Hearing Chord Changes

[Sam Sherry]

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 . . .

[tsolo]

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

[Damon Rondeau]

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.

[tsolo]

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.

[Damon Rondeau]

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.

[Chris Fitzgerald]

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.[b]


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 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.

[Bruce Lindfield]

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 ....?

[tsolo]

Damn, that's beautiful.. sniff, sniff

[Chris Fitzgerald]

Originally posted by Ed Fuqua
[b]
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 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.

[Chris Fitzgerald]

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.

[tsolo]

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.

[mje]

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.

[Damon Rondeau]

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.

[David Kaczorowski]

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.

[mje]

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>

[mje]

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?

[Damon Rondeau]

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'...

[Sam Sherry]

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."

[Chris Fitzgerald]

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.

[JazzDoubleBass.]

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