Are there any good methods for learning to hear what chord a song is going to next? I'm new to the forum and this is my first post and I will probably get torn apart for this but here goes. I learned to play on my own and also do my own luthier work on my bass (Englehart ES1). All of my playing is by ear and in a jam session type setting. I prefer old country and western swing but do play a little bluegrass. The wife and I play strictly for the fun of it as part of our new life after kids (a concept only understood by us old folks). I am always interested in improving. What to play isn't the problem but where to play it is sometimes. I do a lot of walking bass and I would like to go to the right chord more often than I do now. I do have a good understanding of music theory.

Just play as much as you can with others and listen to as much music as you can. If you are jamming frequently with others, your ear will naturally sharpen and you will begin to feel certain changes and phrases. Another trick for bluegrass is to learn the fingerings that guitarists use for basic chords and watch them as they play.

Ditto what Jim said. Nothing beats just plain old familiarity with the genre...it's always been my saving grace that I tend to dive into a style headlong and really focus on it, both playing and listening. It's really helped me.

I'm also lucky, too, that the guitar player in my bluegrass/roots/country band is also a great bassist and I can tell where he's headed almost to the point of telepathy.

Thanks for the input. I guess I'm pretty much on track since that is what I have been doing. I do ok on most 4 or 5 chord songs but some still seem to elude me no matter how many times I've played them. I guess there are some songs you just have to memorize the chord progression to.

Here's the tip I learned from Rufus Reid's book: stand behind the piano player and watch his left hand. I always felt like I was cheating doing this, but once I read it, I felt validated. Its a great way to figure out the basics of a tune, as the piano player will tend to play more left hand until the bass line is swinging. Or I guess the real point is to watch whoever is most familiar with the tune closely at first (a time or two through or whatever).

I don't play with a piano anymore but sometimes I have watched the rhythm guitar players hands like Jim said at the top. Sometimes that's one of those necessary evils you have to do to survive a song you don't know. The problem is that by the time you see where they are going and then you go there your bass note is a late and behind the beat. This is especially bad in bluegrass where you need to be on top of or a hair ahead of the beat. This is a big part of what gives bluegrass it's drive and makes it go. This is one thing we all need to keep an eye on so it does't become a bad habit no matter what kind of music you are playing.

Originally posted by George Lenz
I don't play with a piano anymore but sometimes I have watched the rhythm guitar players hands like Jim said at the top. Sometimes that's one of those necessary evils you have to do to survive a song you don't know. The problem is that by the time you see where they are going and then you go there your bass note is a late and behind the beat. This is especially bad in bluegrass where you need to be on top of or a hair ahead of the beat. This is a big part of what gives bluegrass it's drive and makes it go. This is one thing we all need to keep an eye on so it does't become a bad habit no matter what kind of music you are playing.

George, I wouldn't jump in here if you were a jazz or orchestral player because I could fill a big book up with things that I DON'T know about those genres of music.

On the other hand, I do know something about bluegrass after over 40 years of playing it.

First and foremost, unless you know the melody of the song well enough to sing, whistle or hum it, either out loud or in your head, there is no way that you can possibly do a walking line over all the chord changes.

Stated simply, if you don't know the tune, you simply cannot play it. You particularly cannot play a walking line because if you don't know where the tune is going you cannot possibly know where a walking line is going.

I play walking bass on practically every song that I play in performance. Untill I learn the song, I stick to root five.

If I don't know the song, I simply ask for the chord progression and hope I can remember it through the course of the song. If there are more than 3 chords in the song, I usually can't. I don't need to remember if I can see the guitarist' left hand.

Granted, the chord changes on the bass may be one beat late with this method but by treating the late beat as an accidental, a walk between chord changes sounds OK untill you get the song down cold. This usually only takes a couple of verses with bluegrass because bluegrass is comparitively very simple.

Another thing that I keep in mind:, How many bluegrass songs need a walking bass line all the way through the song? It usually makes for a better bass line to do a full walking bass line on the instrumental breaks only, anyway. Don't want to be TOO busy with the bass line.:)

Pkr2

I agree Pkr2. I do most of my walking bass on western swing and mostly walk in and out of chord changes in bluegrass. You do have to have the base note of the chord before you can do any walking. Maybe it's just that some people seem to be more gifted at hearing chord changes than others. I notice this especially when somebody does a song that they wrote and I know that nobody in the group has ever played it before. I've been playing about 8 years and I'm getting better but still a long ways from where I want to be.

George, something tells me that your knowledge is better than you might believe. Great to strive to be better but there's lots of value in giving yourself all the credit you deserve, too. Confidence is a powerful tool.

