Use your EARS!!

[Jools4001]

Originally Posted by funkydanbass

This is absolute rubbish. 99% of musicians have worked hard at developing an ear. Through transcription, sight-singing, interval identification and singing etc etc. Most musicians are NOT born with an innate ability to identify pitches. Even people possesing perfect pitch need to develop there relative pitch...

Music isn't a matter of being a reader OR being an ear player. We all have to work at all aspects of musicianship. And for most of us mere mortals it taks lots of practice.

Don't be disheartened that you can't transcribe basslines from record perfectly yet... If you work at it you will get better. Hook up with a teacher that can guide your transcription and help develop your ear.

It never fails to amaze me that people will dismiss something as absolute rubbish because somebody has posted a view that doesn't agree with their own experience.

This may be your point of view but it doesn't mean that the perspective of the person with whom you are disagreeing so violently has no validity.

I do not have perfect pitch and would never claim to have. I did grow up in a household where neither of my parents played an instrument but loved classical music, so I grew up listening to all of the major composers and many less well known composers as well. From a very early age I have always been able to zero in on a given instrument and listen to the line that it was playing, don't ask me how, I just can.

As I became interested in contemporary music I naturally gravitated to playing bass because it seemed to me that's where the power of the music was and I never had any trouble picking out basslines. I'm not infallible and there are bits of some records where the bassline gets a bit blurred in the mix (either because it sits back in the mix, gets tied up with a keyboard line or maybe there are some subtle damped notes or small grace notes in there) but I can always hear the fundamental bass line right away and work on the subtleties later.

I have never had to conciously work hard at it. I may be one of the lucky 1% but I would submit that nearly every guitarist and bass player I've worked with in over 30 years has been largely self taught, so my guess is that there are a lot more people than 1%

[funkydanbass]

The statement that:
"A lot of people learn to play them self by playing by ear while other people go by tablature or sheet music."
Implies that some people do not develop any aural ability at all... That it's some how either or. That's how I read it anyway. Anyone that has been a musician for longer than a year or two would know that that is just not the case. As the rest of my previos post said:

Music isn't a matter of being a reader OR being an ear player. We all have to work at all aspects of musicianship. And for most of us mere mortals it taks lots of practice.

Don't be disheartened that you can't transcribe basslines from record perfectly yet... If you work at it you will get better. Hook up with a teacher that can guide your transcription and help develop your ear.

Hardly the violent attack...

[professor_bills]

hey do what I do....fake it

[ksandvik]

Personally I think this could be developed:

* Play along any song, as much as possible. Use pandora.com or slacker.com, key in a channel and just follow along.
* Learn to isolate the bass lines when listening to music, this way you learn a lot of cool techniques by just listening to the bass lines themselves.

It takes a lot of hours, but it's worth it, for jams, or ad hoc playing, or otherwise for quickly learning to play any song, original or cover.

--Kent

[JustOpenYourMind]

Sit with your cd player, alone then, riff by riff try to make out the parts, just rewind and rewind till you find it. Eventually, even if you don't know theory, you'll just know where the notes are on your neck, this skill will be especially usefull when your improvising music with your friends, you hear a note and your hand just knows where it is.

Everybody can do it, it has nothing to do with perfect pitch, every good musician i've met can do this. It sure need practice and it's going to be hard. If a bassplayer keeps looking at the guitar player's neck to know what he plays he'll never develop a hear, you need to chalenge yourself and push your limits

[4 stringed fury]

Originally Posted by professor_bills

hey do what I do....fake it

Thats what I do now!

[holy_toy]

Originally Posted by JustOpenYourMind

Sit with your cd player, alone then, riff by riff try to make out the parts, just rewind and rewind till you find it. Eventually, even if you don't know theory, you'll just know where the notes are on your neck

I agree that's the only way.Before I coulden't play anything by ear now can I take simple riffs/lines.One advise...Don't give up.

