Thoughts on Benny G's "How do I Improvise?" video?

[Tal_175]

Sort of yes, because I think there is a tendency to use the hunt and peck method when you go directly to the instrument. I have seen Christian recommend similar in his videos that you should try and sing a line first before playing it on your instrument. I am open to trying both, though.

I agree that hunt and peck is not a good way to get better at playing what you hear. I am a bit confused by your response because I was asking you if it is your contention that solfege analysis away from instrument is a faster way of getting better at playing what you hear in the moment than singing first and playing it on your instrument. Is that why you liked the suggestions in the video that made you start this thread? I think this is an fair question to ponder for anyone who is interested in working on their ears.

[charlieparker]

I agree that hunt and peck is not a good way to get better at playing what you hear. I am a bit confused by your response because I was asking you if it is your contention that solfege analysis away from instrument is a faster way of getting better at playing what you hear in the moment than singing first and playing it on your instrument. Is that why you liked the suggestions in the video that made you start this thread? I think this is an fair question to ponder for anyone who is interested in working on their ears.

Well, I go back to Christian's video on this where he talks about transcribing. He suggests putting the guitar away and singing it until you can sing it without the music to internalize the phrase. So at the very least, I think I should spend time away from the guitar internalizing the music. For me, one way of doing that is using solfege, as I used to be in a chorus and did a fair amount of sight singing.

I really don't know which is better, just I that I am trying to develop a better connection between my ears and what I play. And I will probably spend time on both.

[Christian Miller]

Blimey that’s an old one

One thing I tend to see with guitarists is that they try to play things before they fully know what they are playing

If you are still at the hunt and peck stage you will find it very easy to forget what you are trying to play when you play the wrong notes. So it’s incredibly important to have a really strong idea of it in your head.

I think guitar players overlook this a bit and focus on the next stage which is translating the notes to the guitar neck. This is important and needs practice, but is basically impossible if you don’t get the sound of it in your ears first.

That’s the engine of musicianship.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[brent.h]

Here's my process of learning by ear (see steps 1 to 4). Most of the time, it's done without the guitar. It's a long process that involves a lot of singing and visualisation. Thankfully, I'm getting better and faster at it.

I love learning the older, pre-bebop, GAS tunes because that they are simpler and easier to digest than bop heads or solos or licks. There are short melodic cells in tunes (say 2-4 notes long) that are great because:

1) they build my fundamental musical vocabulary
2) they build my overall capacity to learn more difficult music later on
3) they increase my overall understanding of how melody flows

You say you want to get better at decoding, and you've mentioned that you're not too familar with tunes outside of bebop.

Perhaps start with simpler tunes? I can't stress how important it is to learn a tonne of these simple, playable melodies because at one point or another, you will see/hear some of these melodic cells appear in so many tunes.

Take for example the tune Limehouse Blues in the key of G.

The opening 3 notes are E, F#, and G. This melodic cell is in so many tunes it's ridiculous:

- Have You Met Miss Jones
- Indian Summer
- Lover Man Oh Where Can You Be
- Poor Butterfly
- Rose Room
- Days of Wine And Roses
- Alone Together
- Avalon
- Back Home In Indiana
- Embraceable You
- Foolin' Myself
- How High The Moon
- I Can't Give You Anything But Love
- Polka Dots and Moonbeams
- Samba de Verao (Summer Samba)
- Softly As In A Morning Sunrise
- There Will Never Be Another You
- Body And Soul
- I'm Getting Sentimental Over You
- Lullaby Of The Leaves
- My Melancholy Baby
- On Green Dolphin Street
- Perdido
- When You're Smiling
- Whispering
- Yesterday
- I Can't Get Started With You
- Autumn Leaves
- Exactly Like You
- I Cover The Waterfront
- If I Should Lose You
- I'm Confessin' That I Love You
- Stella By Starlight

Bebop
- Hot House
- Groovin' High

(The songs above are part of my repertoire.)

I know this cell is so small and so common, but that's the point: it's a fundamental piece of music. So it's up to us to figure what the rest of these common small cells are from the recordings.

By the way, this cell is really powerful and musical. Almost the entire verse of 'I'm Coming Virginia' is written with this cell (some variation of it). When I first heard it, I went, "Oh, it's the cell! It's the thing I always hear!" These kinds of connections I make in my mind is awesome because it means I truly know the cell now, and when I hear a jazz musician on the bandstand with me, if he plays that cell, I can respond/mimic it easily and quickly as well.

