Jazz Advice

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 all those chords that you stumble upon.

Lucky for us, the right notes have been laid out for us in theory books and on the pages of play-a-long tracks. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself: “Why exactly are those notes the “right notes?”

What is it that makes them right and the other notes wrong? Are we just following the rules of music theory on blind faith or are those “right notes” right because we hear them that way?

Music theory is important in understanding the inner workings of harmony, but the true test of the “right notes”comes with your ear. What does it sound like? The interesting aspect of music is that this “sound” is different for every person. Listening is a truly subjective endeavor. What one person hears as pleasing, another person can find unlistenable, even unbearable.

Sometimes it has to do with personal taste, but more often not it has to do with exposure and experience. I remember the first time I listened to Schoenberg’s Pirot Lunaire:

To my untrained ear, it sounded overly dissonant, almost like noise. However, putting it on today it sounds surprisingly accessible. The piece … Read More

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 questions that we get every week have to do with this exact problem. How exactly do you make the transcription process easier?

In a perfect world transcription would be a breeze. You would hear a solo that grabs your attention, bring it into the practice room, and figure it out in a matter of minutes. The entire process would be seamless and easy: hear it, sing it, and play it; translating those harmonies and melodies right to your instrument and on to your solos.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, this is actually closer to reality than you might be willing to believe. You can get to this point in your playing, however, the path there is not what you may be expecting.

Getting simple with it

With any complex technique, advanced skill, or in-depth harmonic knowledge that you wish to acquire as a musician, the process has to begin with a very simple concept. A small exercise or idea that you expand, explore, and expound upon. You take this simple idea and master it; building it up step by step, until you are playing at an entirely new level and using skills … Read More

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 or even an expensive membership to your local gym to get in shape. According to the Mark Lauren, what most people don’t realize is that you already have all the equipment you need to completely transform your body.

You are indeed your own gym.

At first glance, it seems like a concept that’s too simple and too obvious to work let alone create elite soldiers. However after a few weeks of sticking to his program, the results speak for themselves. More important and far reaching than his workout program though, is the concept of intrinsic improvement.

This idea of self-engendered personal growth may not be a revolutionary concept in the realm of physical fitness, but in the world of music it is surprisingly rare.

Fitting the mold of the musician

In music, we constantly define ourselves and our musicianship by external factors: the instruments we play, the style of music we perform, the records we listen to, and the groups we play with. Classical musicians are supposed to play a certain way, jazz musicians have to play another way, string players play a certain way, drummers should focus exclusively on rhythm, horn players … Read More

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 remember that chord tones are not the only aspect of improvising that you need to worry about. In fact, focusing only on these specific notes or ways to connect them when you improvise can lead you in the opposite direction then you’re aiming for.

Think of this ability to hear, understand, and utilize chord tones in your solos as yet another skill in your improvisational arsenal, one of many that you use daily to create the lines you’re hearing in your head. In other words, chord tones should just be one piece of the puzzle, not your only way to construct material to improvise with.

With this in mind, here are concepts to think about that will put you on track to understanding and using chord tones to your advantage. Along with each practice idea, I’ve included some links to some of our articles that will guide you through the process of acquiring these skills.

I) Adjusting your mental approach

While the focus of improvising should be the sound of the music, the way that you think about chords and their respective chord tones can have a huge impact on the way you play. The … Read More

You’ve heard it time and time again…”Play what you hear!”

But how do you actually go about playing what you’re hearing? And how do you hear the stuff that you want to play? Playing what you hear sounds easy in theory, but it’s much more difficult in practice.

When you think about it, it’s kind of the whole point. If you could hear everything you want to play and play everything you hear, you could play anything you wanted to. That being said, the advice, “play what you hear,” is not an easy task.

There are however many ways to get closer to the goal of hearing what you play and playing what you hear. Here’s a simple process to get the ball rolling and make quick headway.

Step 1: connect your voice to your mind’s ear

The first step to playing what you hear has nothing to do with your instrument. It’s just you: connecting the voice that produces sound in your mind, with the your singing voice.

Anybody can develop this skill. We all have the ability to hear voices and sounds in our head, in fact, sometimes it’s difficult to turn them off! Yet not everyone learns to control this inner voice. It’s this inner voice where everything comes from.

For this first step, sit in silence and close your eyes. Turn all your attention to the voice in your mind. Instruct your inner-voice to “sing” a solid continuous pitch. Focus even more on this pitch and … Read More

Everybody talks about learning tunes. I mean everybody. It’s the one common thread that you hear about at jam sessions, in music schools, and conversations with great players. So much emphasis is placed upon the need for more tunes it’s not surprising that most players have this burgeoning mental complex about knowing and learning tunes that hangs over their heads day after day like a black cloud.

