Blog: The Perpetual Beginner

Putting the pieces together

December 17, 2018 By Dave Isaacs Leave a Comment

All the lessons in the world won’t teach you to play if you don’t learn how to put the pieces together yourself.

The explosion of educational content on the internet is a wonderful thing. I wish YouTube, Ultimate Guitar, JamPlay, and the thousands of other online resources existed when I was first learning to play. But despite all these tools, I constantly hear from students that are becoming frustrated. One told me recently, “I have hard drives full of terabytes of guitar lessons, and I still can’t play”.

The problem is not with YouTube, the nature of learning online, or the strength or weakness of anyone’s teaching technique.

The problem is that really learning to play requires a specific skill that you can’t get from watching a video: the ability to manipulate musical ideas in real time.

I’m not talking about the difference between playing prepared parts and improvising. Even if you’ve practiced every detail of a piece of music, a good performance still requires a strong delivery. That means playing the music with your mind as well as your hands: not simply repeating a sequence of learned movements but speaking to the audience as clearly as if you were using words. Shaping a line with the right emphasis just in the way you might deliver the turn of phrase that brings the message home. This is what “performance” is really about, and the only way to learn how is to do it.

It’s possible to learn a part and execute it consistently based on muscle memory alone. It’s also possible to play on autopilot. Even more often, it’s possible – and even common – to play without really hearing yourself, or listening to what’s going on around you. I’ve been onstage with musicians myself that were playing at the same time I was, but we weren’t playing together. Without real-time interaction and sensitivity to each other, musicians can play simultaneously but not as a real ensemble.

This gets back to the recurring question of whether you should be thinking while you play.

I think that being completely in the moment and “in the zone” is the highest form of music-making.

It’s a goal to shoot for every time. And there will be moments in that state when the music just happens. But just as often, there is thought in the form of observation and reaction, and in conscious choices. Think of it like driving: you don’t think about moving your foot from the gas to the brake, but you do pay attention to the traffic around you. In other words, though directs action but not the mechanical movement. It’s the same with playing: your choices direct the musical gesture, but the physical movement comes from muscle memory.

Even something as seemingly fundamental as strumming a song from beginning to end requires conscious attention. The chord sequences and form of the song should absolutely be memorized, as well as the lyrics of course. But no matter how thoroughly you’ve practiced, there are aspects of the performance that need real-time attention. You may have rehearsed when to build a crescendo, for example, but you still need to feel it as it happens. Dynamics are really enhanced by conscious performance, because we feel the music that much more strongly and respond to the emotional energy in the song. After all, when we talk about a “dynamic” performance we’re not really talking about soft and loud. A dynamic performance is engaging because it draws the listener into the flow the performer is experiencing. You can accomplish a lot practicing with a metronome or backing track, but it’s still not the same as playing with or for someone else. The simple presence of another set of ears in the room will make you self-conscious enough to hear differently. It’s also sufficient distraction to disrupt the performance if you haven’t learned the music thoroughly.

Real musicianship is developed and tested in performance.

I’m not suggesting that playing in a group or on a stage is the only way to get better. This is actually an area where social media can he helpful, in that you can learn to perform for the camera and then post videos. Aside from starting a YouTube channel, there are also numerous Facebook groups and other forums where a beginner can post videos and document their progress. But sometimes you might just corral a friend or loved one and ask them to sit down and listen to you play.

When it comes to improvising, conscious choices matter as well. There’s a fine line between going with the flow and going on autopilot. I find that the simple thought “now do something else” can be enough to keep me out of stock clichés and mindless licks. A good improvisation should tell a story, so it’s best to choose your words and not just babble.

A good teacher can absolutely help you develop these skills. I work with my students on developing listening skills and reactivity both in private lessons and in my weekly group classes. But 30 minutes or an hour a week of supervised practice are a check-in, a tuneup. The real work has to be done on your own.

Get rhythm: timing and feel.

December 10, 2018 By Dave Isaacs 1 Comment

If you believe you have no natural rhythm, you’re wrong.

Rhythm is actually as natural as breathing, or a heartbeat. We use the term “pulse” in music for a reason! Your pulse might be faster or slower depending on the situation you’re in, but if it’s irregular you know there’s a problem. We walk in time too, mostly. (Try walking OUT of time, you’re likely to look like this).

The fact is, rhythm is everywhere in nature, including your body. So learning to apply it in music might come more naturally to some than to others, but everyone does in fact have “natural rhythm”.

When we talk about keeping time in music, we’re really talking about coordination.

There can be a difference between perceiving steady time and being able to articulate it. To really develop a musical command of rhythm, you also need to be able to play with it: to count, group, and subdivide time in a variety of ways.

