I main on fingerstyle guitar, but I find my aural understanding on guitar feels impeded. Now I know music theory and how the fretboard works, but translating it is so damn laborious.
I’ve played other instruments, and this is what I’ve noticed about their impact:
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Penny whistle. It’s mostly in one key. The root will always be the same fingering and the fifth will always be the same fingering. I think this helps with making associations with sound and scale degree, as opposed to more chromatic instruments played in different keys. [Also used a transposing electronic digital instrument to the same effect.]
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Clarinet: Having to figure out the fingerings made me painfully aware of key signatures and where the sharps and flats are. On guitar you can smoothly shift up or down a fret without much thought or just play in position, but on clarinet there is often a specific button or button combo you need to get one specific note.
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This is the big one: Piano. You do need to bring a little theory into it to know what chords you’re playing, but the actual NOTES you are playing are immediately obvious, and since I’m building all these chords myself, I know exactly where the third is and how to lower it to make a major a minor, or where to add a major seventh, so I can also very quickly ask myself, “What if went with a minor chord here instead” and almost instantly be able to play it. On guitar, there’s a tendency to just memorize chords as shapes without knowing where the chord tones are because each shape has them in a different configuration (which is why eyes-closed arpeggio exercises are absolutely vital for guitarists).
[On piano it’s also easier to play the same inversions over and over again, which might help you learn the sound. You can play a whole song with Root-3rd-Fifth if you want, but on guitar, the common chord shapes are a kaleidoscope of chord tones. For instance, common chord tones on root chords:
C: O-R-3-5-R-3
F: R-5-R-3-5-R
G: R-3-5-R-3-R
]
I’m curious about violin, too, because I’m betting needing to intonation just right really sharpens your ear.
What’s your experience?
i also grew up playing clarinet. the fact that it overblows a 12th makes it really hard to see patterns, because the fingerings are different for every note in every octave, without getting into the trill keys
i still predominantly play winds, but i “think” in piano because that’s what i learned theory on. it’s kinda the lingua franca because it’s built around western theory, what with the white keys being the naturals. can’t play for shit though!
someday i’d like to get a harmonetta because the way notes are laid out makes stacking thirds into chords easy. it’s a shame they never really took off
I do, yes. I play multiple instruments but mostly write music with a keyboard or a guitar. I approach chord progressions and melodies differently depending on the instrument. I do feel more restricted/limited with a guitar though. I can envision/visualize way more combinations when my hands are on keys instead of strings.
As for hearing and listening, they are all the same to me. Since I can play keys, guitars, drums and other instruments, I can isolate each instrument and section in my head when listening, so I can pick and choose what I want to focus on.
That’s an amazing skill. I’m afraid I might have the aural equivalent of aphantasia… that is I have trouble hearing as well as seeing things in my head. I can sing a melody, but that doesn’t mean I hear the rest of the band behind it, and I can’t really be sure I’m hearing it myself until I sing it. Ditto for hearing just the melody instead of the lyrics. I can do it aloud, but if I take away the words in my head, the melody disappears.
There’s a dude on YouTube who sells exercises promising to unlock this talent of inner hearing, but I really think it’s something my brain doesn’t do. Not that I can’t develop music skills, but I’m going to be working in a much narrower lane than a composer.
Yeah it’s something I didn’t really realize and appreciate enough until I learned not all musicians could do that by default. I just assumed that if you play, you can do it too. Thanks, I didn’t know it had a name (inner hearing).
I grew up as a pianist but joined choir in college and stuck with it. One thing that is really hard as a singer is knowing exactly what note to sing. On an instrument, you put your fingers in the right place and play, and you get a note (tuning aside—that’s a whole other issue). Whereas with the voice, you have to know what that note sounds like before you can sing it. For easy music, that’s fine, but my chorus sings a lot of new music, some of which has funky scales or is just straight up atonal. My musicianship has had to level up, and I’m a way better musician and sight reader because of it.
100% agree on singing, but, tragically, you do have to have a certain ability to get into and develop chorally. All my experience in choir has been singing whatever note the person singing next to me is singing before I abandoned the choir in shame and anxiety.
Singing scales and arpeggios and working on identifying scale degrees are the best things I’ve done for my ear, but I’m still pretty limited. I’m trying to work singing thirds off random diatonic scale tones, but it’s a slog. One exercise I used to do was to make a deck of cards from Ace to 8, shuffle them, and then lay them out a few of the time and see if I could sing their scale degrees… I got pretty good, but identification still lagged behind my production (that is to say, I could sing the scale tone much easier than I could recognize it), so I got discouraged.
I’m not a huge fan of reading music, because I depended on it so heavily, but it was very rote “finger go here” style of playing, so I think it actively detracted from my musicianship. Just the other day I found myself tinkering on the piano and trying to figure out the melody of a Chopin Polonaise by ear and I think I did pretty good, even understanding some of the musical turns (based around the seventh and the second) and pondering what the key change and chord implications for those melodies might be… I’d probably never be able to figure out a whole Chopin piece by ear, but I think I’d be a better musician for having tried than memorizing the piece completely as a collection of notes.