There is more than one point of view to everything. Even though we are listening to the same thing at the same time, my point of view as the player is different from the listeners point of view. I hear what should have been played and they don't. This is a little off the subject but it has to do with confidence. Bass players are treated worst than any other member of a group, especially if that is all you do. The only time you really get noticed is if you don't play at all or you play out of time. You can play a whole fist full of wrong notes and only you or another bass player will notice. Just to see if anybody was paying attention to what I was doing, onetime, I played an entire song in the wrong chord and nobody noticed a thing. Now isn't that a good confidence builder? I am fortunate in that I have the opportunity to play with musicians from different states every weekend.

Heh so THAT'S what it is when I play a song in the wrong key! An experiment!

Didn't you check the results of your experiment? Did anybody even notice your experiment?

Originally posted by George Lenz
Maybe it's just that some people seem to be more gifted at hearing chord changes than others. I notice this especially when somebody does a song that they wrote and I know that nobody in the group has ever played it before. I've been playing about 8 years and I'm getting better but still a long ways from where I want to be.

I don't know anything about bluegrass, but I can relate to these comments about walking lines and learning changes from trying to play Jazz for about the last 4 years.

I go along to Jazz workshops every week and often there is more than one bassplayer - so you get to compare notes and assess your own standard etc.
Generally, people expect that given the age I am, that I will know loads of Jazz standards and have things worked out to play, but as I have only taken up Jazz recently I know very few compared with most Jazz bass players I meet.

But when we get an original tune and especially something that is different from the "norm" I often find I am doing better than other more experienced players or at least am on the same level. I find I am hungry for new structures and sets of changes, but often get bored with simpler ones and struggle to find new things to do that interest me.

So this leads to strange situations where one week I am treated like a virtual beginner, as I am struggling with a standard that most Jazz bass players have played hundreds or thousands of times before and have loads of variations and solid walking lines already in their heads.

Whereas other weeks it's completely the opposite. So for example, there was a workshop with a trumpter/bandleader who brought along all original tunes he had written and arranged himself, which really inspired me and he asked for my phone number for when he needed a bassplayer when he was touring Europe - he's Swedish!

Both situations are sort of unsatisfactory to me, as I'm not really ready for true professional status but being considered a beginner has a kind of demotivating effect on me. I've talked to my Jazz tutor and he say that you have to be able to play good stuff on a 12 bar blues or a simple standard.

But I suspect that a lot of the experienced bass players in Jazz are relying on their experience and apply this to sequences and know what will keep the rest of the band happy in certain situations. It's not a question of them "hearing the changes" any better than someone else; but rather that they have heard things like this many times before and can guess where it's going very easily. But if you gave them something unorthodox, they would be back in the same place as the rest of us who have less experience.

[It's not a question of them "hearing the changes" any better than someone else; but rather that they have heard things like this many times before and can guess where it's going very easily. ]Quote by Bruce

Very well said, Bruce. That concept holds up very well in bluegrass music as well. When you mentally kick out everything that wont work, the choices become much fewer.


Having listened to your sound clip in an earlier post, I think you may be selling yourself a bit short.:)


Pkr2

To Jason, Bruce, pkr2: I can't say that disagree with anything that was said. I have done a lot of the things that Jason and Bruce mentioned with varying degrees of success. I think it's safe to say that the problem is all in my head. :D

Glad to see you're ok as there have been a lot of threads in hear wondering if you were alright. Not having had any formal training I learned a long time ago that there aren't any rules when it comes to what chord is comming up next. If I have a good lead voice (instrument or vocal) I do pretty good on 4 chord songs. I listen to the melody and try to play a bass line that flows with the melody. If a lead player goes into left field adlibing and gets away from the melody I get lost. When I hear a chord change comming I couldn't tell you if it is a half step or whole step away.

My walking bass is based on a 6th chord of whatever chord the song is in at the time. The patterns are easy to do with the left hand and there are a lot of possible variations. Do you think working out another walking bass line based on a different chord would help? I hear almost all chord changes in a song I just can't always tell which chord it's going to.

George

Some formal training with ear training would have probably eliminated a lot of my problems. But when a song goes from C major to a C7, I hear the change and try to find out where it went when all I need to do is stay where I'm at.

Hey, George, you have already gotten a lot of great answers from the DB guys down here.

I just wanted to see how things are in Heber. I lived there for a couple of years back in the early 80's.

Hello Jeff, The guys down here in DB are great. I tend to ask questions that don't have a definite answer but they are a lot of help. I moved here in 1980. It hasn't grown very much, about 5600 now. We do all of our playing in Mt. View now. Did you ever go up there and play on the square?