With this ominous mindset, the simple act of learning a tune becomes a painful, long, drawn-out process that we try to avoid at all costs.

For years, I was stuck in this mental box and would force myself to try to learn tunes by pure memorization, from a piece of paper. Hours were spent in fruitless pursuit and it became easier to read tunes than to actually learn them. When it came time to perform these tunes, I was hanging onto these mental facts like a stranded swimmer holding on to a life preserver.

If I couldn’t think of those note names I memorized or that sequence of fingerings, I had nothing to play and worse, no aural skills to keep me afloat.

When you are learning in a situation like this, building a solid repertoire can seem like an impossible task. Even when you do manage to learn a tune, are you sure that you truly know it and will remember it?

If this sounds familiar, you’ve probably had the same thought I often had: There has to be a better … Read More

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 and learn to hear them just as easily as we hear a whole-step, we just need to utilize the intervals that we already know well as the foundation to learn these less familiar sounds.

Using the intervals you know to hear more difficult ones: the 2-step method

So you can hear the intervals of a perfect fifth and a half step just fine, but tritones (diminished 5ths, or augmented 4ths) give you trouble. No worries. By using what we’ll call the 2-step method, you’ll quickly grasp tritones.

The idea behind the 2-step method is to hear an interval that is close to the interval you want to hear, and then move via half-step (or whole step in some cases) to the target interval. For instance, if you want to hear a tritone and you can hear/sing perfect fifths and half-steps no problem, then first you sing a perfect fifth, and then sing a half-step below.

The full process would be to sing a note. Now sing a note a perfect fifth above. Now sing a half-step below. Now sing the root again. It looks like this:

We’re calling it the 2-step method because in … Read More

Every so often we make a musical discovery that drastically changes the way we approach improvisation. One day we are struggling over the same tunes, growing more and more frustrated with our own predictable patterns and then it hits us – we suddenly discover a secret that was hidden right before our eyes.

A subtle mental, aural, or physical shift occurs and we are able to approach improvisation in an entirely new way. From then on, our eyes (and ears) are opened to a wealth of new possibilities.

Looking back at the last fifteen years or so of my own journey to learn improvisation, I have made some very important musical discoveries that have changed the way I look at the music. Some of these discoveries came rather quickly, with a small amount of practice and others I had to struggle with for years before I had control of them.

Regardless of how long the discovery took, the result was the same: from that point on my ears changed and I took on a deeper understanding of the music. Most importantly, I now went into the practice room with a renewed excitement for improvising.

On my journey to find these breakthroughs, I looked for information in all sorts of places. Some of this information I found in books on how to improvise and some of it, in contrast, was not mentioned in any texts, videos, or lessons. Some of it was handed to me numerous times while I foolishly ignored … Read More

“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 you tried to improvise a line over a chord progression. If you were anything like me, you were frantically looking for the “right” notes to play and using the one scale that you memorized to find them. When you are learning to improvise, you are too busy racking your brain for scales and avoiding “wrong” notes, to use your ears or hear anything.

Sure, it gets easier as you progress as an improviser: you learn many more scales, memorize chord progressions, transcribe solos, and figure out harmonic patterns. However, whether you like to admit it or not, with all of these tools that you pick up, you are still relying heavily on a mental knowledge of the music.

The bottom line here is that the majority of us aren’t using our ears nearly enough as we improvise. If you continually feel like improvising has become a repetitive exercise or that you keep returning to the same patterns and licks as you play over tunes, then this article is for you.

Confronting the gap between our ears and our minds

It’s a simple fact, it is much easier to understand a concept mentally than to actually … Read More

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 have them in our ears and fingers. The wondrous aspect of learning improvisation is that it is a process that never ends – you can always improve and there will always be another level to strive for.

The difficult part, however, comes in pushing yourself to get to that next level.

In the process of learning to improvise, we immediately make big jumps in skill level. We go from knowing a few major scales to understanding chord structures, from hearing basic chord progressions to playing improvised lines over entire tunes. Eventually we transcribe a solo and begin to think about the concepts of phrasing, motivic development, sound, time, and articulation.

All of these steps are huge and it truly feels great when we accomplish them. We go from dealing with music superficially to actually creating something meaningful and personal. With each level, a whole new world of sound and possibilities is discovered.

As we become more advanced technically and more sophisticated harmonically however, it takes more and more work to break through to the next level. Despite our previous successes, roadblocks inevitably pop up in the way of our improvement: we get lazy, complacent with … Read More