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Learning to understand harmony

November 19, 2018 By Dave Isaacs Leave a Comment

Learning to play without understanding harmony is like speaking a language without understanding what the words mean.

I should take a moment to qualify what I mean by “understanding”. It’s certainly worthwhile to learn enough music theory to able to identify the notes of a key, or spell a chord. But knowing the math isn’t enough: real musical understanding can only come from listening.

“Harmony” is the result of notes blending together in a harmonious way to create chords.

Some chords are more harmonious than others, though. We call sounds that blend consonant, while sounds that don’t are dissonant. There are degrees of dissonance: some sounds clash more than others. But those clashing sounds actually create the sense of movement in music as much as anything having to do with rhythm.

Try this simple exercise. Hold down the notes of an open position G7 chord, but strike only the first and second strings. The sound is clearly dissonant, maybe even unpleasant. Now play an open position C chord, followed by a G7, then return to C. This sequence creates a complete musical statement with C as our starting point, and G7 as a tension chord that resolves back to C. Now go back to G7 and play only the first and second strings again. You will probably find that the notes sound a lot less dissonant! Outside of the context of the chord pattern, all we hear is the clash. Within the chord sequence, we hear movement: tension and release.

This concept is at the heart of our Western musical system. When one chord follows another, we get a sense of movement. Every new movement in the sequence sets up an expectation in your ear: not exactly predicting what will happen next, but suggesting possibilities for what might happen. It might be a simple two-chord sequence like C and G7, or it might unfold over eight or even sixteen bars.

No matter what, though, in almost every case the sequence eventually comes to a final resolution that completes the cycle.

Understanding harmony means your ear can follow these unfolding sequences, and hear the implied direction as one chord moves to another.

When writing or improvising, this allows you to create a melody part that works with the movement of the chords. For a great illustration of this, give a listen to Bill Withers’ “Lean On Me” and check out my post on the song here.

Sometimes chord changes are meant to play on your expectations. Try playing the following sequence:

C F G C

C F G Am C

Notice how the move to A minor chord plays off the expectation set up by the previous resolution from G to C. Instead, the resolution is delayed the second time by the unexpected minor chord before the return to C. If you play with sequence without the final C, the Am does provide some sense of completion but creates a much more unsettled feeling.

Since chords are collections of individual notes, every chord sequence also creates multiple melodic possibilities.

Even if the lines aren’t highlighted as a melody or bass part, these melodic “voices” reinforce and strengthen the sense of movement. Take a look at this example:

The top line gives you the chord part. The bottom line extracts two possible melodies from the chord sequence. Play the melody alone and then play the chords once more. Notice how the melodic connections between chords help to reinforce this sense of movement and “progression” from one chord to another.

In this more advanced example, the chords could be grouped in sets of two or three.

Each group “points” the ear to the chord that follows:

We start off in the key of C, with Dm7 and G7 pointing to Cmaj7. Shifting the chord to Cm7 sets up an F7 resolving to Bbmaj7, creating the same chord progression in Bb major. The half-step descent to A7 is an unexpected twist, as is the A# diminished that follows. But the diminished chord resolves neatly into Bm7, setting up a chain of 2-5-1 resolutions:

Bm7 – E7 – Am7 (key of A, but with a chromatic adjustment to A minor)
Am7 – D7 – Gm7 (Key of G, with the same chromatic adjustment)
Gm7 – C7 (setting up the key of F).

Notice how the first time through, the C7 doesn’t resolve to F as we’ve come to expect but to the Dm7. This is what we might call a “deceptive” resolution, but the second time through to C7 resolves to F to complete the pattern in F major.

If all that theory is making your eyes cross, just listen to the sense of movement as the progression unfolds.

Try to hear how some of the chord changes resolve exactly as you might expect, while others are more surprising. The surprising changes delay the sense of resolution and prolong the tension until the very end of the cycle.

If this concept is new to you, all you need to do at first is just start listening. The more you pay attention to these kinds of musical details, the easier they become to hear. Ultimately, hearing this sense of implied movement within a chord progression will make it easier to learn new songs, write interesting chord sequences, and improvise. Learning the notes and chords that belong to each key will also help complete the picture, but take in the information a little at a time. Remember that memorizing is relatively easy and quick, but internalizing into your musical ear is a longer process of assimilation. As with everything else in learning music, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Learning to listen

November 5, 2018 By Dave Isaacs Leave a Comment

Musicians listen differently than the average person. But anyone can learn to listen music more deliberately, and understand more about what they hear in the process.

