I’ve struggled to be musical all my life–took lessons, took college classes, did ear training, etc.
I think I finally cracked the code, and it’s surprisingly simple:
- Learn to play melodies by ear (starts with singing)
- Learn only enough theory to:
- know your way around your instrument (scales, arpeggios)
- understand chords
- understand song structure
- Experiment (ie have fun!)
The most anal formal exercise I’d recommend is learning to hear relative scale degrees (two very good apps available for that)–though I think that skill would be developed by transcribing (playing by ear), it’s helpful for your confidence level to have graded exercises you can have some success with.
But my experience with most of my music teachers is they fall into one of two traps:
For classical music, it’s:
- Learn how to translate written notes into notes on your instrument.
- Go to 1.
For instance: I was taking clarinet lessons and I remember my teacher saying goodbye to his last student–a kid–and the teacher said, “If you bring me the sheet music for it, we can learn to play it.” And I thought what a missed opportunity that was for that girl to learn to hear and transcribe music–obviously not a skill he thought was important to the teacher at all. And I’d understand now wanting to do that for piano, which is really complicated, but learning to play a melody by ear on a single note instrument is a very achievable goal, especially when you have someone that can tell you what key it’s in and what the first note is.
The trap for jazz music is:
- Learn what are the “right” notes to play.
- Play them in any random order.
I used to blame teachers for just being bad at their jobs, but I think students (and maybe parents/administrators) are also to blame.
I ran across a senior guy who was trying to get back into piano. He’d played for a few years and it was clear he had no idea of how to be musical–no idea of how to construct a simple bass line, no knowledge of how to define a chord. So I said, “Hey, I’ll work with you even though I don’t play piano, I think you need to learn this song and just play the root and the five in the left hand, and sing the melody while you play, and use a metronome.” What an amazing exercise I thought: it would help teach him timing, develop his ear, develop his feel, let him be expressive with his voice, let him embody the melody, lear to work the bass, etc. Aren’t I brilliant teacher?
You know what this guy did? He pulled out his phone to show me some recordings he did of him playing the song the way his music teacher had written it out for him; it was what I expected–just haltingly reading the music with no sense of time. I wasn’t sure, but I think he wanted me to praise him for playing such a complex piece.
For him, and maybe for a lot of students (and certainly for parents and administrators), they don’t actually want to master music, they want to impress people. And maybe for the musically disinclined, haltingly playing a complex written piece is more impressive than a 2-note bassline in time with an expressive voiceline sensitive to dynamic; since most people in charge of music education (parents and school administrators) don’t know music, maybe they would promote a teacher who taught the former and fire a teacher who taught the latter…
For jazz programs, I think they’ve got a lot of theory they’ve got to cram into the kids heads, and we can learn theory a lot faster than we can develop musically, so if you’re going to be judged on “performance” of your students, you’ll be rewarded for having them be able to pass essentially paper exams set to music more than for having them skillfully play pentatonic blues.
I don’t know what the answer is, but for some reason, actually mastering music is very low on the list for both teachers and students.
What’s all y’all’s experience with music and music education?
Playing what you like is the reason I think there are so many more adult guitarists out there than violin players. Classical music, which dominates formal music education, is trapped in some serious weirdness.
No major disagreements with you, but I will quibble a little bit about what constitutes “ear training.” I think any time someone is listening to what they’re hearing, playing it on their instrument, and thinking about what it means, they are engaging in ear training.
For instance: given the choice between a student who spent 100 hours learning all their intervals in abstraction and the student who spent 100 hours transcribing songs they know and loved, I’d bet good money the second student will be more accomplished.