George

George, I'm not trying to be the wet blanket and pardon me if I'm repeating the obvious or previously-stated: Learning to read music and learning music theory really help you "hear" changes on-the-fly. Understanding "why" things sound is, at the minimum, an enormous help to understanding "how" changes sound.

Samuel, I agree. I think I got a hint from something Ed said. This is about as hard to explain as hearing the next chord change. Just as an example take, the three major keys of G,D, and A, and go from the base chord of each key to an E chord. In a song, the lead in to each of these chord changes sounds different even though they are all going to an E chord. I think I need to relate the chord change to the base chord in terms of steps from the base chord.

George

"My walking bass is based on a 6th chord of whatever chord the song is in at the time. The patterns are easy to do with the left hand and there are a lot of possible variations." George Lenz

George, why do you always use the 6th chord? Do you primarily use the Aolian mode in walking?

To the original poster I'd recommend sitting down with a piano and play the chords in the song as well as the melody (assuming there is one). Try Play diffrent tones in the bass than the root. Invert the chords and so on. Learning tunes on piano is really useful to me.

/lovebown

I think it also helps develop your ear for chord changes by putting on a CD and playing along with it or trying to play along with the radio. It's helpful to try to accompany and solo to music that you have not heard before. So the radio is a good help in this regard. Also, I think this approach your "feel" and "groove".

This might help you-Dick Grove defined modern music as being made up of 119 chord progressions.Each one is numbered.Some you know,like I-VI-II-V, but where he really made it easy was that you can you a variety of susbstitutions to replace each chord.He defined the nine chord families.Each family has a specfic function: either II or V or I. More complicated changes replaced a C major,which is a I chord in Major,with CMaj.13+11,which functions the same in the progression,but now as a bassist,you think C lydian because of the augmented 11.Check out his encyclopedia of Harmony and Theory volumes i-3.It takes the guess work and the "just listen for hours" and turns it into "name that chord progression when i hear it' You'll be able to anticipate changes before you hear them.

I'm a freelancer, and play DB in the following styles: jazz, country, rockabilly, Irish, western swing, blues and latin. Often there are no charts so I wing it. My ability to wing it comes from two factors, one, sheer experience, and more importantly, two, learning to play jazz, in particular, The Real Book. Jazz, whether you like it or not, contains all the theory and ear-training you will ever need. Last night I played a jazz gig where only 50% of the songs were charted, and I only stuffed up on one song. Jazz contains so much musical knowledge that it benefits all other styles you might play, not just in your ear developement, but also in your feel. Even Irish (which is quite similar to bluegrass for a bassist) benefits from being able to "swing".

Originally posted by Marty Forrer
Jazz contains so much musical knowledge that it benefits all other styles you might play, not just in your ear developement, but also in your feel.

PARTY FOREVER offers sound wisdom. I play 80% bluegrass but spend as much or more practice playing along with jazz. While I am a long way from being adept, the strong jazz influence in my playing makes me a much better musician.

I think jazz is the most advanced language because it uses all nine chord families, 5,6 and 7 part chords and corresponding scale sources.The real book is largely made up of songs,many from broadway,but show chords are replaced by "jazz" chords. I have worked with so many pianists who reharmonize the real book changes ten different ways.It's good to know tunes, their form (AABA,VCVCBVC or first ending,second ending),the type of phrase the melody uses,which of the 119 chord progressions is being used for changes,and know the appropriate scales to solo through the changes with. The chord functions,chord families, chord progressions and form is universal to all pop music from jazz to blue grass to rock and roll.

Originally posted by ZITHER


It's good to know tunes, their form (AABA,VCVCBVC or first ending,second ending),

Man, I hate it when the soloist loses the form on one of those VCVCBVC forms. It seems so unprofessional to have to yell, "BVC......BVC!!!" at them on the bandstand, but then somebody's gotta do it.

...the type of phrase the melody uses,which of the 119 chord progressions is being used for changes,and know the appropriate scales to solo through the changes with.


I played with a guy last week who only knew 64 of the 119 chord progressions. Can you believe the nerve of some people?

I'm deliberately avoiding all 119 - so my "creativity" isn't stifled!! ;)

George...

Something I haven't seen in this thread is a good solid exercise in developing your ear to hear chord changes.

2 exercise I do often are:

1) Play through the cycle of 4ths and 5ths. A lot of music, especially Standards, move strongly on the principal that music likes to progress logically this way. So I start with an exercise that starts on low G and start moving up in 4ths. G goes to C goes to F goes Bb etc... until I get back to G.