We might think of the way we listen casually as passive listening. This is the way you might hear music playing in the background, whether you’re driving your car, sitting at a desk, or even dancing. The music accompanies some other activity as a part of the atmosphere. You can enjoy the song and even be moved by it, but be conscious of the experience more than the particulars of what you’re hearing.

Good musicians listen critically, with a level of comprehension.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the listener recognizes the specific notes being played, although sometimes they do. Rather, a trained ear perceives details of the way the music is put together. That might include any and all aspects of music: instrumentation, musical vocabulary, rhythm, and texture. This perception is fluid, in that sometimes we might notice something without actually listening for it while other times the experience is more “active”.

“Active listening” is a skill one applies consciously, simply by paying attention. You might have heard a song a hundred times but never really paid attention to the specific details. Sometimes you might even discover an instrument or a part you never knew was there, simply by listening more closely. Talent and training play a role in your ability to perceive these things, but it starts with the simple decision to pay attention to what you hear.

We might also call this skill critical listening. “Critical” in this context doesn’t imply passing judgment but differentiating and observing. Critical listening allows you to hear the individual elements of the music, as well as the way they interact to form a complete and pleasing sound. This process often occurs in layers or levels, in which you perceive more and more detail upon repeated listens.

At the most basic level, we feel a beat and hear a melody.

This is the way the average person hears. A particular instrument might stand out at some point, but for the most part the collective sound is perceived as a whole. But that whole is made up of individual parts. Most people do find that when they begin to pay attention, they can separate the different sounds when they know what to listen for. Over time, this sense becomes more and more acute. Even someone with trained ears might require multiple listens to peel away the layers, depending on how complex the music is.

The ability to learn by ear comes more easily to some people than others but it’s a basic skill anyone can acquire. It can be developed through formal training but also requires lots of trial and error. I had spent so much time in high school trying to learn music by ear that when I got to college my skills were better developed in that area than most of my classmates. Even so, there was still music I listened to every day that I didn’t know nearly as well as I would come to years later. This ability to hear critically has continued to develop over my entire career. In fact, I think most of my improvement as a musician over the last twenty years has been in my ability to hear more than my technical ability to play.

I’ve also found that as my ear has grown more sophisticated I’m able to appreciate music that used to be difficult to follow.

Every piece of music tells a story, whether there are lyrics or not. If you’re only accustomed to following a vocal, instrumental music might seem random and uninteresting. When I first discovered jazz, I sometimes found it hard to separate the improvised sections from the composed “head” melodies. I might respond to and enjoy the sound and texture of the music, but I couldn’t follow the story. As a student playing classical guitar, I could learn the notes and even follow the musical instructions well enough give a convincing performance, but I needed guidance from my teachers to actually hear the music.

This idea of developing your ear applies to everyone that listens to music in any setting. You don’t even need to play an instrument to be able to fine-tune your ability to hear and appreciate. For a player or writer, though, learning to really listen expands your ability to communicate: to tell the story with a level of nuance and detail that adds depth and power to your work. That doesn’t mean that your music needs to be more complicated. Having a “sophisticated” ear simply amplifies your ability to perceive and play with ideas. It allows you to infuse even the simplest thing with layers of subtlety and meaning. This is what gives great music staying power: not complexity on the surface, but the kind of depth that continues to yield new rewards upon years of repeated listening.

Learning the notes: navigating the matrix

October 29, 2018 By Dave Isaacs 1 Comment

One of the great challenges of learning the guitar is that the logic of the notes on the neck isn’t easily apparent. By contrast, think of the layout of a piano keyboard. Low notes are on the left, high notes on the right. Move from one white key to the next and move up or down through the musical alphabet. Skip a key and you skip a letter. To find a sharp or flat, replace a white key with the adjacent black one. It’s very clear and simple, strictly linear.

On the other hand, a scale fingering on guitar seems arbitrary and random. How many notes per string? When do you change strings? Why do the fingerings change so much from one scale to another, and why are there so many of them? The challenges this presents are enough to intimidate some people away from learning to play melody or “lead”. But fortunately, there IS logic to the guitar neck. It’s more complex than the layout of a keyboard, but there’s actually a direct relationship.

The notes on every string of the guitar are linear, in the sense that we progress through the scale as we move along the string.

So moving from an open string up the neck is like moving along a keyboard from left to right. Note that “up” in this sense means rising in pitch, moving away from the headstock. The frets divide the string up into a series of half-steps, just like the white and black keys of the keyboard. To play a chromatic scale, start with the open string and simply move along the string from one fret to the next. This is like striking every key of the keyboard in sequence from left to right.