[Drifta]

Originally Posted by 4 stringed fury

Thats what I do now!

hey man just don't let it get ya down. let me guess your buddies have been playing longer too? they probably don't realize how hard it is anymore.


i started playing bass 3 years ago and i had same situation, buddies were life time musicans and couldn't understand why i couldnt hear bass parts. it got me down and really pushed me away for a little time, i felt like i was never gonna hear it and never be good, but i worked through it and still don't got a great ear, but its not bad. Sing the bass parts or hum them. listen to the song over and over,

listen to a song without your bass.
tap your foot to the beat
recognize where 1,2,3,4 are at etc
hum or sing each bass note in time
keep doing this till you can turn off the song, keep your foot tapping and hum or sing the bass part
pick bass up and try to find the notes, You might be surprised how much quicker you find these notes .

[doktorfeelgood]

Originally Posted by 4 stringed fury

Thats what I do now!

"When I die, they'll say he couldn't play S***, but he sure made it sound good..." Hound Dog Taylor )-(

[4 stringed fury]

Originally Posted by doktorfeelgood

"When I die, they'll say he couldn't play S***, but he sure made it sound good..." Hound Dog Taylor )-(

Nice quote.

Just read through this thread - good thread!

I would say with

1. Developing your ear takes years (whether or not you have perfect pitch - you still have to be able to 'unmix' parts)
2. People that have true 'perfect pitch' have it from very early in their development (not birth, but key experiences need to happen before the age of 3 or so that 'categorical' rather than 'spectral' perception of pitch can develop).
3. It would be nice if instead of 'perfect' pitch, people started to refer to it as 'categorical' pitch, since I don't see what's 'perfect' about it. (Maybe someone will have an idea why). Maybe people should just go the whole hog and start saying 'SUPER-HEARING' or bionic hearing or something. Or MIRACLE PITCH!!

For me, the things that really helped with being able to pick out parts all involved active, but enjoyable listening. As it happens, and if it suits your taste, I think one really good type of music to listen to is 4 part choral music. If you listen to it and try and hear each of the four parts, (especially in counterpoint), then I think that's a good thing, because you know that there can only be four parts total. For example, Mozart's Requiem is a good one to listen to for that.

[MarkTAW]

There are some tribes in China where pitch is an important part of language. If you ask them to repeat a phrase

a) every person in the tribe will hit the same pitches when saying the phrase
b) if you record the person years later they'll repeat with the same pitches.

Either everyone in the tribe is genetically gifted or through constant exposure they have something approaching perfect pitch.

Ear training is really like learning a language. As an infant you learned to point to the black ball of fuzz and say "Cat" - at first you thought all black balls of fuzz were cats, and that white balls of fuzz were "Dog" but you learned to discriminate between the two and now except for the occasional chihuahua in a handbag, you get it right 100% of the time.

So too with ear training, you learn to recognize a major chord from a minor chord regardless of context and you learn to recognize a major seventh from a dominant seventh from a ninth.

One way to do this is to learn lots of songs. Lots & lots of songs. Learn them on a chordal instrument, and learn to *play* the vocal melody. Certainly sing the vocal melody too, this will get your ability to finely discriminate pitch better - if you're sharp or flat - but by playing the vocal melody you're learning the intervals.

If you do this enough you'll begin to have names for the changes you're hearing. This is also where a good fake book comes in. If you start learning lots of jazz standards - really learning them, putting them on your ipod and listening to them, playing through them, singing them, etc. you'll eventually build a vocabulary of just about every chord change and melodic interval in the book, and it won't be some sort of dry, academic "sing do-sol" thing, it will have a real-world melodic significance to you.

[Erick Lam]

Originally Posted by Mr_Sore_Fingerz

A lot of people learn to play themself by playing by ear while other people go by tablature or sheet music. Doesn't mean one is better than the other, you just learn different ways. Developing an ear might be USEFUL but it doesn't mean you suck because you can't just pick stuff out by ear.

I can't agree with that. Being a musician is all about developing an ear. There's no "might be useful" about it. I'll agree that it doesn't mean you suck because you can't do it though. It takes practice, just like everything else.