When I was in my first year of music school, all the students were required to take a class called “musicianship”. The textbook was called Elementary Training for Musicians, but it seemed to be far above elementary:

(In fairness, this is from page 100, but still….)

However, looking back at it now the way the book is organized is brilliantly simple, and provides a solid approach to building musical coordination. Each chapter is divided into three sections: action in time (rhythm), action in space (melody), and coordinated action (both together). The “action in time” section begins with a simple instruction to tap a steady pulse. Over the course of subsequent exercises, that pulse is organized into recurring counts to create meter.

Meter is just counting!

Meter, as the name suggests, is simply organizing your steady pulse (beat) into measured groups. If a song is said to be “in 4” then the groups are four counts long, but there’s no separation or pause between them. The beat is continuous, and the count is a cycle:

1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 etc…

Meter and time signature

The term “time signature” also refers to meter, but goes one step further and articulates what to call the rhythmic value being counted. In most cases these will be quarter notes, but can also be eighths or (less commonly) half or sixteenth notes. This doesn’t change the steady beat, or even tell you definitively how fast to go (tempo, measured in beats per minute or bpm). The difference between 3/4 and 6/8 time, for example, is more a matter of style, feel, and accent than fast or slow. The distinction matters, but it’s important for you to learn to pick up these kinds of details by listening rather than by counting and thinking. For our purposes, all that matters right now is that you can keep a steady beat while counting to two, three, four, or six over and over.

Add a slight accent to each “one” as you count. There’s a good chance you might do this naturally, since our bodies like cycles. The first count of the cycle is called the downbeat, and you might feel a definite sense of landing or arrival each time it comes around.

Let’s differentiate further. This time, count to two repeatedly and put the accent on the second beat. This is called the backbeat. Now experiment with changing the accent back and forth from downbeat to backbeat. You’ll notice that this changes the feeling of the beat:

Downbeat accent: 1 2 1 2

Backbeat accent: 1 2 1 2

Most songs will accent one more than the other, and the “feel” of a downbeat-heavy song will be very different from a backbeat-heavy song. You will always hear and feel both beats, but the sense of momentum and forward motion is determined by where that accent falls.

Subdivisions and strumming

Of course, most songs do more than bounce back and forth between two beats. The pulse can be divided up into twos, threes, fours, or even further, and notes can be played on any of the subdivisions. Any rhythm you might ever play or sing will line up with a set of pulses and subdivisions that can be “measured” in time as if you were using a ruler.

Applying this idea to the guitar, we can use pick strokes as our unit of “measurement”. Repeated down-up strums might be counted as “1 and 2 and” or as “1 e & a 2 e & a”, articulating eighth notes and sixteenth notes respectively:

From here, you can work out most rhythms by simply alternating between down and up strokes and either striking the strings or not. For example, notice this pattern of down and up strums:

The quarter note pulse is played with downstrokes, while the subdivided eighth notes are filled in with upstrokes in between. If it helps, you can count every subdivision but only strum on the ones where a note appears:

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and

Each italicized “and” is a swing of the arm without striking the strings. If you find this tricky to coordinate, try swinging the arm back and forth and counting out loud: “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”. Notice how the down swing reinforces the sense of arrival on the downbeats, while the up swing on “and” creates a sense of lift. Viewed this way, it makes sense why these are called upbeats.

Ideas to apply

If you’d like some more practice with applying this idea, download this exercise and apply the strum formulas. It’s important that you think in terms of rhythm and feel, though, not just timing. Try using this sequence:

1. Play a steady beat with repeated downstrokes.

2. Count to four repeatedly to establish the meter.

3. Pay attention to the upstrokes and count the “ands”.

4. Using the steady down-up-down-up as your “ruler”, find how the rhythm lines up with the counts of four. Remember that a single quarter note is played with a downstroke, while pairs of eighth notes are played down-up.

5. Experiment with the feel by emphasizing downbeats (1 and 3) or backbeats (2 and 4). You can also try emphasizing other beats for even more options.

These are relatively simple rhythms and there’s a lot more to explore. But if you can begin to connect the related ideas of steady pulse, meter, and subdivision to the feeling of moving the arm back and forth, your coordination, timing, and confidence in strumming will absolutely get stronger.

For more on strumming accents and rhythm, check out this video lesson from the archives:

How to make a guitar sing.

December 3, 2018 By Dave Isaacs Leave a Comment

Some people can play a lot of notes, but the best players make the guitar sing.

Why do some musicians command attention with a single note? Chops are impressive, and speed and flashy technique have their place. But the notes are just the beginning. Expression on the guitar comes from the player’s touch, and the way that subtle variations in pressure and movement can shape a melody.