The piano, of course, has a wider range than the guitar. A full 88-key keyboard spans just over seven octaves, while the average guitar will reach a little below four. (An octave is the distance between a given note and the next higher or lower note with the same letter name). Some electric guitars go all the way up to 24 frets to complete that fourth octave. A single string has a total range of just under 2 octaves, but the frets above the 12^th are used fare less often and rarely on the bass strings. So for the most part, the average skilled player is working within an octave-plus on each string.

You can explore this by trying to play simple melodies on a single string.

The first lesson I would often give a young child would be to play “Hot Cross Buns” by sliding a finger along the first string, starting at the third fret:

This puts the melody in the key of F, but you can play the same melody anywhere on the neck by starting on any fret above the 4^th, dropping two frets, and then two more. This will change the key, of course, but not the melody itself.

Now look at an open position fingering across two strings:

At first, it might seem arbitrary why we change strings when we do. But consider two factors. One, we’ve established that every string has the same linear layout as a keyboard. Two, each of the six strings is tuned to a different pitch, getting gradually higher as we move from thicker to thinner strings. The distance between each pair of strings is a perfect fourth, which works out to 5 frets. (The only exception is the third and second strings, which are a major 3^rd apart or four frets).

Given that even a short-scale neck has at least seventeen frets, there’s obviously going to be some overlap between the pitch ranges of different strings. So you could think of the guitar neck as six overlapping keyboards, each sharing notes with adjacent strings. With this in mind, take a look at the next diagram:

Here, we have a C major scale spelled out on the 5^th string, with duplicate note locations indicated in the tab. From each note locations, there’s at least one other possible place to play the same note. So playing the scale is essentially navigating a matrix, in which you can choose one move or another to arrive at the same note.

Obviously, it takes time to learn the neck well enough to be able to navigate all the possibilities comfortably. But understanding the nature of the guitar neck helps move that process along. Memorize scale fingerings to acquaint yourself with how some of the patterns fall. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that those finger patterns are where the music is. That comes with time, exploration, and listening.

Professional skill vs personal style

October 22, 2018 By Dave Isaacs Leave a Comment

I believe I developed a personal style as a player in spite of my education. This might sound like a flip statement, but it’s taken many years to understand. I’m grateful to have had the training I did, but I didn’t fully understand how working to become a professional could also slow the process of becoming an artist.

It’s a product of the training and trajectory of an educated musician.

From young fan imitating my heroes, to music student, to working player just trying to be prepared for the next gig, a good portion of my musical life has centered on imitating and reproducing familiar sounds. You could probably say the same for most people who play, especially those with formal training. After all, that formal education is meant to build the basic skills you need to play any style of music. You can choose to focus on a particular genre or specialty, but a professional player doesn’t always know what the next gig will be and therefore needs to be able to function in a variety of musical settings.

I used to embrace this philosophy fully, both as a player and a teacher. It’s like the “liberal arts” model of music: regardless of where you land professionally, a well-rounded education is the best preparation. This is certainly true of the freelancer and pro side player, and as a gigging musician that background kept me working. Rock, blues, jazz, country, folk, classical – whatever the gig called for, I wanted to be prepared for it. When I was devouring the pages of Guitar Player magazine as a teenager I read every article and every lesson column, whether I understood it or not, and I meant to learn more if I didn’t. My goal was to be the best and most well-rounded musician I could be.

An artist doesn’t share the same imperatives as a working pro player.

A performing artist needs a distinctive style and sound in order to stand out, and the most successful are often the most strikingly original. When I look back at the musicians that had the biggest impact on me as a player, you could say that about virtually all of them. Even the instrumentalists have an identifiable “voice”. Pioneering Latin rock guitarist Carlos Santana once said in an interview, “your tone is your face. Why would you want to look like someone else?”

When I was first learning to play I was a student and a fan first, learning by imitating my heroes. They taught me what was possible, expanding my concept of what a guitar could do, and I built my vocabulary by stealing from them all. But while many of these players were and are great masters of their instrument, they were not chameleons. They may have started off as I had, imitating their inspirations, but eventually began to stake out territory of their own. This became style as it solidified into a vocabulary and an overall approach.

Developing an individual style may not be a high priority for the average student or hobbyist.

Learning to play favorite songs is satisfying enough for many people. But even if your musical tastes as a listener are diverse, you might find that you have a musical “home base” that you return to even as you explore other, different sounds. So style is defined by musical preference and genre, as well as your own aesthetic sensibility. We all gravitate towards sounds we find pleasing and compelling.

