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"The first is Chuck Schuldiner, who was a big influence on heavy metal (I know, I know, it's not jazz, but bear with me). His parents bought him a guitar when he was 9, and paid for lessons- he went to them for less than a year and learned all of 'Mary Had A Little Lamb'. But then he got an electric, fell in love with it, and spent an absolute massive amount of time in the garage practicing, trying to learn stuff by ear. I think that if he was an ear-playing god by virtue of birth, not work, he would have picked up more than Mary Had A Little Lamb in his first year of playing."
Yes, the thing about it is that a guy like that, or many rock players who learned by ear, almost certainly never did any sight-singing or formal ear training. They seem to have developed their ears by constantly TRANSCRIBING (in the sense of just playing copying or copping) stuff from past players. The same seems to be true of Wes Montgomery, etc..
It really should not be necessary to sing. Besides, I don't have time for everything. I would prefer to spend the time transcribing, which I actually enjoy one hell of a lot more than solfeggio and all of that. I don't know.
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11-29-2009 01:37 PM
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Furthermore, if I transcribe, say, a Wes solo I'm often forced to try to hear the chord voicings in his chord solos. What is interesting is that I can MOST CERTAINLY "hear" certain typical Wes chords ("there's that legendary dimished passing chord", that's the 13 chord he usually subsitutes here. etc) and yet I generally can't sing any of these chords (arpeggiated).
I hear these patterns and recognize a certain long lick. I can play it back. But I still can't sing three notes of the damned thing somtimes!!
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Well, Franco, the joy of singing is that you can do it ANYWHERE. Do you drive a lot? Coz if you do, there's a good place to practice your vocal improvisation. Pop in a CD, and just start singing some solos along to the music.
It shouldn't be necessary to sing, to be true, but I think that singing will help you be able to 'hear' in your head what you want to get out of that guitar. I'm not talking about singing a Wes solo and then playing it- I'm more just talking about singing your own thing and THEN playing it, which isn't that much different that transcribing off of a record. I find that when you're singing, you forgo the usual patterns and licks and just hit the pure spontaneity that IS jazz...my hope is that by practicing singing and ear training together, and working on being able to get what you sing onto the guitar, you can eventually completely forgo the singing itself and just 'hear' what you want to play in your mind.
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It's all natural talent. Forget it.
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I think it can be learned. When I started singing what I was playing I was terrible at it but I got better. Remember hearing a diminished chord for the first time? Your ear got used to it and finally accepted and adapted to it I think its much the same. I can't scat sing and play like Benson but I can come a whole lot closer than I once could. Practice practice practice.
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How do you practice something like that? You just start playing and singing at the same time? It sounds like Keith Jarrett on steroids.
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YES. YES INDEED, damnit. I'll just jeep doing it all the time. Scales, arpeggios, everything. Why the heck should I care whether the people next door think I should awful? What nonsense.
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I sing along with EVERYTHING that I play. Like you said, Franco, arps, scales, sight-reading, improvising on tunez, whatever. I've only been doing it a little while now (maybe a month or so), but it has really helped my improv phrasing.
I'm not the only one. You think I would be doing this if I didn't have some damn fine players tell me to do it?
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Sing two notes, an interval. Play them. I don't care how long it takes you to get those two notes right. Once you've got them right, sing two more notes. Play them. Repeat until you can get each of them 9/10 on your first try playing them. Then move up to three. And then up to four. And more, and more, and more.
Eventually, you'll get so in-tune with your inner ear that you can hear the melodies in your head without having to sing them.
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Practice is private time at my house we have group practice with our family band and individual practice. I would start with something easy like a three note phrase that you play anyway. I played a lot of stuff the neighbors didn't like over the years. In my youth they would send the law out to turn me off lol! The more in touch you get with the artistic half of your brain the better, thinking about scales and chords summons the wrong side of the brain for creativity. Sing, hum scat create and duplicate!
Last edited by Bigmagic; 11-30-2009 at 02:42 PM.
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singing along impr. is the best tip i ever got..
just practice it
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I'm all for singing while you play. It definately has helped my phrasing.
But, it's a completely different thing to play what you sing (given you're not just singing lines you already play). If you can truly do that then you can also instantly play anything you hear, close to perfect on the first take. And, you are a great guitar player... Benson like actually.
I doubt most will ever be able to do that. Unfortunately that includes me.
fep
The one who spends tons of time on ear training
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the 1 3b 3 1 example is not good.
we don't really want to play some notes like C Eb E C or to know what interval exacly 2 play but we want to play what we feel..
And I think that singin along impr. helps a lot.Last edited by drobniuch; 11-30-2009 at 08:55 PM.
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The idea of playing exactly what we're hearing is a pretty interesting concept, and I'm skeptical as to whether or not it's something that we even do when we play. For example, when we have a little jazz solo going on in our heads, what we're really doing is a subvocalization. This word is usually applied to speed reading text. The slow readers typically read the words out loud "in their heads," and the fast readers understand what they're reading without actually hearing what they're reading. I believe successful improvisation is a skill more akin to the latter.
