The Guitar Diaries #6

Last week's lesson was a slight change of pace. The primary focus was on ear training, and involved much more talking and listening, as opposed to actual playing.

For me there has always been a certain mystique about the concept of "playing by ear". I grew up in that generation of players for whom guitar tab was the default way to learn to play your favourite music. Reading the precise transcriptions of the military-precision riffs in Metallica songs just reinforced the natural feeling that trying to learn this by ear was futile. And so there'd you be, hemming and hawing over such nuances as whether this or that power chord should be played with just root and fifth or whether the root one octave higher also needs to be played (when in fact with sufficient distortion you can't tell the difference anyway!). But without the transcription you were basically helpless. The net result was that you could play some pretty cool riffs, but you didn't really develop as a musician.

Over the years I have picked up a rudimentary ability to figure things out by ear. I can tune my guitar by ear (so I'm not at the absolute lowest rung of the ear ladder -- whew!), and with a bit of trial and error I can reproduce basic melodies. I can also sing in tune (within my rather limited vocal range) -- an ability that in my case is certainly not to be confused with havnig a good singing voice!

But that's a far cry from having a well-developed musical ear: I can't reliably recognize all intervals (I seem to struggle with tritone and minor sixth and beyond), and I'm not too good at recognizing different chords (and wouldn't have a hope of distinguishing different voicings). But, hopefully, that's all going to change with a bit of practise.

The end result is certainly worth aiming for. It was rather impressive watching the teacher mention a tune, then start playing it more-or-less flawlessly (though slowly, obviously). The idea that you could just hear a tune in your head seems like a key part of what being a musician is all about. And who knows, one day I could be like Jack Butler mimicking Ralph Macchio's solo (as an aside: for my two cents, he got far too little credit for what was a extremely worthy effort on the fly!).

Anyway, back to the present: the initial goal is to become comfortable identifying intervals. To keep things simple, I'm concentrating on recognizing intervals played in ascending order from a fixed middle-C base note (3rd fret, 5th string), and staying within a one octave range. To help with recognizing musical intervals, the recommended approach is to identify examples of each interval from tunes you are very familiar with. Here are the interval - tune associations that I'm using for now (unless otherwise specified, the interval is between the first two notes of the given tune):

minor second (1 semitone): jaws theme, beethoven's fur elise.

major second (2 semitones): for this one I just think of the second note when you play an ascending major scale. "Happy Birthday" is also a good one.

minor third (3 semitones): acoustic version of layla (eric clapton unplugged); smoke on the water (deep purple).

major third (4 semitones): when the saints go marching in.

perfect fourth (5 semitones): here comes the bride.

tritone (6 semitones): the simpsons, maria (from west side story -- this was suggested by the teacher; I wasn't familiar with the tune, but this interval was proving troublesome enough that I went and listened to on youtube).

perfect fifth (7 semitones): this is probably the easiest to recognize. star wars theme is the best one for me. "flintstones" (descending order) is also good.

minor sixth (8 semitones): vangelis 1492 theme, last of the mohicans theme, piano tune from "the sting".

major sixth (9 semitones): "man in the mirror" (descending order), "my bonnie lies over the ocean".

minor seventh (10 semitones): a tough one for me... the only tune I could find was the warbly theme from the original star trek. I may try to find a couple of others.

major seventh (11 semitones): another tough one... the first and third note in "somewhere over the rainbow" is good. Another one is "moon river", when she sings "i'm crossing you in style": the interval between "i'm" and "crossing".

octave (12 semitones): the first and second note in "somewhere over the rainbow", the chorus of david bowie's "starman".

I wrote myself a little Mathematica Demonstration which has proved very handy. The great thing about ear training is that once you get switched on to it, you find yourself "practising" whenever you listen to music, or even just walking along replaying a familiar tune in your head.