me because I do not alternate pick. If I don't figure out the geometry, my right hand is screwed. An example would be head of Groovin High. I struggled with this for a long time (the ii-V-ish bits). I tried Christian's fingering (in his video about stealing licks to fluency or something). I simply could not play it because of left-hand shifting and right-hand string skipping. But I watched how Pasquale Grasso played it (with Barry Greene) and copied it. It works for my circular picking style because I didn't have to shift my left hand or skip a string with my right. Instead, it required that I stretch my fingers to get the chromatic notes.
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I call it the bebop tetrachord. There are a few ways to use it. Originally Posted by Tal_175
Good to be able to play fluently in cliches to start off with IMO. Make conversation and small talk before trying to write poetry. Most people never get to the conversational level.
It's the same with baroque improvisation. You just have endless boilerplate patterns and things. And then you look at something like Bach and your appreciation goes up. But the endless boilerplate patterns will get you into sounding like the style.
If you are looking to play in the generic style of a 50s/60s jazz musician - which is probably a good goal for an intermediate student interested in that kind of music - that #9-b9-1-b7 into 3rd thing is absolutely something you should internalise. It's all over.. well... everything as you say. Same thing with the 'Crimea river' lick, descending the minor blues scale from b5 or the ascending triplet arpeggio after a lower neighbour. It's all boilerplate, and some musicians might roll their eyes (not me), but it's basic material that makes the idiom and it's all over your record collection.
So, it's a great first step. Until you can, for instance, rinse ATTYA at 180, or 200. Or 240 and are being booked to play gigs.
Play the cliches. Earn the right NOT to play them - or be told off form playing them by an elder lol.
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Interesting - it didn't strike me it would be a difficult line. Sorry about that, I probably should have chosen something else for the purposes of the video. I'll remake it again in 6 months probably haha. I play the line slightly wrong in that video anyway as you probably noticed. Cliff set me right. Originally Posted by brent.h
String skipping isn't an issue for me because I'm not picking in the plane of the strings. Whereas with the Chuck Wayne approach you are very much moving the pick in the plane of the strings more so it's physically harder to do that. The things I do intuitively (I don't even think about shifts) are not necessarily going to be intuitive for others, but that doesn't mean you can't play the line your way. Maybe I couldn't play it your way?
This is one reason why TAB is a bad idea. What is natural for me is not going to natural for you. Honestly I am incredibly aggravated about guitarists relying on TAB and I wish I didn't have to put it up because it's not necessarily going to be useful, as you have explained. Your is always much better off using your ears, or reading the notation, and making your own decisions, especially with picking and left hand styles of various players being so diverse (even with the pros). But the market doesn't want to hear it.
Hmmm... thoughts for a video idea... I might cite you on this.
So I hope you learned the right lesson from this... which is use your ears and do it the way that works best for you. If you've been practicing consistently with that technique for a while, your body will have an intuition abut the way it wants to play things. Trust it. The more you do it the more confident you'll get.
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It's like that thing where guitarists go 'it's so hard to read music because there's so many places to play the note?' - like even presumed professionals like Rhett Schull or whoever.
This I find genuinely baffling. Yes, it's true, and it's true of playing ANY MUSIC AT ALL on the guitar, it's the SAME.
If you are playing Happy Birthday by ear, or if you are reading it from staff notation, you have the exact same issue. Where do you play it?
That's why we have positions and so on, on the guitar, to make these decisions easier - that's where the E is in fifth position, finger goes there.
The only way that isn't an issue is if you have practiced something a lot in a specific fingering, or someone is telling you where to put your fingers. (I mean that might be necessary to execute some hyper technical shred lick - but for playing a melody, say?)
I honestly think there's a lot of cats out there how think in mostly in terms of the technical inputs (where my fingers go) and not the musical outputs (what sound I want). It is something you can probably get away more with in rock, but it's not a jazz/rock split. I don't want to say that's not being a musician, but I have to say that it seems like being a guitar operator, not a musician?
There I said it. Come at me!
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Despite having had no musical background when I started guitar, I quickly recognized how hacky tablature is and how much of the music it hides from the reader. Used it only until I could (barely) read standard notation and then never again. It's always surprising to see how some people stick with it for so long... I also have never given much thought to technique except when some new up-tempo thing feels clumsier than it should. Most concerns people have about the physical playing of specific instruments seem to me to be musically immaterial.
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How chops and ear are intertwined is interesting.
It's certainly possible to play lines that are faster than you can really think. Probably requires practiced patterns, licks, scales, arps, whatever.
OTOH, you could choose to always put ear first in which case you might be limiting the faster stuff in favor of more intentionality.
As usual, you can find more than one path up the mountain.