I've spent hours after hours doing the play/stop/rewind with cassette tapes and this is the single best thing I've ever did to become a decent musician. Every once in a while, I'd spend days locked up in my room trying to figure out more difficult parts, like solos. It's slow and frustrating but after that, picking up simpler parts was just that, simple. Sing the part and eventually, pick the part and write it down without an instrument. It's good to learn some theory (harmony) so you already know where the music is going before you even begin picking up single notes.

CD players suck for this though. It's too easy to rewind too far behind or press stop instead of pause. Use a computer program.

[ksandvik]

Yep. Anyone could learn to play bass to some degree, but those who get gigs, opportunity to play originals, jam in all kinds of interesting configurations and get work in general are the ones who have developed ears. Even better, they don't stop developing it, it's a lifetime effort with unlimited potential.

--Kent

[Thunderthumbs73]

Originally Posted by 4 stringed fury

All my friends tell to use my ears when playing but I can't pick the bass line out of a song and play it for the life of me.

Is there something I can practice or is there something I am completely missing?

Any other advice would be much obliged

Thanks in Advance.

Let's separate the hearing from the playing.

Can you hum the bass line? If so, then it's a reasonably simple matter of learning to play what you can already hum. It shows your ear is there already, and is attuned to the bass parts or things in that frequency.

If you can't hum the bass line, then it's first an ear thing, and any technique on the instrument will be secondary to that, as you can't play what you can't hear, literally.

[mambo4]

Originally Posted by Deacon_Blues

Back then, I wrote down the chords for lots and lots of songs which gradually built up a musical memory of how certain chord progressions and intervals sounded. I also learned a lot of theory while transcribing.

+1

I think recreating the above activities will probably bring you closer to being able to play "by ear" than anything else. When i figure out basslines by ear, simply recognizing the chord progression as one I've heard before helps me guess more accurately what the bass is doing.

[Stumbo]

Originally Posted by Thunderthumbs73

... as you can't play what you can't hear, literally.

You also can't play what you can't recall from memory.

Can you sing songs in tune from memory (any songs)? Practicing and remembering melodies from a variety of tunes is helpful as well.

[Thunderthumbs73]

Originally Posted by Stumbo

You also can't play what you can't recall from memory.

Can you sing songs in tune from memory (any songs)? Practicing and remembering melodies from a variety of tunes is helpful as well.

Yes I can. Remembering melodies is always helpful, but as a recommendation for a bass player who is having hard times picking out the bass part, remembering the melodies is perhaps not the most essential thing and bang for the buck to be able to play the song. At least, IMO.

I'm not even convinced singing tunes in tune from memory is completely useful, as some common songs are played in different keys from group to group (aka Jazz standards) or to consider the ranges of different vocalists.

[Stumbo]

Originally Posted by Thunderthumbs73

Remembering melodies is always helpful...

If you can remember melodies, whatever the key, ime, it's always helpful, just lower it an octave and apply the same principle for the bass line.

Just a suggestion to the OP as a starting point, taking nothing away from all the good advice previously posted or making any type of comment regarding anyone's experience or method.

[Thunderthumbs73]

Originally Posted by Stumbo

If you can remember melodies, whatever the key, ime, it's always helpful, just lower it an octave and apply the same principle for the bass line.

Just a suggestion to the OP as a starting point, taking nothing away from all the good advice previously posted or making any type of comment regarding anyone's experience or method.

My main point was perhaps not heard or understood, which is, without training your ear to hear the bass part, or to pull it out of the mix via your hearing, everything else means little... ...as a bass player. Melodies are usually the highest thing in the mix, and it IS cool to remember them. However, bass parts are quite often, or even most often, the lowest thing in the mix, or if you want to be real technical about it, the least noticed/noticeable, by and large- unless you're talking RHCP or something very bass-heavy. The skill to pick out that musical component (the bass part) which is often buried or obfuscated by everything else in the mix, is really the single initial skill, IMHO, which must preceed any other to play the song by ear.

Like the previous poster, as well as the original, I respect all comments which have gone before...