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I see a lot of stuff here on arpeggios, scales and so on...but what I'd like to ask is: does anyone here practice vocal improvisation as well as improvising on the guitar?
I think everyone here on the forum doesn't doubt the value of both ear training AND theory. But I really find a lot of charm in the idea of practicing vocal improvisation, and then trying to translate it onto guitar. It does have some precedent, I believe- I've read that Kurt Rosenwinkel will sing his lines as he plays them, and there's a bass player (Slam Stewart: thank you, Randalljazz) who would play his lines and sing them an octave higher at the same time.
I think this is something that would be very useful to practice: improvising using scat singing over a progression, to get a feel for it. Another good one would be improvising a vocal line, and then trying to copy it on the guitar- as time goes on, you'll eventually be able to get past the vocal bit and just 'hear it in your head' and translate it to guitar seemlessly, or you could hum the line and play it at the same time and so on...
Another thing that would make this useful is: it lets you express musical ideas that you might not be able to quite muster on the guitar. In a lot of the technique threads, people say that they don't want their hands to limit their ideas- at the times when their hands ARE limiting their ideas, they can practice and experiment using vocal improvisation.
Just a thought I felt would make an interesting discussion.Last edited by Shadow of the Sun; 11-27-2009 at 05:04 PM. Reason: Adding in Slam Stewart
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11-26-2009 05:42 PM
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There's a big difference between playing what you sing and singing what you play. I would surmise almost everyone here can sing what they play, but the vice versa is what we're all striving for, I think.
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True enough, but I think that actually practising (like I suggested: singing a line, then trying to play it until you can get it right almost all the time, and then just focusing on hearing the line 'in your head' and playing it) would be very helpful for being able to play what you sing.
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That is so true. Playing what you sing is a very high level skill. I'd guess that being able to both 1) sing really good lines and 2) spontaneously translate them to guitar is a skill that is beyong the ability of the majority of people... no matter how much they practice it.
Originally Posted by lkmuller
It's much easier to learn a vocabulary on guitar and play those lines on guitar than it is to sing those lines.
Just try to sing this... 1 b3 3 1 (doesn't matter what key but in C that would be C Eb E C). Play the first note as and reference.
Can you sing that accurately without referring to your instrument? I'm guessing most guitar players can not.
But that is so easy and so common on the guitar. It's part of my guitar vocabulary that I can hear and apply.
In theory, playing what you sing is a wonderful idea (if you have a good vocabulary that you can sing). In practice, it's just not practical for most.
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Fep, I'm going to respectfully disagree, but that's the beauty of discussions: we don't need to all agree!
I think the beauty of vocal improvising is that we can focus on getting good sounding lines without immediately having to analyze them. I'm going to bet that you can sing along to a jazz tune and sound kinda good, even if you have no idea what notes you're singing. From there, it's just a matter of practice to get better.
Being able to translate those lines onto guitar, well, that's just ear training. I'm going to admit that ear training is quite arduous, but again, it's something you can practice.
And, this is just my view: even if it is not practical for most, I'd like to think that it'd be good to practice it in the hope that you can get it to work than to simply say "No, not going to work" and never giving it a try.
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slam stewart Originally Posted by Shadow of the Sun
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I don't know is it practical or impractical for some, for most, etc.. I will admit that it is certainly a pain in the tail, but I would like to think that it is not IMPOSSIBLE to keep getting better at "ear" playing in general anyway.
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I think that music can be taught and learned VERY well by ear- folk music traditions, for example, flamenco guitar, and Indian classical music are all transmitted primarily by ear and have been for centuries. I think it's just a matter of sticking to it, honestly.
And, if you can learn songs by ear pretty easily, what's to stop your singing a line, and then trying to play it? And, when you're good at that, hearing a line in your head and playing it?
I think it's a series of baby-steps.
Personally, I love vocal improvisation. It gives me the freedom to express and experiment with stuff that I can't play just yet (I've just gone from a few months playing guitar to playing bass for a bit). And, if I had an audio recorder, I'd keep it with me so I could sing little lines into it so that I can learn them on my instrument and work on them.
All in all, I think my opinion on this is: it can't hurt to practice it, and it might just really help. I'm not saying you shouldn't learn theory and just use your ear (although I do hate learning music off paper, to be honest), but that you should work on your ear and being able to play by ear just as much- and learning to play stuff that you've vocally improvised seems like a bloody good idea to me.
