3 Highly Effective Ear Training Exercises You Can Do All By Yourself
We’ve presented tons of exercises on how to practice ear training, but many require that you have someone to train with. So what do you do when you don’t have a partner? When you have no one to practice ear training with there’s just as many exercises you can do and better yet, you can ...
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Developing Aural Knowledge: How to Turn Music Theory into Music
Jazz is smart people music! I first heard these words from the great pianist Harold Mabern. Walking through the practice rooms at school one day, as was usually the case, a group of eager students was huddled around him as he told a story. An impromptu musical lesson that didn’t involve scales or chords, but ...
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Learn to Change the Way You Hear
Each day when you get your instrument out of its case and set out to practice improvisation, your goal is to play the right notes. Whether it’s playing with great technique and great sound or finding the best line to play over that new tune, you’re looking for the fastest way to sound good over ...
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If You Can Sing Happy Birthday…You Can Transcribe Your Favorite Solo
Transcription can be a real struggle sometimes. Some days it feels like you can spend an hour trying to learn a few measures, and after a dozen frustrating attempts, you end up in exactly the same place you started. If this feeling rings a bell with you, you are definitely not alone. Many of the ...
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You Are Your Own Instrument
Recently I’ve been checking out a book called “You are Your Own Gym: The Bible of Bodyweight Execises.” The author, Mark Lauren, is a former instructor and trainer for elite special forces soldiers. The central premise of his book, geared toward your everyday civilian, is that you don’t need all those fancy high-tech weight machines ...
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Understanding Chord Tones
Recently we’ve gotten a few questions regarding chord tones: how to work on hearing them, how to aim for them in your lines, and how to connect them when you’re improvising over a chord progression. Understanding the sound and function of chord tones is important to your success as an improviser. However, it’s important to ...
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3 Simple Steps Toward Playing What You Hear
You’ve heard it time and time again…PLAY WHAT YOU HEAR!! But when it comes to improvising jazz, how do you actually go about playing what you’re hearing? And how do you mentally hear the beautiful jazz lines that you want to play? Playing what you hear sounds so easy in theory, but it’s much more ...
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How to Completely Learn a Melody in 30 Minutes
Everybody talks about learning tunes. I mean everybody. It’s the one common thread that pops up at jam sessions, on gigs, in music schools and in conversations with great players. Hey, what tune do you want to play next? Do you know this tune? What tunes are you working on? I really need to learn ...
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A Simple Way To Hear Difficult Intervals: The 2-step method
Hearing larger intervals is difficult for most people. After a couple weeks of practicing your intervals, half-steps, whole steps, major and minor thirds, perfect fourths, perfect fifths, and major sixths fall into place, but the remaining few linger on, causing us trouble for eternity. There’s no reason why we can’t isolate these more difficult intervals ...
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The Path to Playing What You’re Hearing
Play what you’re hearing in your head! These are the instructions that numerous books, videos, and educators tell us as we struggle to figure out how to play over chord progressions. The only problem in situations like these is, as beginners, we aren’t hearing anything in our heads… Think back to the first time that ...
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Getting to the Next Level: 5 Ways to Speed Up Your Musical Progress
Learning to improvise is a path with many steps leading to many different levels. Contrary to the belief held by some that improvising is a talent, or even a skill allowed to only a special few, the truth is much simpler. Time and again we must tackle new concepts and tirelessly practice them until we ...
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Learn to Hear More Music with Selective Listening
Hey, did you just hear that? Look, did you just see that? Wait, can you feel that? What’s that smell? Wait…what?! On a daily basis our senses are bombarded with information. Sights, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations come at us from every angle, vying for a precious scrap of our cognitive awareness. Despite our best ...
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