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 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 heard an NPR show once about a guy that heard a song for about two weeks in 1986. He remembered the song well enough and one day he got curious what it was, so he started singing it to people and nobody had heard it. He knew he wasn’t making it up, so he hired a band, and sang them all the parts he remembered. Once he had it cut, he tracked down the person who was the radio station manager of the station he listened to at the time, played it for him, and the manager accurately ID’d a song as one of those songs that get a little airplay, don’t catch on, and immediately get memoryholed.
This was just an average schmoe, not a musician.
That’s when I knew I had a deficit, beacause I could not perform all the parts to songs I’ve heard a million times, even if one of those million times was five minutes ago.
I’m a Trumpet player at heart but it shines in my vocal deliveries more often than not. I rap and I tend to get more Danny Brown with a microphone than say El-P. Danny was a Trumpet like me and El-P played sax. Love the prior’s lyrics more but Danny has energy.
I write on a keyboard and a Push 3 by Ableton. I can’t play keys great, my grandfather (abusive) broken three of 5 fingers so I had a rough time playing Trumpet. I actually had my right hand operated on which caused complete relearning of how to use my fingers again during my time playing Trumpet and keys. My left hand became a cheat and I obviously can get bass lines down even though I feel I can’t. I write melodies left handed still though.
The Push helps as it’s a Linnstrument with a keyboard layout from left to right and a guitar layout in a 4x8 matrix. It’s also more closely together so my badly healed broken fingers can jam on a melody and play easily without breaking my hands. The MPE makes it feel closer to a stringed instrument as well so I tend to play it closer to a guitar.
In total, all instruments influence how we play but we also influence the instruments. Black Sabbath’s guitar player made metal because he couldn’t play after loosing his finger tips but used plastic to continue playing, the looser strings made metal a genre but also made the plastic tips of his fingers stay on. J Dilla turned off Quantization on his MPC and gave hip hop GROOVE. So they do influence us but we influence them as we figure out how to get the sound we like.
Edit: Came to say, I play the Push in a C Major layout since it looks like a keyboard and I follow it like I would any other instrument. I know it can Scale lock but I don’t like doing that to a device I see as an instrument.
Yes, Trumpet seems like an amazing tool to tune your ear because each button combo give your a harmonic series and you have to know what your note sounds like. It’s kind of if you were going to purposely design an instrument to discourage playing by sight and rote, it would be a trumpet. You’re also going to have that harmonic series embedded in your brain eventually.
And you can add Django Reinhardt to your list of disabled guitar legends. I think some of his fingers fused in a fire and he’s like, “fucking awesome, now I can bend the shit out these strings” and not worry about chords.
I’ll definitely look into the Push 3. I’m a pretty pure instrumentalist, that is to say I don’t want to “mix” any music, I want to play everything, but I might be OK with live-recording a loop.
I love piano, but the ubiquity of the piano keyboard depresses me. I played a chromatic button accordion and absolutely loved having all those little keys right next to each other and the relations between all the buttons being so static. Basically there are three rows of buttons, so there are really only three positions for a major scale, depending on which of those buttons you start on. You could easily transpose up or down a minor third just by shifting your fingers…
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.
Hmm, honestly because I learned so much of this as a kid, it’s hard to pinpoint it. A lot of it is probably instinct solidified by repetition. Yes, I absolutely can identify the root of the chord without actively thinking about the intervals, and since inversions were drilled into me during piano lessons and I had to demonstrate them on exams, I didn’t just hear them; I did them. I’m a big believer in learning by doing, and boy did I do a lot of them. So … yeah, it’s probably just a lot of time and a whole lot of exposure.
Same with intervals. Lots of people use tricks, like knowing the beginnings of certain songs are a specific interval (“Here comes the bride” is a fourth, etc.) but I haven’t had to use those tricks for a long, long time. I sure did teach them to undergrads when I was in grad school, though.
For what it’s worth, solfège is essentially learning the scale degrees and using them to hear things. I definitely hear scale degrees and I don’t think that’s a “wrong” way to go about it, either. Far from it! Whatever works for you is great, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.
I think the main thing is that I am getting better and I can see the musical road for myself.
I think it’s also true that different instruments can help unlock different skills, and it can be more fun and direct than abstract ear training (though I’m trying to incorporate a little ear training into the songs I’m working on, mostly singing arpeggios).
Playing piano more recently, I realized how much I disconnect from thinking about what chords I’m playing on guitar–they’re just this shape and that shape, but piano is so delightfully transparent.
Another bonus is movement is so much more obvious. I’m playing a song with chords that go from Am to F to D to C to E, all major, and the root movement of F to F# (3 of D) to G (5 of C) to G# (3 of E) was just immediately obvious to me on the piano, easy to play, and it sounds beautiful. I’ll work it out on guitar later today, but it’ll take a lot more effort.
Great talking with you!
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
Were you mostly reading music? I was playing by ear, and two things about that 12th: it’s really just a fifth, and the scale pattern at five are basically the same as at one–whole step, whole step, half step… so I think I remember the fingerings working the same. Plus, I’ve got the right half of the circle of fifths memorized as a guitarist, but the left hand side needs a little work for all the clarinet keys (and I’m not transposing shit, thinking about the notes as their true values).
harmonetta
This is the worst thing you’ve ever done, friend, introducing me to this marvelous instrument that is simultaneously unavailable! I thought it would scratch my currently-unaffordable accordion itch, but the only thing I found was one for 700 pounds on Reverb, already sold!
But if you’re into easily making chords, the Stradella left hand side of the base, arranged in fifths, has major, minor, major 7, and diminished chords all in a row. Super easy. But I think building chords yourself probably teaches you a lot more.
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.
As a professional classical musician… You’re painfully right. It’s a struggle to find work, increasingly. And the few professional ensembles that hold auditions get so many applicants that the enormous competition basically results in a succession of rejections eating away at your confidence year after year, even though I am by most definitions a “virtuoso”.
I actually tried to get a secondary subject for another instrument back at the conservatoire, but my main subject teacher nixed my application for it. Saying I had to concentrate all my attention to the instrument they were teaching me. The same teacher, by the way, also discouraged me from doing too much work next to the conservatoire study. Same reason. While having a network is basically the only way left to get work in this field anymore and your student years are the main period to do so.
What’s your instrument? Are you ever tempted to branch out into more popular forms of music, either with your instrument or a related instrument or a completely different one?
I kind of have a big problem with formal music education because it seems to discourage engaging with the music. It breaks my heart that so many people start with an interest in music and just have it beaten out of them by band directors that just want students to play the notes in front of them. I mean, that’s understandable thing to want if you’re a band director, but I feel like musical development takes time and the things that make people fall in love with music a lifelong hobby aren’t taught; rushing into performance is counter productive.
On the plus side, though at the end of every Spring, I can pick up some quality instruments for pretty cheap on FB marketplace.
The guy has an NPR interview where he talks about it, I’ll try and find it