0:28 to 1:05

Learning the melodic cells are also forgiving on your technique. You mentioned that you struggle with picking, so starting with simple, basic, non-bebop melodies will be easier for you.

Don't feel bad for starting with the easier and less cerebral stuff. It's all valid and good music that builds towards something.

[Jazz4Four]

Was watching Part 1 of Benny G's series on "How do I improvise Music?". The video is a bit academic, but I thought it had a lot of clarity. He breaks improvising into four parts in the video.

The alternate title of the video is "How To Overcomplicate Music". My God, how do people even attempt to play music with approaches like this?

One thing I've learned about jazz is there is no shortage of people who will suck the life out of it by introducing unnecessary complexity.

How does "Hear stuff, learn to identify it, and learn to play it on your instrument" not cover it?

[ragman1]

Thoughts on Benny G's "How do I Improvise?" video?

Come back when everybody suddenly starts to actually improvise like it's a magic trick. Until then this guy's just a chancer trying to make money or something. Very competent player but that doesn't make him moral.

[GuyBoden]

Thoughts on Benny G's "How do I Improvise?" video?

Come back when everybody suddenly starts to actually improvise like it's a magic trick. Until then this guy's just a chancer trying to make money or something. Very competent player but that doesn't make him moral.

Learning Jazz music by ear is difficult and takes a lot of serious practice.

Most good musicians I've known, start by learning easy Pop songs, usually as a teenager, and then very gradually, over many years, start to learn more complex songs by ear.

Getting a "Good Ear" takes years of careful listening and a lot of musical experience.

I think you have a "Good Ear" Ragman.

[Christian Miller]

I don't think improvisation itself is difficult. Most people improvise naturally.

Making it sound like music is hard. The only way to make things sound like music is to study music. So form, harmony, melody, texture, all of that stuff is about making the music sound better. Doing this in the moment while improvising is a great challenge. But it is profoundly a musical/compositional one, and one professional improvisers spend their time preparing for.

The important question is - why improvise? To some people the question never occurs. It didn't for me. Some people like making noise for the sake of it - unfettered self expression. Many teenage boys most stereotypically. Probably most electric guitar players, it's sort of self selecting. Also I didn't know enough to know what I was doing wasn't sound good. These people might impatiently declare that people are over thinking things. It sounded good enough to me at the time. So someone like myself learns to become better and more discerning over time via active listening. So there's a sort of golden window for a certain type of human being to get into the whole thing via hands on participation.

But I've realised from talking to people about this, not everyone shares that 'let's give it a go' impulse, and so the question becomes less 'how do I improvise?' more than 'why play something that sounds bad?' The better the musician the more they can hear what they are doing in beginner jazz workshop does not sound right.

So, for a very clear example, I've come to realise that the reason why classical musicians struggle with improvisation is that their musical upbringing focusses entirely on beautiful aesthetic objects - pieces and great performances of those pieces. They have spent years - perhaps decades - playing repertoire of stuff that sounds really good and polishing their performances of that repertoire to the best standard they can.

They struggle to see the value of bumbling around in the blues scale. They can tell it doesn't really sound like the jazz or blues music they have listened to. And when your upbringing focusses on the aesthetics over the process, it all seems like self indulgent nonsense.

I'm actually rather sympathetic to this... I'm not sure noodling around on a scale gets one anywhere musically of itself. It may sound agreeable enough for a jazz workshop end of course performance, or a school big band gig. Which is why it is taught, I suspect.

TBH, I tend to see more similarities between classical musicians and say, REAL blues guitarists, these days than I used to. Both have a focus on repertoire and tradition. Real blues guitar has a heavy emphasis on paying one's dues. (Jazz OTOH is split between traditionalist and progressive impulses.)

The principle difference is classical musicians no longer learn repertoire in a way which is conducive to creating their own music. Blues musicians would refer to this as licks. You might learn the Robert Johnson song exactly as he played it, but you learn the licks and ideas from it for your own song writing and improvisation in the style. Classical musicians learned licks two or three centuries ago, as a way into their own compositional and improvisational development. (There's actually books from that period, the antique version of Mel Bay hot licks books or whatever, aimed at a similar sort of audience.)

Of course there's other sides to it. Jazz's relationship with licks and 'vocabulary' is more complex. People stuck in an idiom for decades may suddenly find free improvisation really exciting and freeing. But I think people going into non idiomatic improvisation are looking for something different from jazz. For when you get tired of 'music that sounds like music' to quote Miles. It's possible for a classical New Music performer to go into free improvisation without ever leaving their musical world.