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I don't know. At the age of 42.....I'm not even sure what the baby steps are. People say "master the intervals", so I learn the intervals and can now distinguish all the intervals pretty easily (but out of context). I can get up to about 4 random notes correctly. Sometimes I can recognize a certain pattern or scale or something. When it comes time to sing something, I can't get the 1 b3 3 thing that Fep was talking about.
People say "pratice the solfeggio" and I might learn to sight-sing a tune in 20 years. Sing a bebop line from a Charlie Parker solo? Forget it.
How do you get from here to there? I don't know....
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[quote=Shadow of the Sun;57013]I think that music can be taught and learned VERY well by ear- folk music traditions, for example, flamenco guitar, and Indian classical music are all transmitted primarily by ear and have been for centuries. I think it's just a matter of sticking to it, honestly.
Sure, it happens all the time. Itìs just that those people either have some natural gift or started ear development at about 4 years and then never stopped.
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Ok, I will stop procrastinating now. (;
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I think it really helps to develop the voice. Intonation as well as building up lines, though this seems to be difficult. I try to sing simple solos or melodies, first with the record and then without. And after some time you get more freely.
I also try to sightsing from the Omnibook, but heck..
Another thing is to take some simple patterns from a book like "Building up a jazz vocabulary" and sing them over progressions. And suddenly you realize how bad your intonation is. But your ear develops and your overall musical feeling.
Stay singing. The good thing about it: You have your voice always with you. You can practise nearly everywhere.
Hey Shadow of the Sun- you like Ulver?
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Hey Franco,
Try singing a Parker solo this way (from a transcription).
Temporarily strip away all the rhythm and make everything a half note.
From there it is just singing intervals. Figure it out in relation to the key note.
Separately sing the rhythm on one note.
When ready bring the 2 together.
In theory, if you can sing intervals then you can can figure out any melody away from the guitar by
breaking it down into as small of steps as necessary, persistence and patience.
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Okay, I sang over some changes and transcribed it. And I played over the same changes and transcribed it (I made the playing a bit fancy to illustrate my point).
My point is there is no way I could have created the lines I played on guitar from singing. (I'm not sure I'd ever sing those kind of lines, no matter how much I practice, and I practice singing as part of ear training, a lot, every day. And btw, I can sing the example I gave in my previous post, I can sing the church modes (i.e. sing a mixolydian scale etc.) I can sing natural, harmonic and melodic minor scales. I do have some experience with all this and more practice than most).
However, from my ear training classes and discussions with the professor I've learned there is a very small minority that have a lot better ears than us more average ear folks. So, for the small minority this play what you sing may be attainable.
The lines I sing as improvisations are simple and mostly diatonic. That's fine, but I want to play a larger vocabulary.
Here's the pdf of my transcriptions (bar 1 to 6 are the singing, bar 7 to 12 the playing).Last edited by fep; 11-27-2009 at 11:05 AM.
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I think building a vocabulary is simply a matter of working at it, whether it's on guitar or in vocal improv.
As it comes to your improvisation approach: if you like improvising like that on guitar, why stop? It seems to be working just fine for you, which to me is a bloody good thing.
But I'm going to work on vocal improvisation because I think it'll be valuable for me in helping my creativity and so on in improvising. Same with ear training- especially for learning songs. That, and to be entirely honest, scat singing is FUN
. I love it. Though I'm doing it to improve my playing, I also do it because it's really fun. Learning by ear is really fun and satisfying when you get it down, although frustrating at first, too.
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Originally Posted by bako
always interesting ideas here anyway. I will give it a try -
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I'd have to agree with all of that. However, for me I'm not sure it's the most efficient way of improving on guitar. But fun is fun. Originally Posted by Shadow of the Sun
I think building a vocabulary is simply a matter of working at it, whether it's on guitar or in vocal improv.
As it comes to your improvisation approach: if you like improvising like that on guitar, why stop? It seems to be working just fine for you, which to me is a bloody good thing.
But I'm going to work on vocal improvisation because I think it'll be valuable for me in helping my creativity and so on in improvising. Same with ear training- especially for learning songs. That, and to be entirely honest, scat singing is FUN. I love it. Though I'm doing it to improve my playing, I also do it because it's really fun. Learning by ear is really fun and satisfying when you get it down, although frustrating at first, too.
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Franco? I've got an example of two very well acclaimed players who didn't, at first, have the ability to play like they did later on in life, and who got it by just working like madmen.
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.