Right now my musical project is to learn some simple left hand patterns and be able to play melodies I know in the right hand, and eventually just vamp on both hands From what I’ve read about Chopin, that’s how he built his own skills, bro would apparently just riff for hours.
But, damn, if I could look at a piece of music and hear it, that would be fucking amazing.
Give yourself some credit! You should also take what I said with a grain of salt: not only do I seem to have a naturally excellent ear (whereas rhythm and sight reading were where I struggled), but I also went on to major in music theory and had a very, uh, aggressive theory teacher in college who made us sight-sing on solfège for exams, even atonal passages (as in, we had to choose something to be DO and stick with it). It means I learned how to hear intervals in my head, so if I can figure out what the interval is on the page, theoretically I can sing it. (It does get way harder if there is funny stuff going on in other parts!)
In my chorus, I’d say the vast majority of our singers learn by listening to a part track made by their section leaders. Which is essentially singing the same note as the person next to them.
I had to drop out of the one college theory class I took because I could just get learn intervals to save my life… I kinda don’t understand the obsession with intervals given what I understand how music works and don’t understand why scale tones / solfege isn’t more emphasized. I can see it’s value, but it seems like a level of abstraction from actual music that most people don’t need.
My experiments in choir predate the MP3s and YouTube, so I never had a part track…
Any insight into learning how to hear chords? I can see the road for developing pitch recognition, but chord recognition is a mystery. The two paths seems to be: a) hear all the individual notes of the chord and identify the root (through all inversions)–which seems crazy hard and b) just sort get a feel for what the chord sounds like (through all inversion)–which also seems like a hard ask.
Haha you’re not gonna like it! It’s intervals 🤣
The way different chords are made up is essentially stacking different intervals (usually 3rds but not always) on top of each other. But there are different types of thirds: major and minor. (Also diminished and augmented, but those sound like other intervals so im gonna ignore those for now.) A major triad is a major third on the bottom and a minor third stacked on top. A minor third is the opposite. Being able to recognize the tonal quality of a major third vs a minor third is key for my ability to recognize chords. Maybe others have some alternative suggestions. Also, the more you do it, the more natural it becomes. I was inundated with this stuff at an early age when my brain was a sponge.
So let’s say you have C E G–a major third plus a minor third.
If you have E G C, it would be a minor third plus a fourth.
If you had G C E, it would be a fourth plus a major third.
And that’s just for basic triads in closed positions. Add extensions and open phrasings, it would get really complicated. I kinda wonder if you interval wizards are learning something along the way of interval training without being explicitly aware of it?
When you were learning chord inversions, did you listen to the samples and identify all the intervals and determine the root through a process of deduction? Or was there a moment when things sort of snapped into place and you could hear the root of the chord automatically, without thinking about intervals?
Because for me, I can hear the major and minor qualities of a chord without identifying any intervals, and ditto for a major and dominant sevenths. I imagine there’s a rootness and a thirdness and fifthness I could I also teach myself to identify.
There’s also the possibility that different people just learn differently, and that intervals are just hard for me and easier for others, and scale degrees are my best way in.
I was just talking about this with my family last night haha
I’m not a musician but I do love music and the stories around it.
So I can’t really answer your question but I can bring up something that fits your question. The artist Sun Ra was famous for his avant-garde approach to music. He’s awesome, check his stuff out if you don’t know it.
Anyway there is a story about how he would interview potential new members to his orchestra. The story from one of his horn players. At this point Sun Ra was a know thing and getting into his group was a big deal. So the guy gets himself all prepared and tuned. Shows up to the Interview and Sun Ra handed him a string instrument. The guy is like “I play horns” and Sun Ra is like yeah I know but I want to know if you know how to make music.
I guess he was always making his band do that kind of thing because it separated people who couldn’t break out of their own thing
Nice! I kind of don’t trust instrumentalists who never play a different kind of instument because I think the bulk of being a musician is understanding music and technical skill on most instruments is a pretty low bar. Of course, world class at playing takes a life time of dedication and if your entire music education system is based around competing with other instrumentalists for spots on the orchestra (particularly the college orchestra), it’s gonna warp your development…
Check out bluegrass jamboree. You’ll see one guy with one group on guitar, the next time you see him, he’s playing banjo, and by the end of the night he’s on the bass. It’s wild.
@schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works I was going to say—that may be true for pop music, but for classical music that just doesn’t work. You can’t be a top class violinist and also master another instrument, if you want any semblance of a social life left over.
Absolutely true, but I have to ask what is the utility being a uniquely classical musician if you’re not working for an orchestra? It’s like trying to get into the NBA but never being able to shoot hoops with friends on the weekends–outlets for classical music are so limited at a time when live performance venues are becoming increasingly rare. I don’t think it’s a sane bet to put your kids on that track.
Anyway, one of those bluegrass bands I ran across at a jamboree all met at classical music school. The violinsts became a fiddler/banjo player, the classical guitarist became the bassist/percussionist, etc., so if you’re trained classically and want to popcorporate another instrument, you definitely can.
The Beatles, for example, were solid players, but nobody was really any kind of virtuoso; people just want a good song, much in the same way that pedestrian prose is forgiven if the story is appealing.
The guy has an NPR interview where he talks about it, I’ll try and find it