Next I'll arpeggiate a maj chord off each root of the above exercise like GBD, CEG, FAC, etc.

Then I play chordal scales such as Gmaj and arpeggiate each scale degree in succession with the appropriate major, minor, tonic and diminished chords including the appropriate 7th (maj or min).... GMaj, Am, Bm, CMaj, D7, Em, F#dim.

All this really tunes my ear to how chords sound and what chords typically like to go to next. It's helped me a lot.

But I can't take credit for it. I learned this stuff from the great BG player Carol Kaye. Check out her website it has lots of great free stuff inclulding very good books and tapes for learning.

I'll bet that if Dick Grove tried hard enough, he could have whittled it down to 75, 80 progressions. At 119, he's gotta just be throwing in some of his favorites.

Seriously, I'll second the thing about jazz being the best developer of the ear. The classical dudes must not like that too much, but your ultimate jazz improviser can play anything he hears internally, with no latency for the neurons to process the thought, can do it in real-time interaction with other musicians, and has excellent (maybe even leading edge) musical taste.

Just don't try re-harmonizing the bluegrass stuff on the fly. Some of those bluegrass guys will stop the tune to give you a kick in the ass. Then one of the pickers' wives will pick up the bass and play root-five all night long.

I have no practical advice on this, but after about 20 years of playing, I'm finally getting to the point where I can hear the changes well enough not to break into a cold sweat upon discovering the the gig has no book. My problem is I try to analyse the tune instead of just trusting my ear.

I occasionally play with an excellent pianist who can't read a note -- not even chord changes. Everything is in a weird key, and he likes to do jazz versions of off-the-wall tunes: "Theme from Mannix," Chopin's "Waltz in C-sharp minor," "Battle Hymn of the Republic." He'll play the tonic with his left pinky for the first chorus, then I'm on my own.

Originally posted by Damon Rondeau

Just don't try re-harmonizing the bluegrass stuff on the fly. Some of those bluegrass guys will stop the tune to give you a kick in the ass. Then one of the pickers' wives will pick up the bass and play root-five all night long.

That sounds like fun - I would pay to see that!! ;)

Why are posts disappering around the general vicinity of this thread? I swear I didn't touch 'em. DON?

Can we agree that (1) knowing theory helps you understand what's going on, and can help point you in new directions (2) learning "standard progressions" from Dick Grove of Jerry Coker or whomever can be a great help in internalizing the patterns that we use to figure out where a tune is going or might go and (3) the ideal state of affairs is to internalize all this information through practice and listening, so when we are confronted with an unfamilair set of changes, we can let our ears and fingers guide us?

My background is experimental psychology, and if there's one undeniable truth about learning it's that repetition is the key to "internalizing" a task- making it automatic. Playing canned patterns and progressions may not be making music, but it trains the practicer to hear the cadences and play them without stopping to analyze. And once you can walk an arbitrary set of changes- even with set patterns- you have a framework you can start to use as a point of departure to develop your own lines.

Or am I wrong?

I think your'e right on the mark...

Ed, I'm curious: would you recommend that the approach of hearing the music and expressing it on the axe -- if I'm understanding your way of looking at all this correctly -- works well for folks just starting out with music? Or is it it something that works well for you because: a) you know from experience what doesn't work for you; and/or b) when you started this current work you already had a quite advanced ear and musical sensibility?

I'm digging what you're saying, but I'm just wondering if it isn't an approach and framework more suitable to persons already steeped in music.

Originally posted by Damon Rondeau
Ed, I'm curious: would you recommend that the approach of hearing the music and expressing it on the axe -- if I'm understanding your way of looking at all this correctly -- works well for folks just starting out with music? Or is it it something that works well for you because: a) you know from experience what doesn't work for you; and/or b) when you started this current work you already had a quite advanced ear and musical sensibility?

I'm digging what you're saying, but I'm just wondering if it isn't an approach and framework more suitable to persons already steeped in music.


If I may answer until FOGHORN shows up:

In the beginning, everything sounds new. When you are first learning to get around on your instrument, even a major scale or a simple arpeggiation can seem like a whole world to explore. So in this case, you are doing yourself no harm by practicing scales and patterns over a set of changes...I still do this all the time. But it's also wise to remember that scales, licks, patterns, etc. are TREES, and the FOREST is is the ability to play any sound that pops into your head. My own personal belief is that most of us learn from the "inside" out, meaning that we start with simple concepts and sounds and add complexity (both in terms of what we can hear AND what we can play) when we are ready. I still remember years back when I was learning to hear the #4 sound for the first time, there was a point where it CLICKED and went from being a concept I was practicing because I knew it would be useful to a sound that I HEARD spontaneously. So IMO, if you can just remember that what you are doing when you practice licks and patterns is TRAINING YOURSELF TO HEAR THOSE SOUNDS rather than memorizing a bunch of stuff you can insert when your brain tells you it will fit, you'll be okay. YMMV

Thx for the response, Chris. Those were some of the thoughts I was thinking, and I thought I'd like to hear 'ol Foghorn's riff on the theme.