The second is- and this guy is much more relevant- Charlie Parker. Really. Bird wasn't a natural genius with his horn; he's gone on record saying that he wasn't. To quote Wikipedia (I've read a biography of Bird that agrees with the quote) "Parker began playing the saxophone at age 11 and at age 14 joined his school's band using a rented school instrument. One story holds that, without formal training, he was terrible, and thrown out of the band. Experiencing periodic setbacks of this sort, at one point he broke off from his constant practicing."
Charlie wasn't a natural genius, he wasn't like Mozart who, as a kid, would hear his sister play on harpsichord and then play it back to her. Charlie got to the skill level he did by sheer hard work. Again quoting Wikipedia (and again supported by a biography I've read) "Exasperated and determined, in any case, at this time Parker improved the quality of practicing, learning the blues, "Cherokee" and "rhythm changes" in all twelve keys. In this wood-shedding period, Parker mastered improvisation and developed some of the ideas of be-bop. In an interview with Paul Desmond, he said he spent 3-4 years practicing up to 15 hours a day. Rumor has it that he used to play many other tunes in all twelve keys. The story, though undocumented, would help to explain the fact that he often played in unconventional concert pitch key signatures, like E (which transposes to C# for the alto sax)."
I have no doubt that there ARE musical geniuses, no doubt at all. I bet there's a kid right now picking up a guitar and playing a Charlie Parker solo, by ear, right off the bat. But these two folks show that you DON'T need to be born a genius to end up as a damn good musician. It's just work, work, work.
As for ear training, I'd like to see if I can get my hands on a computer program that will let me at least attempt to simulate what I think is the most fun way to learn to play by ear: call and response stuff. What I'm hoping for is that the computer will randomly pick a scale, and play a short melody in it (hopefully it'll be able to slowly increase the difficulty of the melodies over time, to better train out ears). There'd be an option so you could repeat the melody as much as you wanted, until you've got it perfect, at which point you can move on to a new melody. This is pretty similar to how Irish folk music is traditionally taught.
Anyways, that's enough of my rambling. Sorry for such a long post.
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Showdow, you might want to check out practica musica. Maybe they have a demo. That software and sight singing have been the two most fruitful ear training excercises for me.
It will play progressively more difficult melodies which you then notate - you are instructed to do it without an instrument though, straight from sound to notation.
Seems to be a very similar skill or at least the first step. Step one identifying the melody, step two finding it on your instrument.
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I had to scat solos to 26-2 and Giant Steps for a class.
It was fun. Challenging but not exactly held to the same standards of pitch and tambre that a legit vocalist has to deal with. Either way it was fun to work on.
I can pretty much sing whatever I can play on the guitar save for chords and demonstrate it to students in an effort to get them to listen to themselves more clearly. Some of them get it, others are clueless.
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Me, I'm trying to sing everything. I also spend much time with a digital piano, hammering out notes, matching pitch, practicing lines, etc. I've found that a piano is a better instrument to use than a guitar for this purpose.
Kessel had a great quote, something like, "I don't think of myself as a guitarist, I'm a musician, first and foremost. I hear my music in my head, first of all".
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Isn't this kind of the opposite of what we're supposed to do though? I know my teacher keeps hounding me "sing while you play" - the problem is, I sometimes just end up singing what I would have played on the guitar, so my vocal improvs just end up sounding like licks. On the other hand, if I actually sing phrases, and then try to play those on the guitar, those phrases usually come out sounding a lot more lyrical than anything I would typically come up with on the guitar. Originally Posted by Jake Hanlon
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I can do both, sing what I play/play what I sing. probably wasn't clear on that, my bad. The only real difference between the vocal expression and the guitar expression is I am more accurate on the guitar since I train that, and do not train my voice. Plus I cannot sing the chords (since I can't sing polyphonically) and thus my guitar playing expresses things better then my vocalizations.
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OK, gotcha
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I don't think learning to sing what you're playing is
harder than other aspects of learning to play.
You just have to start with the basics and play
very slowly. Play diatonic melodies in open position.
Melodies you already are familiar with (without wide
interval leaps). Also scalar patterns:
13243546 -- 321432543654 -- 132243354465 etc
and broken arpeggios.
Learning to do this will help you phrase like a horn player,
though it's not the only way to go. Some people play
solos which are more idiomatic to the guitar and probably
wouldn't benefit from singing solos.
I almost always sing along with music when driving.
Sing the melodies, riffs, basslines in familiar music which is not
too complex. Wouldn't do it if someone is riding... :^)
Its great ear training.Last edited by swboy; 11-28-2009 at 10:46 PM.
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