Many players seem to get distracted in their explorations of lead guitar. This often starts with learning scales, which is important for a variety of reasons. But memorizing patterns on the fretboard is just the first step in a longer process, and can even be misleading. Why else would so many students express that they’ve learned the forms up and down the neck but still can’t seem to make music with it? If you’ve learned about bricks but not mortar, you can’t build a house.

Good lead guitar starts with attention to phrasing.

This is much too large a topic to explore with any depth in a single blog post. But for now, we can hugely simplify and just say that the problem most people have is that they try to use the scales as a foundation for improvising. But music is built on gestures: smaller melodic phrases with integrity of their own. Even a long, continuous line can be broken down into smaller segments that together form a larger gesture. The scales give you one possible set of notes to choose from, and this often works very well. But it’s the choices that make your playing musical, not the set you choose from.

Once you’ve begun to trim your ideas down into smaller pieces, you can start to look more closely at the way you articulate the notes instead of just the notes themselves. Playing melody is like speaking, and no one wants to listen to someone droning on in a monotone. Phrasing, dynamics, timing, and articulation are essential elements of communication. An experienced actor can make the same words convey different meanings by the way they deliver the line. To be an expressive player, you need to have the same kind of flexibility with notes.

1. Repetition and variation

Again, the simple idea is just to do less. Make statements: play a few notes, pause, then play an answer. This is called “call and response” and is an easy way to make your ideas more organized. Pay attention to how many notes you play in each statement, as well as how long you wait between them. Trying varying the amount of time between phrases. Use repeated rhythmic patterns to tie things together, then mix them up to create interest. Nearly all music balances the opposing techniques of repetition and variation to create a coherent whole that holds the listener’s attention.

2. Articulation

How many different ways can you approach a note? You can land squarely on it, or slide in from above or below. Remember that slides can be timed, in which both the starting and ending notes have a specific duration, or untimed, in which the first note is a “grace note” with no time value of its own. You can slide in from an adjacent fret, further away, or an indeterminate pitch.

We can also use slurs: “hammer-ons”, when coming from below, “pull-offs” when coming from above, or simply tapping the neck (another type of hammer-on where the note is sounded by the finger landing on the string). This also leads us to what in classical music is called ornamentation: trills (moving very quickly back and forth between two notes, from above or below), and turns (approaching a note from directly above or below, moving past it, and then returning to land on the target note). These can be played strictly with fretted notes or might also incorporate open strings.

Then there’s the question of picking hand attack. Are you using a pick or a bare finger? How hard do you strike the note? What about the force of the attack? Does the string ring out cleanly or is there a percussive “snap”? Are you simply passing through the string or “popping” it away from the neck? (This doesn’t have to be a dramatic movement, although it can be). Changing the angle of attack can radically change the tone, as does striking the string in different places. Tremolo picking – quick repeated back-and-forth strokes on the same note – is another powerful and memorable effect.

3. Vibrato

Vibrato involves moving the finger back and forth on the same fret, pushing and pulling the pitch slightly. This has the effect of essential sounding the note repeatedly, creating more sustain and a more vocal, singing sound.

There are two basic types of vibrato. One comes from the wrist and forearm, in which the arm is rotated slightly back and forth. This works best with the index finger. The movement can also be from side to side, which is effective with any finger. This is the kind of vibrato you see used on bowed instruments like the violin and cello, as well as the classical guitar.

The second is more dramatic and comes generally more from the arm. Balance on the fingertips and lightly move the arm up and down. This tends to work best with multiple fingers resting on the same string. Try varying the speed to create a different effect. This is the type of vibrato you probably associate more with the electric guitar, especially in blues and rock settings.

Some players create this motion more from the fingers than the arm. This generally involves more of a dropped wrist, and requires more muscular effort. This approach has its place, but to my ear the vibrato isn’t quite as controlled and tends to be more obvious and dramatic. We tend to see mostly hard rock and metal players using this approach. As a general rule I always prefer to have the muscles of the hand working less, relying on the larger muscles of the arm to carry more of the movement.

4. Dynamics

Dynamics are essential to expressive playing: again, think of a speaker with a droning monotone. Varying the volume and intensity of your phrases. Get louder (crescendo) and softer (diminuendo). This variation comes primarily from the intensity of the picking hand attack, but can come from the fretting hand as well.

The music itself will tell you when to change and which way to go. A solo might have an overall dynamic “shape”, perhaps starting more quietly and building in intensity as it unfolds. It can be very effective to suddenly get quieter, especially when it’s unexpected. And when you’re playing with a band, the feeling of a rhythm section responding to your dynamic lead is a powerful thing the audience will always feel.

These are all topics that could be explored in much greater depth, but the first step is just to get you thinking about them.