[Christian Miller]

Re: audiation

I think this is quite poorly understood by a lot of people. (I think I'd even disagree with people like Edwin Gordon who coined the term, and whose book - Learning Sequences in Music - is worth looking at.)

I've long been fascinated by Gustav Mahler saying that he couldn't hear an Arnold Schoenberg piece from the score. When you think that here was one of Europe's pre-eminent musician and certainly one with a profound ability to audiate music from the page - a hallmark of his profession - this is an interesting admission. The reason is that Schoenberg's music represented a profound rupture with the Romantic style with which Mahler was intimately familiar.

If I go back to the blues, I think most of us guitar manglers would recognise a BB King blues box lick or a E turnaround without difficulty. These are familiar and common features in the music. Jazz has analogous features, as does Classical, Baroque and Romantic music etc. You have to expose yourself to the music in detail and the time honoured way of doing this in Jazz and Blues - which are not principally score based musics - is to work things out from records. Do enough and you won't need to make a conscious effort any longer.

So it's about learning to hear words and sentences. Things that are comprehensible are easier to recognise and remember. In the same, we can remember a sentence in English easier than we can one in a completely unknown language, because we can operate at the phrase/sentence/meaning level rather than having to retain an apparently arbitrary string of sounds, letters or symbols.

As I far as I can tell, the ear works in the same way. We can do our relative pitch exercises and get good at recognising tone clusters etc, but it will always be more intuitive to recognise familiar material and sounds.

[GuyBoden]

Re: audiation

I think this is quite poorly understood by a lot of people. (I think I'd even disagree with people like Edwin Gordon who coined the term, and whose book - Learning Sequences in Music - is worth looking at.)

I've long been fascinated by Gustav Mahler saying that he couldn't hear an Arnold Schoenberg piece from the score. When you think that here was one of Europe's pre-eminent musician and certainly one with a profound ability to audiate music from the page - a hallmark of his profession - this is an interesting admission. The reason is that Schoenberg's music represented a profound rupture with the Romantic style with which Mahler was intimately familiar.

If I go back to the blues, I think most of us guitar manglers would recognise a BB King blues box lick or a E turnaround without difficulty. These are familiar and common features in the music. Jazz has analogous features, as does Classical, Baroque and Romantic music etc. You have to expose yourself to the music in detail and the time honoured way of doing this in Jazz and Blues - which are not principally score based musics - is to work things out from records. Do enough and you won't need to make a conscious effort any longer.

So it's about learning to hear words and sentences. Things that are comprehensible are easier to recognise and remember. In the same, we can remember a sentence in English easier than we can one in a completely unknown language, because we can operate at the phrase/sentence/meaning level rather than having to retain an apparently arbitrary string of sounds, letters or symbols.

As I far as I can tell, the ear works in the same way. We can do our relative pitch exercises and get good at recognising tone clusters etc, but it will always be more intuitive to recognise familiar material and sounds.

Good, so, basically, it's listening and learning, in precise detail, good Jazz Phrases from the great Jazz recordings.

[Jazz4Four]

I'm actually rather sympathetic to this... I'm not sure noodling around on a scale gets one anywhere musically of itself. It may sound agreeable enough for a jazz workshop end of course performance, or a school big band gig. Which is why it is taught, I suspect.

How would one be able to develop personality in their playing without doing this to some extent? I'm not saying noodling should be one's primary practice routine.

Personally, I don't believe that stringing together licks from others is improvisation, though it may sound "right" enough. I feel like I can often tell when someone is doing that, though there may be good reasons, e.g., if you're in a situation where the part requires that you sound like Wes Montgomery, you play his licks.

Everyone is going to learn a bunch of phrases that everyone uses, but I guess I don't understand hobbyists who approach improvising as collecting licks and deploying them verbatim. This is assuming that finding your own "voice" is the goal of improvisational music, of course.

[charlieparker]

The alternate title of the video is "How To Overcomplicate Music". My God, how do people even attempt to play music with approaches like this?

One thing I've learned about jazz is there is no shortage of people who will suck the life out of it by introducing unnecessary complexity.

How does "Hear stuff, learn to identify it, and learn to play it on your instrument" not cover it?

It's not that complicated at all. The guy can play his ass off. It's about identifying where your weak points are when playing by ear. Maybe watch the follow ups where he talks about specifically working on this stuff. It's all pretty straightforward advice.