The finer technical points of style develop over time. Every aspect of your technique has an impact on your sound, including the way you breathe and carry your body. So even if you’re not consciously trying to be an individual, you already are. When you start to recognize this, you become faced with an important choice: how much do you allow your predispositions to shape your style, or do you consciously try to absorb things you admire in other players?

This is not necessarily a conscious decision. Intuitive players are naturally guided by what they hear and find pleasing, so individual style often takes care of itself. The player that chooses to develop more wide-ranging skills is also choosing to have more control over their options. When you have more control and a larger vocabulary, a player’s style can change according to the demands of the music. This is a must for the professional session player and most working musicians in general.

For a creative artist, though, this kind of versatility has a downside.

A distinctive voice can be obscured by stylistic “masks”. Again, this can be a conscious choice if the player is being called upon to reproduce a sound. But the most distinctive artists’ style comes through in any musical setting. These can be a product of the player’s physical approach to the instrument – touch, attack, energy – or their musical choices.

You may not have begun to develop a “sound” of your own. As you continue to learn, though, you will find that some things come more naturally than others. Don’t shy away from the challenges, they will help you grow! But do start to recognize your comfort zone, and get to know that territory as well as you can. There’s always more you can do to develop your style with confidence and authority. You might find yourself gravitating to a certain style of playing. Explore the nuances that make great players sound the way they do.

Style is ultimately a product of our influences, but also of the choice to be an individual.

For some people this occurs naturally. If you’re still a beginner or long-term beginner this process may not have begun yet. But the more you play and the better you listen, a sound will begin to take shape. When that begins to happen, embrace it and dive in deeper. Sometimes that means working with and around your limitations. but that won’t stop you from growing. What it will do is allow you to grow as an artist, not just a player.

Chops vs technique

October 15, 2018 By Dave Isaacs 1 Comment

When you think about “technique” or technical playing, you probably think of what musicians call “chops”. It’s a general term but it’s almost always used to refer to difficult or physically challenging music. Using your chops means playing fast, intricate parts, beyond the reach of players that don’t work to develop that ability.

This isn’t inaccurate, but it’s unhelpful to the average guitar student or even the average guitarist. There’s no question that developing good technique is important. If you develop your technique properly, speed comes as a natural result. But a focus on the “chops” aspect of technique can be a misleading distraction from finer points that are essential to really playing well.

Let’s define playing “well” as the ability to play deliberately with confidence.

That means you have enough fine control to execute what you need to consistently without mistakes. It also means that your playing isn’t automatic. You need to know the music with your mind and not just your fingers. The more subtle aspects of technique are often applied more intuitively than consciously, but a good player can choose to zero in on one of those aspects just by paying attention to it.

When you first learn how to play, it’s easy to downplay some of the technical aspects as you simply try to memorize what to do. But since any action on an instrument calls for good technique, paying attention to mechanics early on is helpful and powerful. Ultimately, it will make it easier to get your hands to do what you want them to.

Good technique isn’t difficult, per se, in fact it’s the most natural approach. It takes time to be able to apply good technique on command in the moment, but that’s a separate point. Relaxed, mechanically sound movement are the most fluid and natural, and easiest to control deliberately when you take the time to build the coordination.

A focus on flashy playing and “chops” makes it tempting to rush ahead and play things faster but less controlled.

Odds are, you can move your hands faster than you can fully control the movement. So it’s possible to be able to hit most of the notes quickly, but without enough fine coordination to make sure you can hit them all. Because of this, the lure of speed becomes a distraction for many people.

That’s not to say that the pursuit of accurate speed and obvious “chops” isn’t a worthwhile goal. First of all, it’s not necessarily gratuitous: you ultimately want to have more ability on the instrument than your music demands most of the time. So the more demanding the music is to play, the higher your bar needs to be in order to keep a solid comfort zone for performing. Consistency breeds confidence, so you want to be able to play the part well every time. That’s challenging when the part is at the edge of your ability. So there’s a strong imperative to be able to play more difficult parts than you generally have to. And even so, there’s really nothing wrong with developing virtuosity for its own sake. It’s nice to have power under the hood even on an easy Sunday drive.

Why does this matter to the player with modest musical needs and goals?

The details of expression that make a good player great are not obvious, and sometimes practically invisible. You might not even be able to articulate what was different if they were missing, other than that the music is somehow less dynamic and compelling. But that’s exactly the point: the subtleties that really make music speak are also technical. They require greater attention to detail and greater fine control. We develop this kind of ability the same way we acquire speed and fluidity, through deliberate technical practice.