I think in the beginning there's a huge amount of forest/tree stuff going on. The student really can't hear music the way a musician can. Some non-musicians get mad when I say a thing like that, thinking that the musician's way is better or something. Unh unh. Just different.

I'll bet I think about "red" completely differently than Van Gogh did, for example. In some sense, I don't know sh*t about red compared to Vincent.

There's an old novel by a Canadian author name of Robertson Davies. He was cool, but some of his older stuff reads pretty square now. One of the older novels is called A Mixture Of Frailties, and it's about a promising young singer coming out of a small Ontario town with her talent, eventually winds up in London in the Big Time. The story is about her REAL musical training and blossoming. Anyway, the high brow musician from the Big Time who teaches her the most is the one who teaches her to be an artist (actually, I believe he was the one to get into her pants, too.) The one who teaches her to hear music, feel music, and to perform music expressing individual feeling.

When there's nothing of that side of things in a musical education, or someone's musical development, there's trouble. At the very least, the probability is quite high that the "music" will suck to my ears.

I play bluegrass. Bluegrass is played faster than lightening across the prairie and the chords change faster than texas weather. And sometimes the changes are not ordinary. I don't learn new stuff on the bandstand, only in rehersal or jam sessions. You don't have time in a jam session to discuss the changes so the first and foremost thing that you have to know is: where the notes are on your instrument and how to get there (practice). I miss chord changes in new stuff all the time. My techinque is to recognize if the change went up or down the scale and then find the root. It may take a couple of misses but, usually, by the time a tune is finished, i have a good idea what the changes are. I also listen to everyone playing. It's hard to explain but, I kinda remove myself from the action and listen to the 'whole sound' of the group.

Originally Posted by Damon
Would you recommend that the approach of hearing the music and expressing it on the axe -- if I'm understanding your way of looking at all this correctly -- works well for folks just starting out with music?
My favorite and only son, Dylan, is 12. He's in 7th grade. He's played tenor for three years. As soon as he could play a C scale, we started working on hear and playing on "St. Thomas."

DJ's teacher, Tim O'Dell, does a remarkable job. Tim works with Dylan on the Aebersold books, but his approach is not about, "You must play these notes when you see this chord-sign prompt." Instead, it's about, "This is how these notes sound against this chord." Tim and I have made it a point not to work on pentatonic licks, resolution patterns, lick books etc. It's been about facility and listening.

My son has no more facility than you would expect of a 12-year-old with three years' experience. He has much to learn, and if he keeps going he will inevitably need to address vocabulary on some level. But when he plays, he plays his way. What a great place to start from!

Originally posted by Ed
So the supposition that you have to have a lotta stuff down before you can deal with this doesn't really hold true. . . . It isn't vocabulary that communicates what I'm trying to get across here, it's intent. Tell me a story.

Right on, Ed. You know what Chick Corea says on the topic . . .

Oh, I hear it, I just don't always hit it. How about you? Put another way: I heard that i missed it.

OK, when it comes to bluegrass I can move beyond respectfully asking questions and spouting my "art" B.S.

Back when all I played was R&B, I had an attitude about country music. Corn likker, hound dawgs and 3 chord repetition. How hard could it be? I showed up for a few country-eqsue sessions and GOT MY ASS KICKED. I blew a lot of changes.

Why? 'Cause I didn't know those simple tunes. What's to know about a simple 3 chord tune? A little old thing called "the melody".

You're sitting there playing through the simple tune for the first time, thinking you hear the 4 coming. Or the 5, doesn't matter. You "hear" it coming 'cause all you really know is rock 'n roll, which means the only form you really know is 12 bar blues. So, there's gonna be a chord change all right, but it ain't going to follow your pattern. It's going to follow THE MELODY.

If you don't know the melody, you don't know the tune. I learned that in country music, the hard way.

It's even better when you love the melody, or have some kind of affect for it.

As for the beginners hearing music thing, I wasn't implying that I thought it was a bad idea. I don't know exactly what I think about all that, except that a lot of traditional pedagogy sucks (some of it is actually damaging musically, I think) and a lot of it doesn't. Thinking back to my own early days, though, I thought I "heard" stuff. Not even close to what I hear now. I still can't get it out of the axe, but that's my problem.

