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Very unfair statement, C, and I never made that case. What I did say was that exclusive of savants, a serious musician will 1.) benefit from formal training, and 2.) if he has musical aptitude, he will grow as a result of that exposure. Guitarists need to stop making excuses for their unschooled method of learning assuming that it is artistic, ethereal, and unchallengely creative. The average unschooled guitarist today is limited in his/her abilities and if they are serious . . . they'll hit a roadblock sometime in the future and be stuck there forever. You need both . . . unless of course, you are a savant. . . and how many of those guys are playing any instrument today?
Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Marinero
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09-12-2022 11:45 AM
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TBH I think you'e met too many crap amateurish 'blues' and rock players and associate that ear playing with that. (the secret - those guys aren't really ear players, they just like to think they are.) Originally Posted by Marinero
Anyway, I feel I'm going over the same ground in my posts. I feel I have put some thought and research into this and hopefully some people will find some of the questions and ideas interesting.
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At any rate (didn't have time to read the whole disagreement) at some point, to play jazz (and I assume we're talking about that here) you need to develop some way of categorizing and cataloging sounds. Whether or not that involves theory is actually unimportant, but you have to have some kind of organization. The hunt and peck until you can peck correctly every time method doesn't really work for jazz, because there's so much precedent in what "jazz lines" sound like ("language," I think people like to call it, never been a big fan of the term, but whatever)
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Look at Pat Martino, the legendary guitarist.
An example of how brilliantly you can combine theory with practice. Author of great books and training videos.
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"TBH I think you'e met too many crap amateurish 'blues' and rock players and associate that ear playing with that. (the secret - those guys aren't really ear players, they just like to think they are.)"
Christian Miller
Wow, boys and girls! How's that for an assumption about someone C doesn't know??? I'm going to let this one ride, C but I am quite surprised it came from you. I guess I'll just let Dinah respond.
Marinero
https://youtu.be/upJ3OgMRiUA
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Part time musician opinion - even more so due to the heat.
I play by ear but only when I'm watching my fingers
and tend to know what happens when I place them in certain ways, so pretty aware of stuff that works. I don't know if that's "theory" in itself: "lydian dominant" is, of course, no more and no less than a name, likewise a pivot modulation, both of which I play without giving a thought to what they may be called. Knowing that a given pattern works, for example, I suppose is also applied "theory".
That said, chord/scale superimposition in jazz, which I only really started looking at recently, is seriously kicking my butt. Another 5,000 hours should do it.
Anyway, theory is necessary in that you need to know your options, but it doesn't matter how you arrive at that awareness, IMO.
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i mean I was just joking but given your reaction… Originally Posted by Marinero
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No one’s arguing that their aren’t brilliant players who also have a very strong theoretical background. Originally Posted by kris
Interesting thing about Pat - he had his own very original way of looking at things, that he arrived at himself (maybe some of it came from Dennis Sandole, dunno?). A bit like Barry Harris in fact.
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Chicken or egg thing. What came first? Playing a musical instrument or studying, explaining, writing about, and/or discussing the results?
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Honestly, I think the dichotomy between theory and ear playing is a false one. Theory is just a name for certain devices and if you can't use your ears to distinguish them you would have a hard time using any theoretical construction. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Maybe a better distinction is how the knowledge is acquired. One way is to read a book with a bunch of rules and try and internalize them. Where as another approach is to try and extract that directly from the music by yourself or with the help of a mentor.
I think with the latter you eventually end up with a catalog of things that could be called your personal theory.
TLDR, the distinction between theory and ear is less important than means by which that knowledge acquired.
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very well put. Yeah I could definitely entertain this perspective. Originally Posted by charlieparker
one thing we keep running into is every poster has a different definition of ‘theory’ and we are often discussing them as if they are the same … your definition is pretty far away from my own definition. by your def, Django knew theory for instance. Jimmy Smith is using a similar dentition if I’ve understood him right.
i would myself call that craft or know how. That’s also what I mean when I talk about a sort of private music theory that unschooled players might develop. People are pattern recognition machines after all. It’s why see faces in clouds and so on.
But I don’t think this is what most people mean talk about theory Vs ear approaches, schooled and unschooled players and so on, including the players I know who say they don’t know ‘theory’. This idea of theory seems to me to boil down largely to knowing the ‘right’ names for things, at least where bop and straight-ahead stuff is concerned.
so maybe not even discussing the T word is a good move lol.
My proposal is that the process may not differ very much for anyone who can actually play and people are getting into the woods debating about stuff that’s not really that important to the learning process.
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At the end of the day, it's what comes out of your guitar that matters. All the rest is mostly just talk, innit, (or can be) which is a poor substitute for "time on your instrument".
Now, where was I with that Em7 arp over the Cmaj7? .. oh damn, another work message to answer.