As far as ear training goes in general, I'm in agreement with the notion that having big ears is the single most important thing. It's not just for soloing, it's for everything a combo jazz player does.
If I could do it all over again from the beginning, my major emphasis would be on ear training.
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Sure, but my question is always — how do you make your ear bigger? Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
Playing By Ear is often used as a reason why someone is exempt from some of the more workaday practice that other folks engage in. And it seems to miss that the workaday practice is *how the ear gets good*
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To be brutal, I think what would help a lot of forum members is to think far less about technique, concentrate on the sound they want to come out and trust their instincts. And I'm a technique nerd! Originally Posted by MinToyTot
Sure, learn to play your instrument, practice your scales etc. You need to teach your fingers where the notes are, and that takes practice. But honestly, Troy Grady has given everyone a complex, a new way to over think absolutely everything.
Is it a bit of shred metal mind set that everything needs to be defined in terms of technical problem? Jazz can be quick music. But bop at 240 is not Paul Gilbert alternate picking.
To play fast you need to hear fast. This comes to mind.
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By "learning" I mean I learn to play the line (which implies I have the chops to do so), so I could play it immediately if I heard it again, but I don't try to memorize it. If I really like an idea, I'm likely to fiddle around with it, vary and phrase it in different ways, but I think we all do that with motifs we like? Originally Posted by James W
I've been working on this lately, trying to up the speed at which I can play by ear. It requires intense concentration, I can't zone out while playing, which I tend to do sometimes - I suppose we all do, it's hard to maintain such focus. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
Last edited by Mick-7; 08-27-2025 at 01:25 PM.
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I'll take a shot at this question. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
First off, I think, is to recognize the current size of your ears. My mind was opened when I played a wrong chord and the pianist knew which wrong chord I played and what it should have been. Again, when I played an F13 in the first position and the pianist correctly pointed out that he didn't hear the Eb on the D string. I wasn't pressing it hard enough. And, then, of course, all those times the pianist re-harmed something and I didn't know what he played, etc etc etc etc.
The traditional ear training route is listening and transcribing. I don't have a better idea than that. But, another thing that has worked is hearing and/or reading other players' ways of comping -- getting the sounds of unexpected passing chords. I find it easier to pick up new sounds when I hear them used well in tunes.
I've used Ear Master, with some small benefit.
But mostly, ear training, beyond what gets into my brain easily, feels to me like grueling work.
I believe that some people are more gifted than others with regard to ear size.
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Mick, you seem to very frequently end up situations where you’ve jumped into something and said some version of “oh that thing doesn’t work for me, I do this thing.” And then people prod for a while and it turns out you’re doing exactly the thing we’re talking about doing after all. Originally Posted by Mick-7
So I’m wondering if there’s a way to avoid that arc in the future?
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I take your point about the Grady stuff, although his 'Pickslanting Primer' now features a section on different genres, one of which is about jazz and actually mentions the picking motion I've adopted, finger & thumb. This and Pasquale Grasso's My Music Masterclass video influenced my decision to adopted that picking motion. And actually Grady's advice is not to overthink stuff - quite the opposite in fact, at least initially, or until you've found something that works at a basic fundamental level. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
So, I have been preoccupied with technique in the past but not without good reason! I find the shred mechanics interesting and I still think they are somewhat relevant to jazz guitar, though we are much more interested in doing relatively unguitaristic things, more based on what horn players play, or pianists, rather than fast diatonic scale sequences.
I think the 'trust your instincts' advice might be alright for someone who found the technique relatively straight forward to acquire. My advice, speaking as someone who didn't find right-hand technique straight forward, would be to tell someone all the available motions and to experiment with all of them.
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What to do... I have really poor overall technique and speed. It is a serious hindrance to me learning and playing, and as much as I want to play as musically and as freely as possible, I absolutely have to find the easiest ways to play something.
Me bringing up that Groovin High example wasn't a knock on Christian's efforts (love all your videos); just an example of how something that might seem slightly straightforward will require me to actually put in a lot of effort to find the right fingering that works for me.
I know this sounds really stupid: for me, being able to ear things is one thing, but my fingers need to be able to 'hear' too (as in know where to go). As I work and I figure out more licks and melodies, my fingers hear/sense the intervals better. Over time (just a year of seriously trying to play this music), that finger-ear-brain connection has grown quite strong - I'm able to play tunes/lines without looking at the fretboard at all (lots of times I close my eyes).
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Thinking of a line and playing it immediately -- just requires some serious time on the instrument. Eventually, your fingers find the right notes without conscious thought. I think it can be practiced -- if you're noodling while watching TV, copy the music. But, mostly, it's just a lot of time with the guitar in your hands. Or, so I think.
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