Take a guy like George Benson, for example, who is one of the guitarists most known for singing what he plays. When he plays a line off the cuff, do you really think that he's playing what he's hearing, or is he just playing? I do not believe there's any sort of intermediary process that goes between thinking of an idea and playing an idea. We think it, and simultaneously we play. There is no "hearing" that comes before the playing. In crude terms, there's a direct link between the brain and the guitar.
So I can't say exactly what goes through George Benson's head, but I would wager that he doesn't know what goes through his head either. He probably plays guitar while thinking about high level concepts such as harmonic structure, while his hands literally (after years and years of practice) do the rest of the work almost on their own. When he sings with the guitar, this comes from him taking a sort-of 3rd person perspective on what his hands are doing, and trying to match his voice to it. He, like probably every other good guitarist out there, knows what every note on the fretboard sounds like before he plays it. This does not imply that they're hearing these notes in any real sense before they actually play it.Last edited by bifodus; 12-07-2009 at 07:45 PM.
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I will agree but a little disagree..
We want to play a phrase/line that is in our head, so yes it's not in terms of what physically hear..
but it's good to copy a heard line in our head and play it e.g for communication betwen artists on stage.
what i mean is that singing along playing helps just the same as taping the beat with our foot (it's not really necessary but it helps to stay in the rhythm and after a long practice it's really just in our head like in Bensons
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Yeah, I agree. I suppose what I meant in my previous post is that we don't sing (either subvocally our out loud) what we're playing before we play it, but we should be so used to the fretboard that we can sing what we play as we play it, or literally instead of playing it if we wanted to. I saw George Benson do this in a lesson video. He only fingered the notes without actually playing them, but sang his line instead. You can view the entire video here: . It's in seven parts, and I can't remember the exact part where he does this, but it's worth sitting through in order to find it.
Do you think a vocalist sings in her head before she actually sings it? It sounds a little more absurd when you think about it this way, but the vocal apparatus is no less of an instrument than the guitar is. With our species being so evolved to use tools, tools are in effect just extensions of our bodies. With enough practice I believe our brains could become as closely connected to our guitars as they are to our voices.
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Your reading metaphor is an apt one- and it actually supports the vocal improvisation as a means to an end, in my mind.
When you first started reading, you had to say the words out loud. As you got better, you got to being able to read silently, just saying the words in your head. As you got better still, you were able to read without needing to say the words in your head and just get the text.
It's a gradual process of working up to that with reading, and I don't see why it isn't for a guitarist. At first, it'll be slow, sure, but eventually you'll hit the point where you can finger the notes and sing instead of playing them.
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Thanks 4 the link
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Ideally you should hear the notes in our head before we play them otherwise you are just playing a memorized fingering pattern.
And you have to hear the note in your head before you sing them. Ask anyone who has had ear training and consequently sight sings. It may happen so fast that perhaps you're not concious of it.
Here some excercises to illustrate...
1 - absolute beginner... play any note (in your range) on the piano (it's better on piano but guitar will do also), stop the note and now sing it. While singing it play the note again on the piano to see how well you match it.
2 - a baby step forward... play any two notes together (as one 'chord', but not necessarily actual chords, just random notes) on the piano, then try to sing the bottom note, then play the bottom note while you're singing as a check. Now do the same with the top note.
3 - Same as #2 but with three notes and singing all three notes.
If you are not already good at this I'm betting you'll experience that you first conciously hear the note in your head before you attempt to sing it. As you progress (over days, or weeks, or months) the process will speed up and you may no longer have to so conciously force yourself to hear the note first but the process is still happening. It has to, how else could your brain send the correct message to your vocal chords.
For those with good ears, I'm not sure if this experiment will illustrate my point as you may already be so fast at this..Last edited by fep; 12-08-2009 at 09:59 AM.
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I'm not going to sing. Period. And I know that ears can be developed without use of the vocal chords. Is anyone here real suggesting that, if I were born without vocal chords of lost them because of cancer of something, that I could not develop GOOD EARS (that is, certain brain areas for pattern recognition and aural memory) and therefore could not improvise?
Indeed, I have an excellent ear training book that points out repeatedly that the goal is to get the sounds in your brain. Singing is actually a crutch along that path. It is better to sing it IN YOUR HEAD.Last edited by franco6719; 12-09-2009 at 09:27 AM.
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No, Franco, we're not saying that. And, if you'll allow me to say so, I don't really think there's any need to get aggressive about it.
I don't care what you do as long as you're having fun. As long as you've got that achieved, you can play with your elbows for all I care.
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I should've said "I'm not even going to try to sing everything I play," not Iìm not going to sing at all. I find it necessary to sing phrases to hear them better when transcribing sometimes. But I don't see the point of singing everything. I think it's exaggerated.
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Are you afraid you're going to look stupid? Me too...that's why I do it with the door closed.
But hey, it's your choice, Franco. Whether or not you decide to sing has no bearing on me, so do whatever (or don't do whatever) you want. It has had some benefit for me, so I keep doing it.
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Sorry. I didn't mean to come across as aggressive, just assertive.
Originally Posted by Shadow of the Sun
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I somtimes write in Capital letters just for emphasis, because I'm too lazy to add the HTML codes and I type fairly slowly. For me, it does not mean SHOUTING.
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Grant Green, What is This Thing
Yesterday, 01:59 PM in Ear Training, Transcribing & Reading