Originally posted by Ed Fuqua
I'm not sure if yer a funnin me.

If not, well no. If I hear it, I hear it and play it. If I don't hear it, then I don't hear it and play something wrong (and by that I mean a note without intent). There are sections of tunes that I'm vague on, and I have to really lean into hearing them as they go by in the tune. If the piano player is listening, they can hear if I'm vague on a change or a resolution and they will lay it out a little clearer by the way they voice lead to the chord, playing chords not in the progression to set up the resolution to the chord I'm not hearing etc.

And it ain't like I'm a god realised yogi, there's still plenty of stuff I just don't hear..


But hearing that you missed it, how's that working out for you?

Yeah, I'm funnin' you. Hearing what I missed - as long as nobody points it out it works Ok - the next time around.

I never thought about trying to explain how to hear chord changes before. Quite a task. I've been doing this for so long, I don't think about it. Like Rondo said - you have to know the melodies. I think each genre has it's own dialect. That's why i don't sit in on jazz jams. Some of the 'words' may be the same the dialect is different. That's why Rondo 'got his ass kicked' - and i've seen it more than once. "how hard can it be?" - plenty.

This is probably a little off topic, but the best demonstration I ever got of musicians listening and hearing each other was in South India a few years back. Two guys playing violin and "temple" drum (not tabla) kept me spellbound -- completely spellbound -- for a couple hours one night. (Personally, I think violin finds its real, true voice in Indian music, forget anything Western in comparison.)

Anyway, these two real young guys (mid-20's I'd say) improvised over (Indian) forms for those 2 hours. Nothing planned, per se. Totally beautiful and interactive, you could almost hear a conversation going on between those two musicians.

Now, I know those two guys were trained in a system that teaches by rote, from the little bits on up to the big bits. They have arrived at a position of mastery, though it would be interesting to hear them in a cross-cultural context. I'm reasonably certain they were in that Haden-esque space that Ed talked about.

Originally posted by FOGHORN EDHORN
...goddamn duct tape...****ing DURRL...Oh, there you are.

Bring it, baby...I eat duct tape for breakfast. The black stuff is my favorite, but I've been known to chow on the standard silver from time to time when need be.


DURRL - OK. But alla this "standardized chord progressions" and "patterns" and "chord/scale" still seems to be an unhealthy fascination with the brown, rough stuff that seems to be affixed to whatever this large round tall thing is directly in front of me. Again the concentration seems to be on [b]vocabulary instead of what do you have to say.

That's not really what I'm advocating, though, you must be confusing me with our suddenly absent friend HIGHSTRUNG. What I'm talking about is hearing interval relationships and building CONTEXTUAL SONIC VOCABULARY. So instead of thinking, "well, _____ says it's cool to substitute a lydian scale for major whenever major occurs, so I'll just do that and assume it must be cool, even though I don't really hear it yet", you're practicing learning what a #4 sounds like so you can understand when it is likely to sound good and when it will sound like contrived bull****.

I remember fondly an old interview with Mike Tyson in which it appeared for all the world that he had just learned to pronouce the word "ludicrous", and was intent on inserting it into every possible sentence (see related Hal Galper voicing story from thread X). He only hit the mark of where it would actually fit into what he was saying about one in every five times, and the result was, well..... kinda ridiculous, if you get what I mean. A couple of months later, I saw another interview with him, and he only used the word once. And guess what? It fit right in - in fact, it was about the only thing he said in that interview that made any sense.

The point is, you have to experiment with this stuff, and I firmly believe that many people learn where sounds fit by trying to plug them into every possible place they might go, and then observing that most of them sound like hell. So, you weed those out little by little, and after a while, you know that certain sounds are options in certain places intuitively. I often have to choose between different directions a solo may go on the fly, like choosing one fork in the road over another at night...you can't see very far, but you choose one way over another based on a hunch. When this happens, I sometimes wonder what the other way would have sounded like had I explored it.

Occasionally you run into folks that have just picked up an instrument (or pick up different instruments as a matter of course and interest) and have no divide between what they want to say and saying it (on that instrument). They haven't really spent enough time with the instrument to have developed a reasonable technique, but they have the wherewithal to direct their limited technique and limited vocabulary to their own intent.

Got anybody in particular in mind?

Far too often new players get trapped in this headlong rush to "get good", lemme memorise this, practice these licks, this mode, these changes. Which to me is akin to trying to memorise all the words in the dictionary so you'll have something to say.

"The food's good there."
"That establishment serves the most delectable cuisine."

