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Originally Posted by lammie200
playing music, whether spontaneously improvised, composed or anywhere in between has to be intuitive. It doesn’t seem to work any other way. You can test this simply by recording yourself playing something to click. Anything that isn’t yet intuitive suffers rhythmically or you may not even be able to play it even if you think you have it down.
But a lot of things that are intuitive don’t start that way. Practice is usually about getting things into intuition. I feel that things that are learned by ear go into intuition quicker. Otoh good readers can hear what’s on the page. Theory based ideas have to be learned by ear too in my experience. I might have a cool Diminished pattern or something, but I have to play it and sing it enough times before I can use it.
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12-26-2022 03:25 PM
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Christian's take matches my experience as a writer. There is a level of rhetorical-stylistic performance that goes beyond my basic linguistic competence, so I find myself, say, mimicking a Shakespeare line or deploying a turn of phrase based on Faulkner or Frost or E. E. Cummings or any of the other writers I've read, whether or not I've explicitly analyzed their work. The words just show up when I'm reaching for a phrase. It's the result of what I call "filling the hopper"--which is what my wife's writing students have not done, which is why so much of their writing comes across as middle-school rather than university-level.
I can explain the technical side of most of what I produce--I've been trained in linguistics, semantics, semiotics, rhetoric, and prosody--but when I'm generating copy, I'm not thinking about those technical matters--I'm getting down what I want to say as precisely and gracefully and wittily as I can.
A pedantic footnote: My understanding of what we would now call the writing pedagogy (then: rhetoric) in classical times and probably later is that it consisted of copying and imitating exemplars as well as learning the technical terms for the various devices and forms. An attenutated version was still in use when I started teaching freshman composition in 1966. And while my ear was very usefully sharpened by a graduate seminar on the linguistics-rhetoric nexus, my experience is that no amount of naming figures of speech or types of essay will make up for a poverty of reading experience. And my observation of my musical progress over the decades is that hopper-filling has been at least as important as learning the recipe for a m7-flat-5.
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Originally Posted by lammie200
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
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Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
I don’t see how this thought relates to what I said.Last edited by Christian Miller; 12-26-2022 at 06:24 PM.
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Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
I can't play at that level, but I can play by ear or by theory. I prefer by ear, but, with complicated harmony, I'm prone to hitting some clams until I know the sound of the tune really well. But, otoh, I can't really tell them apart. Say I prehear a m7b5 coming up -- I tend to hear the b5 quite strongly and I know how to find it in voicings I regularly use (one of them in particular). So, I can grab that note and I can find others because I know the grip that includes that note and I know the chord tones. Theory or ear? I'd say they're melted together and you can't unmelt them.
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^ At my ability level, I sure can't tell theory and ear apart. I feel having music knowledge helps me in tandem with ear. That's the way many greats do it so there's no way I'd try to pursue an aural above or to the exclusion of all else approach.
About the harmony. It doesn't bother me to work on thought out approaches to hitting right notes. Because that's only one aspect of music. I can use prescribed notes devices and improvise the rhythm or phrasing. Or if I want to work on earing out a line or passage, then I can do that too.
Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Hi !
I listened to podcasts last night about Joe Pass.
Joe Pass had had guitar lessons from the best guitar teacher. He learnt how to read and studied classical guitar.
His father used to make him play 8 hours per day.
So he knew everything that everyone should know but didn't talk a lot about it.
He didn't need it, instead of talking he played.
Les premieres influences guitaristiques : episode 1/8 du podcast Joe Pass, le Art Tatum de la guitare
I'm sorry if you can't understand French.
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Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
in practice you obviously tend to have lead sheet and parts etc for original music and arrangements, but it sometimes comes up; try this line for the intro etc. and then playing/singing is the fastest way to communicate what you mean. You might spell things out if they really don’t get it, but for most good players this unecessary most of the time. Every working jazz player I know has banked a lot of time learning music by ear and is very good at it, many of them much better than me. They can break the phrase down theoretically themselves if they need to and notation, if needed then functions as an aide memoire.
I often break things down that way in teaching, naming the elements of the line as ‘arpeggio, scale, enclosure’ etc and Barry used to explain the construction of lines in a similar way. It can be useful as a didactic tool. I would tend to work by ear first, singing or playing the line to the student until they have, with any required theoretical explanation coming after. Barry tended to tell us what he was doing first (scale up and down, chord on 3 etc) and then sing it (and the everyone played the line back), so the other way around. So long as the ears are engaged I don’t think it matters too much; Barry’s approach is very modular anyway so naming the ‘Lego bricks’ is important, and your ears still ended up working very hard in these classes trust me lol.
if you can categorise a chord theoretically, that is obviously useful if you want to write it into a chart as a chord symbol (bearing in mind the limitations of the system.)
