Improving Pitch And Listening Skills

[lpmarshall]

Re: Improving Pitch And Listening Skills

If I have a melody in my head, I usually do one of 3 things:

Hum the melody, and try and match it with the guitar.
Figure it by ear on a keyboard.
Loop the chords and figure it out on the guitar.

Lately the latter two have brought me some success. But also keep in mind I don't have the slightest clue on how to play the keys. I just mess around until I have it down. If I need to play a chord I have to look up piano chord charts on the internets

If I have one giant glaring flaw in my music, it's that I barely know any theory. I probably know more than I let on, but I don't talk in musical terms. When working parts out for songs now, I loop the progression and come up with something from there. It's really helped me break out of the pentatonic territory. I told myself "You are not playing any pentatonic patterns on top of this progression" and it led me in another direction.

If you hit a wrong note, you'll know right away. But it's just practice.

I've played in a few cover bands, so picking that stuff out has gotten easier over time. After a lot of practice your ears can easily pick out chords: major, minor, 7th, and so on.

[Quencho092]

Re: Improving Pitch And Listening Skills

I like that 'promise' not to play any pentatonic patterns. It's such a huge crutch, it makes playing blues and such into a plug and play type thing which is neat for starters, but it can take some time to outgrow it if one doesn't fight the urge to just chill on the blues forever.

I want to see if that arpeggio chart helps any of you guys out. I've printed out tons of them and handed it out to every fretted instrumentalist I know, some improved exponentially after really being able to flow on those chord tones and select what they want to hear instead of being limited to what they can play/understand. I wish I would have stumbled across that chart 8 years ago when I started guitar, so I throw them around to see if it helps other players out.

[sosomething]

Re: Improving Pitch And Listening Skills

For a guy whose brain is supposedly addled by drug use, you seem pretty on the ball!

[SteveAlysis]

Re: Improving Pitch And Listening Skills

this!

Put down your guitar and write a riff in your head.

Now pick up your guitar and figure out how to play it.

Do this enough times and you'll get pretty good at figuring things out by ear.

I know it works because it's pretty much how I've approached music my whole life.

This is pretty much how I've always played. No lessons or books. Always found myself bored trying to learn others songs. Recently noticed I got too involved in the pedal world and my playing got dramatically worse. Past few weeks or so have been straight into amp putting the songs in my brain together, and ppicking apart the areas I feel could use a certain delay, heavy verb, or whatever works.

THOUGH I have been trying to learn some Guthrie Govan songs and though a pain in the a$$, its fun.

[wahwah]

Re: Improving Pitch And Listening Skills

I'm another on the self-taught hack side of things with no formal theory training. Desire and necessity have been my two greatest teachers. As a teenager in the mid 70's, that meant rushing home from school to try to work out another 8 bars of Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin songs by repeatedly lifting the needle on the record player and dropping it back to a rough estimate of the part I was after. I had The Beatles Complete songbook and the Led Zeppelin songbook, complete with box chord charts. In many cases they were horribly inaccurate, presumably pieced together by some half deaf copyist with a degree in that'll be good enough. This forced me to go searching the fretboard for what might really be going on. I can recall spending about two months working out "Over The Hills And Far Away." If I had relied on the songbook, I still wouldn't be able to play it.

I have learnt a lot and developed my ear by being thrown in the deep end. Over the years, I have had to learn many 30 song repertoires for fill in gigs within a matter of days. Initially I would write out simple chordal road map charts, but I found that I became too dependent on them throughout the rehearsal process and didn't ever fully learn the song as an internalised 'knowing.' So I developed a sturdy musical memory by learning the songs in their entirety and committing them to said memory. It's amazing how the skills of chord recognition and intervals develop throughout this process. I would never suggest it for jazz comping or any of the more complex forms, but for simple rock and pop music, it soon becomes apparent that the familiar repetitive themes that form the cliches of chord progressions in the most popular styles become quite predictable and easy to fathom in a very short time.

These methods may seem haphazard to some, and understandably so. For those who travel the formal theory route, they are bound to learn far more information. Application is another matter, and I have seen many trained musicians think their way right out of being able to effectively contribute to a band, despite their knowledge. Done well, and by somebody who balances this knowledge with the many other aspects involved in being a musician, they can be hard to beat. But to those of us who don't choose that path, there are now far more tools available on teh intrawebz to facilitate the accumulation of knowledge in order to teach ourselves. I have replaced my record player and needle skipping technique with the excellent Capo slow downer software for tricky passages, but all these years later, I can pretty much hear a simple song and its arrangement on a couple of listens. There's no way around putting in the time to make this happen.





Cheers.......................................... wahwah

[Quencho092]

Re: Improving Pitch And Listening Skills

For a guy whose brain is supposedly addled by drug use, you seem pretty on the ball!

I get lapses in concentration, and my ideas don't follow the same logical sequences that they used to. Makes for some comical tangents in the music though.

Seriously, that arpeggio chart changed my life! chord tones>>>>scale runs, especially if you wanna use your guitar like a drumset.