Pay attention to the ways you hear great players shaping the sound with variations in touch, timing, and melody. Some of these techniques are more challenging than others, but they all can be mastered through experimentation and practice. Taken together, these are all factors that contribute to a player’s sound. All of my guitar heroes had their own approaches and ways of using these techniques, some very distinctive and recognizable. The great Latin rock guitarist Carlos Santana once said, “your tone is your face, why would you want to look like someone else?” His sound is instantly recognizable: melodic, expressive, and yes, singing. Yours can be too.

The one lead guitar rule you should never break.

November 26, 2018 By Dave Isaacs 2 Comments

If you’re working to really develop as a player, learning to play lead is an important part of the well-rounded guitarist’s skill set. And besides, we all love a good guitar guitar solo. When I was a teenager first learning to play it was the most exciting part of the song. I idolized virtuoso soloists like Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore, Randy Rhoads, and Eddie Van Halen. Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour taught me about melody and the well-placed slow bend. Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia showed me how to spin long, sinuous phrases, while Neil Young and Carlos Santana demonstrated how simplicity and intensity make a powerful statement.

I learned my scales, copied licks, and transcribed solos. Most of all, I played, just turning on the radio or putting a record on and jamming along. I learned that the lead player’s role is to be a secondary voice to the vocal. Sometimes the guitar steps in for the lead singer to take over the spotlight, and other times it provides commentary and counterpoint.

Good lead players use a wide variety of approaches, and the best develop a unique voice as recognizable as their face.

But there’s one thing they all have in common, one rule that applies in every style of music in any setting: fit in with the rest of the music. Above all, that means listening to everything else that’s going on and complementing it.

It might sound ridiculously obvious to say you need to play parts that sound like they belong. After all, every student of lead guitar wants to learn how to play the right things, don’t they? I’m sure the answer is yes, but I’m still amazed and sometimes even a little taken aback by how some players are terrible listeners. Or at least, how often some people choose to stop listening.

Even here in Nashville, where the baseline of guitar skill is very high, you still hear players who break this cardinal rule.

The worst offenders sometimes make an unwelcome appearance at the Music City institution called the songwriter round. In a round, multiple performers are onstage at once and take turns playing their songs. Some people like to jam along with the other songwriters they’re onstage with, and in the right hands this can make magic. But unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

Full disclosure: I love to play along with other writers’ songs, and often do. I’m sure I’ve been guilty in the past of exactly the same kind of musical blindness. But as a performing songwriter, I understand what it means to want your song to be well-represented, and how frustrating it is when a jammer’s good intentions hurt the performance instead of help it. So let’s consider this an open letter to every lead player everywhere that wants to join in and jam.

Rule number one, and really the only one: stay out of the way.

Remember, when there’s a vocal the lead guitar is a secondary voice. That means the vocals always take priority. Don’t step on the singer. Listen for the spaces between the vocal lines and pick your spots. Played skillfully, melodic fills can really enhance the song. Chosen poorly, they can ruin it. Here are some guidelines to help make sure you’re adding to the music, not distracting from it.

1. Know what you don’t know.

In a jamming situation, you might not have ever heard the song before. That means there could be things you can’t predict: chord changes, rhythmic and dynamic shifts, and other musical details. Recognize that you don’t always know what’s coming. A good rule of thumb is to listen all the way through a verse and chorus before you play a note. Then when you do join in, you have a basic picture of the song. It’s also important to have enough understanding of song structure that you can begin to anticipate when something new might happen, and hang back until you know what it is.

2. When in doubt, lay out.

This speaks for itself, doesn’t it. Have a realistic sense of what you can and can’t follow, and don’t fish for notes during someone else’s practiced performance.

3. Watch for body language.

It’s pretty easy to tell when someone’s about to sing. It might be as simple as approaching the mic, or stepping away from it. An experienced performer might give you actual cues, letting you know when it’s time to step up and take the lead or calling out a warning when a change is coming. Use your eyes as well as your ears.

4. Match the singer’s dynamic

A good accompanist shadows the dynamic of the vocal, letting the singer set the tone. If you’re given a solo and the accompaniment changes in intensity to let you open up, go with it, but be aware of when that section might be coming to an end. It’s generally pretty easy to tell if you pay attention. If you’re playing fills, try to keep them between the vocal lines. Be sensitive to the singer’s phrasing, and don’t ever play louder then they sing. In most cases, your fills should be the top layer of the background rather than an equal duet.

5. Play it like you mean it, or don’t play at all.

Tentative playing never sounds good. If you have something to contribute, play with confidence and authority. If you can’t play it confidently, don’t play it.

The skills that allow you to jam along well will make you a better and more musical lead player in every situation. The image of the lead guitar gunslinger might be cool, but it can be misleading. Ultimately, your job is still the same as everyone else in the band: to make each other sound better. Blend into the group and pick your moments. Then when it’s time to shine, let ‘er rip!

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.