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^ Lol
My favorite theory concept is sequencing. Can that ever sound bad if you just sequence stuff all day? Usually it sounds bad when you're trying to muck around and make this artistic line out of nothing lol.
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If you take the theory and seriously practicing an instrument will end up with a whole array of music books.
Too manny...:-)
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The answer to this question is no Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
The answer to this question is no a diatonic step lower
...
etc
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Clearly the real metric is the number of words I can type on JGO -) Originally Posted by Peter C
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You're alright in my book Christian because you're a player, as evidenced by your recent CD and you have great taste. You also have formidible keyboard skills and historical overview, which are, alas, wasted on me here as I have to do a lot of very diverse technical reading during the day and get eye strain. "Schenkerian analysis", by gad!
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I once mentioned Schenker to the missus and she said 'oh the three blind mice guy?' Originally Posted by Peter C
"Schenkerian analysis", by gad!
After that I've found him quite hard to take seriously. Maybe I'm missing out, but I don't see the necessity for any of it.
The Americans like it I think? TBH, the Americans do love their neat systems.
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The vast majority of great jazz musicians are master theorists, perhaps without realizing it. Many jazz guitarists including the non readers know fretboard theory. The only one I know of who was, as far as I know, totally an ear player was Django Reinhardt. I still marvel at the complex musicality of his work and wonder how he was able to do it.
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Hi, C, Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I have just finished my first cup of coffee of the day and I felt a small, but discernible tear in the corner of my eye after reading your touching(?) response. I have read many of your posts with a feel for your normal conversational tone and, well . . . you know where I'm going. So, moving forward. There is a wide camp of readers on JGF and the battle lines are very clear to me in re: theory vs. ear and I've stated my opinion quite fully so there's no need to elaborate further. However, there is another reality that is quantifiable and can easily be experienced when listening to musicians play more than one set or over the course of a week. . . namely, repetitive, rote improvisations. The idea that a Jazz musician plays fresh ideas every time he/she plays a song is patently naive and untrue. There is no way for a human to be so persistently creative and all musicians deal with this reality. So, we listen to the second set of a Jazzer and find the exact same licks he/she played in the first set. What happened? He/she found a combination of notes that worked and goes no further. If it's the "ear" guy, he just doesn't hear anything else. If it's the theorist, he continues to use the same combination of patterns/forms because they worked. But, the difference is that if the ear player is stifled in his/her creativity, he has nowhere else to go. However, the theorist/musician may easily seek differing combinations, forms from his formal knowledge to break through the creativity barrier and add fresh insights to his music. This is the case for 99.9% of improvisational musicians. Savants, however, probably only represent .1% of musicians and may never be heard by the Jazz audience since many leave music at an early age to pursue more lucrative careers leaving their ranks thin and emaciated.
Marinero
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This is genius. Originally Posted by rsclosson
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So, if you're feeling stuck for ideas ....
The theorist has a vast array of ways to find different notes to play. Not so much, though, for varying the rhythmic content. Most of what I read about theory is about pitch, not rhythm.
The ear player also has a vast array of choices. He can go to youtube and listen to multiple versions of just about anything. Even if the tune is an original, he can probably find a similar set of changes in some other tune. And, the ear player gets both pitch and rhythm at the same time. You might view it as building jazz vocabulary.
If I had to pick, which I don't, I'd pick ear. In reality, it has to be both and I don't really know what the debate is about.
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"The ear player also has a vast array of choices. He can go to youtube and listen to multiple versions of just about anything" rpjazzguitar
Hi, rp,
So, would listening to other players' recordings stimulate one's personal creativity? Is there a danger of actively or subliminally copying another musician's licks? Is this a concern? Has this technique worked for you and, if so, how was it successful?
Marinero
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I remember reading somewhere, maybe here, that if you learn to play the head of 200 tunes in various places on the fretboard, you will never have to worry about how to improvise again. I am not sure if that is valid, but I do notice that the more tunes I have learned, the better I improvise. (However, I also have studied music and especially jazz theory)
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You bring up some excellent points. Originally Posted by Marinero
Where is the divide between absorbing jazz vocabulary and subliminally copying another musician's licks?
If I were to offer myself as an example, it would probably be for things not to bother with. But, I'll try to answer your question.
To the extent that anything has worked for me, the major thing has been being influenced by the feel or mood of a player whose music I love.
There is a well known jazz guitarist whose playing I can recognize in a few notes who, in the right moment, can sound exactly like Jimi Hendrix, although his usual playing is nothing like that. In fact, who among us can't play Purple Haze?
My guess is that for most people, copying licks won't hurt one's creativity. Well, not any more than being so focused on theoretical devices that one's solos sound like bad Artificial Intelligence apps. And, in the right hands either approach can produce great results.
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