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Btw obviously if you have no theory your only way to communicate is by singing or playing your ideas.
(Of course being able to notate your ideas on the staff does not mean that you need to have a theoretical understanding either!)
otoh consider that this may not just be because the musican has no theory - it may mean that the musician has ideas that are not easily analysed or notated in, for example, chord symbols.
Sometimes the composer themselves might not be able to analyse the chord they have written, and may have chosen it because they just liked the sound.
I think this kind of ‘not theoretical’ writing is the case more often than one might think if one is looking to write non functional or non standard harmony; the ‘chords out of a hat’ thing that Kenny Werner teaches is great for coming up with ideas for tunes and reharms for instance. In this case you choose chords purely because you like them.
That’s not to say these chord relationships couldn’t be analysed; but rather that their analysis is not actually necessary for the composer or reharmonist, allowing the creative side of the ear and brain to have full reign.
which reminds me - Mick Goodrick had an exercise where the teacher played a loop of randomly chosen chords and without telling the student, the student was to solo purely by ear over them. Some of his students got really good at this apparently; Brecker used to work on something similar.
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Originally Posted by Lionelsax
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here's an interesting bit from Martin Taylor and some revelation "sort of" at about 1 min into the YT ...https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=-FdQtR96MKE
S
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Originally Posted by SOLR
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The most important communication in
performance is not before but when it
is happening, real time. Playing by ear
allows the musicians to communicate
with another through the music itself -
it's like a telepathic message sent and
received that says, "Hear this?", "Yes".
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Originally Posted by Irishmuso
the other thing is reading… it’s like use it or lose it? If you do reading gigs you maintain those chops. If you don’t they can get rusty.Last edited by Christian Miller; 12-29-2022 at 04:19 AM.
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
The musicians who play the shows, on the other hand, read notes very well.
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Pretty sure I’ve read or heard an interview somewhere with Martin Taylor where he said he more or less lied about not being able to read in order to get the job on the cruise ship, it was a normal ‘cruise ship dance band orchestra’ type of gig, and once on the stand, he had to fake his way through it. Presumably it was playing chords and maybe the occasional solo, I’m sure he could do it with no trouble.
He wasn’t employed to play solo guitar, I think it was well before he started doing that.
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Martin talks about it in this interview. It wasn’t any old cruise liner, it was the QE2 (and he was only 17)!
Interview: Martin Taylor | Guitar.com | All Things Guitar
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There are three types of good musicians IMO. There are musicians that are good artists, musicians that are good imitators and musicians that are good scientists.
Some "ear players" like Django, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Muddy Waters, Jimi Hendrix etc were actually artists in the true sense of the word. But a lot of "ear players" aren't artists, they are just visionless imitators. A rare few of them may even be exceptionally gifted at picking things up by ear and remembering millions of tunes but that's just it. They can't create their own arrangements or significantly build upon the artists they imitate. They justify their simplistic approach by saying things like, well BB King didn't have to play a lot of notes to make great music. Yes, but the difference is BB King friggin invented the musical ideas he played (or significantly built upon the artists that came before him).
Then there are the scientists. They may or may not have good ears but they understand that they are not the one in a million divinely creative types who can endlessly generate musical ideas out of thin air or invent a whole new way of playing the music they like (ear and creativity are not the same things). So they study music, concepts and their instruments to stimulate their creativity and expand on what they can hear.
These are not exclusive categories. Every musician is a blend of the three perhaps.Last edited by Tal_175; 12-29-2022 at 10:47 AM.
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Nice Tal...great points.
I tend to keep it simple...LOL. We have internal and external skills, and we all have levels of both.
Rhythm, Tonal and Creativity being internal and,
Notation and executive skills being external.
This is where most educational directions seem to be going.... and there are plenty of push button sources for more details... LOL
Personally I still say as a jazz musician you need "Technical skills", chops on your instrument and you need to understand "Form"... how to organize the space or physical time you play.
The better your ears and understanding or awareness of theory get... the easier it becomes to play and verbally talk about it.
You can be an Artist, Imitator or Scientist, amateur or Professional... but without technical skills and understandings of Form... you won't get very far.
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Originally Posted by grahambop
Thx for linking, a good read.....
S
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Originally Posted by grahambop
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Teaching theory to someone who can't "sing" a well-known tune on their instrument, one that's firmly ingrained in their mind (Happy Birthday, for instance), and has no sense of pitch (clueless as to what key a song is in, or what chord is being played), is akin to handing a two-year-old a copy of Warriner's English Grammar and Composition in order to teach them to speak.
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Barry Harris used theory to teach outlining the form (chord changes) by scales.
How many guitars and amps have you owned?
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