It isn't vocabulary that communicates what I'm trying to get across here, it's intent. YES, you want to increase your vocabulary (and in the same ways you are learning to hear) so that you are not communicating that "the food is good", you want to be able to communicate your entire range of thought's and feelings about that experience: the food, its flavors/consistency/presentation, what the room is like, what the people are like.

Tell me a story.
Don't pick words out of a pile and slap them together.


Agree and disagree.

The agree part: I love the writing of Milan Kundera, and have read just about everything he's ever written that's been translated into English. At some point, he stopped writing in his native tongue (he was born a Czech) and started writing in French (presumably because he lives there now). His French books are an entirely different animal from his Czech books, but the intent is still there. It's just that his vocabulary is much more concise when he writes in French, and he is able to convey (in my opinion, anyway) much more with much less. I can only guess this is because it's not his native tongue, but in any case, his character shines through even though his vocabulary is entirely different.

The disagree part: You must have at least SOME vocabulary in order to tell a story. If you want to disprove this notion, you tell me a story in Sanskrit, and I'll shut up. The reason I'm not writing this in Portugese is that I don't speak Portugese. So to a certain extent, it is about vocabulary. In BG land, you yourself are fond of saying, "you can look at alla the tabs you want, but it ain't gonna help you hear the IV chord any better". What does this mean? While I'll give you the point that you do usually say, "HEAR" the IV chord, you're still referring to it as "the IV chord", right? Which means that some thought has gone into applying a label to that sound at some point. And then, at some later point, your "knowledge" of that sound as "the IV chord" became intuitive, and now you simply go there when you hear it....but you still went through point B to get from point A to point C, no?

If no, that's cool - but I did. And I can still remember many instances of some sound which had previously been nothing more than a concept I was d**king around with suddenly clicking when I heard it on some REKKID or another: The Locrian #2 sound, which Jamey had been trying to get me to use for forever, always sounded like **** to me when I forced it, but then one day I hear this killing Kenny Kirkland solo with this great sound on it, and guess what it turned out to be? Or the infamous "upper structure II" triad, which always sounded like a round peg in a square hole when I tried to use it until I heard Kenny Barron playing this BAAAAD solo on "There Is No Greater Love", in which he played variations on that sound in almost every chorus.

There's lots more, but you get the point. So I don't see anything wrong with trying to build vocabulary, as long as you understand that the words are only as good as the story you make with them. Besides, I teach music theory for a living. If I agree with everything you've said, I will have just agreed myself out of a gig.

Originally posted by Chris Fitzgerald

So I don't see anything wrong with trying to build vocabulary, as long as you understand that the words are only as good as the story you make with them. Besides, I teach music theory for a living. If I agree with everything you've said, I will have just agreed myself out of a gig.

I think this is where I appeared to be disagreeing with Ed about "licks" in another thread....

So - teachers have got to teach something in Jazz classes and I think there is an issue around vocabulary - so a lot of British Jazz musicians, some who are also teachers are interested in fusions of other types of music with Jazz.

But how do you teach the differences without some examples of vocabulary - how does something sound "Bluesy" - as opposed to sounding like Palestinian funeral music or Spanish Flamenco ?

How does music get its colour ....?

Damn, that's beautiful.. sniff, sniff

Originally posted by Ed Fuqua

But to get back to something Tsolo was saying, I was thinking back to a time in my misspent Ute. I was at an Unitarian youth group conference near Frogmore SC on Hunting Island. Nice deserted beach, we were a buncha teenagers hanging out and so we start looking for starfish in the incoming tide. And they're kinda hard to see, sorta lumps but a lotta stuff makes sorta lumps and then all of a sudden and you aren't quite sure how it happened alla that other lump looking stuff is just lumps and you can "see" just the lumps that are starfish. And you can look up the beach as far as you can see and the starfish lumps just are [b]there and all the other visual garbage just doesn't register. Hearing chord changes is kinda like that, you don't have to "do" anything or think about anything, you just hear it. The same way you can look at a STOP sign, you don't have to think about it, you don't have to read it and understand it, you just stop. It's there and you know what it means.


Okay, I know what you mean. But just in case some young FiElDy DiScIpLe comes along and interprets what you are saying as "If YoU jUsT wAiT, yOu WoN'T hAvE tO dO aNyThInG aNd ThEn OnE dAy YoU'lL sUdDeNlY jUsT hEaR tHe ****", you might want to clarify exactly where the SLOW PRACTICE and STUDY comes in with this approach. And also how what you're saying here goes together with your practice regime of practicing chord arpeggiations in all possible inversions. If you aren't training yourself to hear and execute what you're practicing by doing all of that, then exactly what do you do it for?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Originally posted by Ed Fuqua
Look, I'm gonna get leaflets printed up so I don't have to say the whole damn thing every ****ing time I type something here. Yes, that's how you get there, by working on your ear. It doesn't just happen.