The player with more modest goals might find it easy to dismiss the importance of technical practice once a basic comfort zone develops. If you can basically to what you need to do, what’s the point of putting in more effort? But that additional effort makes your playing more accurate, more controlled, and more confident. Finer control allows for greater subtlety of things like articulation and phrasing: not just what notes you play but the way they sound.

Think of an actor’s ability to change the impact of a line by changing the way they say the words. You have the same ability as a musician, and giving yourself more expressive power is a worthwhile goal no matter what kind of music you play. More expressive power means better ability to communicate and connect, which should be every player’s ultimate mission.

So if your music doesn’t require speed and flash, don’t fall into the trap of thinking “chops” aren’t important to you.

If it does, don’t let the pursuit of speed distract you from developing real accuracy. ALL technical practice builds your control, consistency, and confidence. And any virtuoso will tell you that even highly advanced technique operates in the service of the music, enhancing your ability to speak to your audience.

What’s your motivation?

October 8, 2018 By Dave Isaacs Leave a Comment

What’s your motivation to play? What made you start playing, and what makes you continue?

For most of us, the answers were pretty simple to start with. Some people just fall in love with music. I know that I was hooked pretty much from the start, and I knew after the first year that I was going to devote my life to it. I loved to play and wanted to play better. It was all I wanted to do and I wanted to be great at it.

That commitment was my driving force for the next ten years of my life. Music school, long hours in the practice room, and just as many hours of hustle to find places to play. Ten years later I had earned two degrees in guitar performance and was playing steady gigs and learning to write music. The satisfaction was built in, the rewards of momentum and commitment.

There’s a good chance that you might have made a different set of choices but still love to play.

Most people don’t make quite such an intense commitment, but still strive to be better players. Part of the beauty of playing music is that there’s always the possibility for growth. You might find, though, that after a while your progress seems to slow down.

This happens to everyone. You might find that playing is still enjoyable but has become a little frustrating. There are all kinds of resources available to you that can help you get better, but it’s hard to know which will help the most. There’s so much information that it can be overwhelming, and learning to use it even more daunting. All of this can make motivation more of a challenge.

You might think that the biggest difference between you and a professional is the amount of hours dedicated to the instrument.

That’s true, but there’s another factor you might not have considered. A professional musician’s life is generally a series of projects. Sometimes that means one long-term band, sometimes one short-term gig after another. Each of these has its own repertoire and dedicated immediate goals: a rehearsal, a recording date, a performance, a deadline. This ongoing series of short-term goals becomes the pro’s motivation. That doesn’t mean the love of playing diminishes, but it does mean that there’s a constant imperative to learn and refine new music.

The pro has an ongoing imperative to learn and master a specific set of material. The challenge for the amateur or student is that lacking specific short-term goals, most people eventually start to spin their wheels. Only the most devoted (or obsessive, depending on how you look at it) are able to maintain momentum without it. And even then, success in staying motivated does come from personal goal-setting.

The bottom line is that almost everyone needs a reason to keep practicing that goes beyond the simple desire to.

In order to keep from coasting, most of us need an additional boost. This can come in the form of jam sessions with friends, a performance at a local open mic, or recording your own songs. You don’t need professional aspirations, or even a desire to do anything other than have the experience. The act of creation is its own reward, and most of all when you give yourself a reason to create and refine.

By necessity, this means narrowing your focus to a specific set of music. Some practice is broad, in the sense of general skill- or vocabulary-building. That means the information you absorb doesn’t have an immediate, specific application. This is an important part of practicing, but it’s wide knowledge rather than deep. To really play the way you want to, you need to get to know specific songs in detail. That means committing yourself to a repertoire and refining it as far as your abilities allow.

There’s another built-in trap here, but understand what matters most.

You can get tired of playing the same songs after a while. Recognize that when this happens, that particular short-term goal may have been reached and it’s time for a new one. There might be more work that could be done: maybe you still can’t play the songs as well as you’d like to. But when your enthusiasm for the project starts to wane, you need to start the process over again with something else. The spark and motivation matter more than the pursuit of perfection. After all, we know that learning music is an ongoing process, and that there’s always another level to reach.

It can be challenging can find people to play with and places to play. It can be hard to choose a particular area to focus on, or get a group of people to agree on what to do. You might prefer to work alone, and that’s fine. But be aware that the goal-setting process and resulting growth are the most important things. All of the specifics are variable: what you do, who you do it with, and how well you can pull it off. The thing that’s certain is that the process makes you a better player and a stronger musician. Once you recognize this, the pursuit of those short-term goals becomes its own motivation. Best of all, you will certainly see your skills and confidence improve. There’s no greater motivation than that.