I’m also kind of torn on reading music. I always struggled with it on guitar (where notes can appear in multiple places), and I find I learn songs easier when I think in terms of chord shapes, and this is a skill I picked up through some rather arduous arepegio practice without sheet music. I feel like a dependence on sheet music robs you of an understanding of chord shapes if you lean on it too much. For instance, with arpeggios, the way I practice is I need to know where in the scale all the arpeggios lie, whereas if I were just reading the notes off a sheet, I could be blissfully unaware of what I’m playing. These Big Book Of Scales with everything written out sort of drive me mad. You should be able to build the scales by ear, and if you can’t, maybe you shouldn’t be practicing different keys yet. When I’m building scales on clariinet, I’m saying, “Ok, so this is where the third is in this key” in addition to knowing the name of the note and how to play it.
(Similar problem with the Big Book of Guitar Chords. Learning where the root 3rd 5th and seventh of just five chord shapes will instantly give you the ability to play major, minor, dominant and major sevents, and flat fives up and down the neck.)
But I think I should give music reading another chance now that I’ve developed my ears some.
To me, ear training is any exercise which improves your listening skills. But also when I studied music in college it meant practicing both identification and sight-singing of intervals, chords, and melodies. However you go about it, it’s about improving your ability to hear what’s happening in a song, I think.
As a guitarist myself, I also think the “geometry” of learning chord and scale shapes is extremely valid and probably the best way to think about things. Our instrument has notes laid out on a grid and we can and should take advantage of that by thinking about things in a way that pianists and horn players can’t!
I found that I was able to get a lot better just by learning multiple shapes on different parts of the need or with roots on different strings. (For example, if you learn e-minor pentatonic on the open string / 12th fret, that is a great too. But if you also learn it on the 9th fret with the root on the A string, now you’ve got a tool that covers the majority of the neck.)
And when it comes to reading… Reading music takes many forms: standard sheet music notation, guitar tabs, lead sheets, MIDI, etc. ALL of these are imperfect and imprecise formats for notating music that gloss over the nuances found in real performances to some degree.
A lot of intermediate classical musicians seem to fall into the trap of thinking that the sheet music IS the music itself (in the case of MIDI it can be, somewhat), instead of being an additional tool for learning and remembering musical ideas. Written music is imperfect.
I need to be sensitive to how other people learn, but also ask that music educators return that same favor to their students. For me, interval identification was total hell and its why I dropped out of music theory class.
The boring thing that I got the most mileage out of was practicing identifying relative pitches, which I think it probably the most applicable to music people play and also what I think most people–more capable than me–are incidentally picking up along the way with intervals. And the reason I was able to do that was I ran into some apps that let me do it in my spare time in ways that were fun and accessible; if I had to go to a computer lab to do it, I doubt I would have put the time in.
But an even more practical exercise is getting a karaoke track and singing chord degrees as it goes along… I really need to spend more time doing that.
Another quirk I have is I’m garbage at visualization. If I could pull up an image of a staff with some notes marked out, I’m sure reading music would be much more meaningful to me. Like if I could picture a key signature and just go up four notes to find the fifth, for instance, that would be great. But my brain just doesn’t have the capacity to do that. The positions and physicality of the guitar are much easier for me to understand (like how the fifth is found on the string directly above or down +2).
On clarinet, I build a model of each key in my head, so I know where everything is, and I know how to flat and sharp every note, so it’s not too hard to handle accidentals.
Even if I was playing piano, I’d still have the same brain, so I’d probably be building patterns, there, too, instead of manipulating mental sheet music, but the benefits of reading on piano are more accessible than for guitar.
One thing I’ve been able to experiment with since improving my ear is single-string playing, which lets me be a lot more expressive with single lines, and maybe what I’d recommend for an ear-first beginner over position playing.
Why is the root of your e minor pentatonic starting on F#? Did you mean seventh fret?
But, yeah, maybe to repeat myself, accumulating frets in sequential order is a painful way to go. Better to have some anchors you can instantly recognize and the the math from there. I think my method is to figure everything out on my own, and then to laboriously figure it out every time on my own, until I finally have it memorized. Then, if I forget, I know how to get there again. The other approach is memorize everything by rote, flash card style, but then if you forget, you’re fucked.