Cool, that's all I was saying. When you get those leaflets done, shoot one my way, and I'll make a FAQ out of it. Seriously, no sarcasm or irony intended. :)

I thought it was a good explaination. Like those pictures that are just squiggly lines until you cross your eyes just right - then it just jumps out at you. It takes practice to make it happen without thought.

So the question is, how do you learn to hear those changes? And equally important, how do you develop a sense of what to play? The answer to both is that you listen to a lot of music, you start to copy what other bass players are doing, and you develop a sense of what works with what.

But listening to someone's notion of standardized progressions isn't all that different from listening to standard tunes; it may swing less, but it may also make it easier for the tyro to learn to hear the progressions. What's the difference between saying "Now we're going to practice II-Vs through the cycle of 5ths" and saying "Today we're going to work on "All The Things You Are"? ;-)

My point is that yeah, the music is the thing, and only by listening to music and playing music are you gonna be a musician. But a lot of these tools we're talking about make it easier in the beginning for tyros to pick up things that the old dogs can see as clearly as a starfish lump on the beach.

Don't forget that people's brains are different, too. Copping from records is an ear-ish approach that worked pretty good for Pres, Bird, and innumerable others. Then you got yer "intellectuals" who relate better to a mind-ish approach, chock full of theories, conceptual templates, typologies of standard changes.

Neither of these approaches necessarily guarantees or excludes the possibility that a musician can play what he/she hears. Don't confuse music and music-making with its tools. The way ya think about it is a tool, too.

Originally posted by mje
What's the difference between saying "Now we're going to practice II-Vs through the cycle of 5ths" and saying "Today we're going to work on "All The Things You Are"? ;-)

The difference, to use your example, is that "All the Things...," is not a series of ii-V's.

Originally posted by David Kaczorowski


The difference, to use your example, is that "All the Things...," is not a series of ii-V's.

I didn't think so either, until I listened to the band at a wedding a month ago....

<rim shot>

Oh, absolutely. The tune's the thing. Same with drummers. You hear a really great drummer and you know he's hearing the tune in his head when he solos.

But how does a beginner get started? Do you say here, listen to this tune and come up with a line? Or do you start by listening to patterns repeated over and over to nail the sound in your head?

If you're talking about learning to hear a tune, it's not patterns in my opinion. I think a good thing to start with is just playing the melody with small variations and spicings-up.

Bluegrass -- another American improvising music -- has a nice tradition of melody-based soloing. In your trad bluegrass arrangement, the soloist only gets a half chorus to get the idea across before he's handing off to the next one. It pays not to stray too far from the melody.

Something I do around the house: I get a tune or a line or a something going in my head, I like to walk up to the bass and try and play it, same key. As the years go by I'm getting better at this. Must mean somethin'...

Originally posted by Ed Fuqua
You're not playing C-7, you're playing SOFTLY or SOLAR or JUST FRIENDS or ...
Wow. Ed, this is such a clear expression, and it seems like something even a beginner can grasp instantly.

Originally posted by MJE
But how does a beginner get started?
It seems silly to say to a 12-year-old, "Carefully study the masters when you practice, but when you get on the stand, don't play their shtuff, just be open to your own." But it doesn't seem silly to say what Ed says so often, "Cut-and-paste seems like music but it's not."

Originally posted by Samuel

...seems like music but it's not...


It's Chiffon. :)

Agreed 100%. And to that I would add that when you're playing "Solar" or "Softly", not only are you NOT just playing a C-7, you are also NOT just playing Solar or Softly: you are playing in the moment, and what comes out should be guided by and inspired by the moment as opposed to trying to rehash an earlier version of same.

One point to note with watching the left hand of the piano, in jazz, a good piano player will stay away from the root so a little caution may need to be observed as C-7 (C Eb G Bb) may appear to be EbMaj7 (Eb G Bb D - the ninth on top) plus a million other variations.

The ideal way is to learn all the standard chord progressions on piano, i.e. ii - V I, ii-7b5 - Vb9 - i, iii-, VI7, ii-, V7 etc because in jazz that is what we're playing 80% of the time anyway, you'll then get to hear when they crop up and even predict them when you know a tune to hear.

Also, sitting at a piano and playing/singing intervals is good for your ear - try to hear the interval in your head first then play it, then make the comparison.

Hope you find this helpful :hmm: