3 ms·

If you can play it slow, you can play it fast. Start by listening to music you like, then pick an instrument. Copy what they did, note by note, but 100x slower

by cevn 3y ago

If you can play it slow, you can play it fast. Start by listening to music you like, then pick an instrument. Copy what they did, note by note, but 100x slower. It may not be fun at first, but you will pick up speed slowly, and soon, you're making music, and maybe you'll learn something along the way.

m3kw9 3y ago
Parrot playing, I do that but I’m only able to play that song and not really improvise much. Any ideas?
- gerhardi 3y ago
  Learn scales. When you understand and know the scale of the song you can quickly start improvising then.
  - Jeff_Brown 3y ago
    Scales are great -- but before or above that, I would say ear train. It's a secret (literally -- shockingly few musicians know about it given how useful it is) weapon. It only takes 15 minutes a day for a few months to be able to hear a melody and know what's being played (at least in relative terms -- perfect pitch is harder but unnecessary). After that you can literally study by simply listening to music, which is both more rewarding and more enjoyable than practicing patterns. (Okay, technically a song is a pattern. But it's a really nice one.)
    - imperistan 3y ago
      Sounds great. What would you do in those 15 mins a day exactly?
      - adzm 3y ago
        Learn scales. Seriously though, you can think of melody and etc as relative parts of a scale as well as intervals between notes. Ear training using scales is simplest and eventually starts to apply to more complicated patterns. Eventually you recognize the intervals and scales even if you are not consciously thinking about the descriptors like 'oh this is a major third interval'
      - Jeff_Brown 3y ago
        Today's software beats the hell out of the audio tapes I used in the 90s but the ideas are the same: Familiarization, recall, and recognition. First you familiarize yourself with an interval, by just playing it all over your instrument, listening and singing it. Then you test your recall: Play a note N, and try to sing N+I (where I is the interval). Once you know more than one interval, you can also test recognition: Someone else plays an interval (N,N+I) and you try to identify I. Once you've got the twelve intervals (you can go past the octave but that's pretty easy so basically there are only 12 to learn) you can do similarly for chords. Chords are also easy compared to intervals, though, because they are built up from intervals, so even before you can recognize them all at once, you'll already have the ability to pick them apart note by note to figure out what they are.
- dgunay 3y ago
  For me the ability to improvise music emerged slowly after doing a lot of playing other things by ear and embellishing songs either from lead sheets or coming up with premeditated variations on pieces I already knew. But that's just how I did it. If improv is your goal then you could probably benefit from doing it in a semi structured format like 12 bar blues, where it can start very simple and you can build up complexity.
- mastazi 3y ago
  IMHO - parrot playing is concerned with "what" is being played, and it's OK in the context of non-improvised music. If you want to learn improvisation it helps to also investigate "why" - why this particular rhythmic figure (e.g as shown in the OP article), why this chord voicing (e.g. block chords? Quartal harmony? Drop-2?), why this melody (e.g. ascending or descending? Arpeggiating the chords or "playing outside"?) etc etc Edit: One more thing: it's OK to improvise with the help of something like iReal Pro, but nothing replaces improvising with real humans, find a group of like minded people that would like to play with you
- cevn 3y ago
  I played a lot of Chopin, especially the Nocturnes, although none to perfection, and other classical music. That gave me a solid background in music theory, I do believe you could learn all the basics from playing Chopin and thinking about the music. As an aside, music skill (and many other skills) can be divided into Reading and Writing. Reading consists of either actually reading sheet music, or Playing by Ear. Writing is executing what is in your mind. In the context of improvisation, it's coming up with those things to execute in the first place. To be honest, I am a good Reader, but a poor Writer myself, and still in the beginning of this part of my journey. I love listening to jazz, and playing along, but devising my own melodies is almost beyond the current me. But what's great about music is that every day you practice is one that you get better.
trane_project 3y ago
I don't disagree that this type of transcription leads to good results, and in fact, it's what you should eventually do, but I've found a different approach to transcription that to me is easier, more fun, and more powerful. Take the song, load it up in transcribe (https://www.seventhstring.com/ https://www.seventhstring.com/) or similar software, pick a part. Up to here, this method and yours is the same. But rather than worrying about the exact notes being played, study the context by just singing and playing over the song and seeing what works and what does not. There's a lot more information than just the notes that were played. So this type of transcription gets you to navigate the same context the musicians were playing in. And as you do it, you'll start hitting the actual notes, and eventually you can close in on them. What's great is that it's fun, playful, musical, and you can do it even with songs that are way out of your level when transcribing note by note or learning from a score. Using a human language analogy, your suggestion would be to mimic conversations and mine would be to babble in other people's conversations until you become fluent. It's clear in human languages that one is much faster than the other. Sure babies are geared for it, but I think the babbling would work for adults too if they became cute as a baby or puppy, got over themselves, and could shamelessly babble onto other's conversations. The best book on the matter I've read of how to learn by ear is "The Gift of Music" by Victor Wooten. It's kind of weird in that it's written as a fiction book, but there are definitely music lessons. And if some of them feel too out there, just listen to him play. He's a master, not a stoner pretender. There's also "Thinking in Jazz", but I am only a fourth or third of the way and so far it's mostly about the historical and cultural background of improvisers. It's not gotten too into the weeds musically speaking.
- Jeff_Brown 3y ago
  Omg now I really want to learn a natural language by babble-bombing other peoples' conversations.
- cevn 3y ago
  Honestly, this approach makes a lot of sense. The transcription piece was something I have looked for in the past and not found. Thanks for your advice, I think I will check on those books as well. edit: This Seventh String software has an old school interface, but it's actually brilliant. This completely changes my approach, thank you!!

by cevn 3y ago

m3kw9 3y ago

Parrot playing, I do that but I’m only able to play that song and not really improvise much. Any ideas?

gerhardi 3y ago
Learn scales. When you understand and know the scale of the song you can quickly start improvising then.
- Jeff_Brown 3y ago
  Scales are great -- but before or above that, I would say ear train. It's a secret (literally -- shockingly few musicians know about it given how useful it is) weapon. It only takes 15 minutes a day for a few months to be able to hear a melody and know what's being played (at least in relative terms -- perfect pitch is harder but unnecessary). After that you can literally study by simply listening to music, which is both more rewarding and more enjoyable than practicing patterns. (Okay, technically a song is a pattern. But it's a really nice one.)
  - imperistan 3y ago
    Sounds great. What would you do in those 15 mins a day exactly?
    - adzm 3y ago
      Learn scales. Seriously though, you can think of melody and etc as relative parts of a scale as well as intervals between notes. Ear training using scales is simplest and eventually starts to apply to more complicated patterns. Eventually you recognize the intervals and scales even if you are not consciously thinking about the descriptors like 'oh this is a major third interval'
    - Jeff_Brown 3y ago
      Today's software beats the hell out of the audio tapes I used in the 90s but the ideas are the same: Familiarization, recall, and recognition. First you familiarize yourself with an interval, by just playing it all over your instrument, listening and singing it. Then you test your recall: Play a note N, and try to sing N+I (where I is the interval). Once you know more than one interval, you can also test recognition: Someone else plays an interval (N,N+I) and you try to identify I. Once you've got the twelve intervals (you can go past the octave but that's pretty easy so basically there are only 12 to learn) you can do similarly for chords. Chords are also easy compared to intervals, though, because they are built up from intervals, so even before you can recognize them all at once, you'll already have the ability to pick them apart note by note to figure out what they are.
dgunay 3y ago
For me the ability to improvise music emerged slowly after doing a lot of playing other things by ear and embellishing songs either from lead sheets or coming up with premeditated variations on pieces I already knew. But that's just how I did it. If improv is your goal then you could probably benefit from doing it in a semi structured format like 12 bar blues, where it can start very simple and you can build up complexity.
mastazi 3y ago
IMHO - parrot playing is concerned with "what" is being played, and it's OK in the context of non-improvised music. If you want to learn improvisation it helps to also investigate "why" - why this particular rhythmic figure (e.g as shown in the OP article), why this chord voicing (e.g. block chords? Quartal harmony? Drop-2?), why this melody (e.g. ascending or descending? Arpeggiating the chords or "playing outside"?) etc etc Edit: One more thing: it's OK to improvise with the help of something like iReal Pro, but nothing replaces improvising with real humans, find a group of like minded people that would like to play with you
cevn 3y ago
I played a lot of Chopin, especially the Nocturnes, although none to perfection, and other classical music. That gave me a solid background in music theory, I do believe you could learn all the basics from playing Chopin and thinking about the music. As an aside, music skill (and many other skills) can be divided into Reading and Writing. Reading consists of either actually reading sheet music, or Playing by Ear. Writing is executing what is in your mind. In the context of improvisation, it's coming up with those things to execute in the first place. To be honest, I am a good Reader, but a poor Writer myself, and still in the beginning of this part of my journey. I love listening to jazz, and playing along, but devising my own melodies is almost beyond the current me. But what's great about music is that every day you practice is one that you get better.

trane_project 3y ago

I don't disagree that this type of transcription leads to good results, and in fact, it's what you should eventually do, but I've found a different approach to transcription that to me is easier, more fun, and more powerful. Take the song, load it up in transcribe (https://www.seventhstring.com/ https://www.seventhstring.com/) or similar software, pick a part. Up to here, this method and yours is the same. But rather than worrying about the exact notes being played, study the context by just singing and playing over the song and seeing what works and what does not. There's a lot more information than just the notes that were played. So this type of transcription gets you to navigate the same context the musicians were playing in. And as you do it, you'll start hitting the actual notes, and eventually you can close in on them. What's great is that it's fun, playful, musical, and you can do it even with songs that are way out of your level when transcribing note by note or learning from a score. Using a human language analogy, your suggestion would be to mimic conversations and mine would be to babble in other people's conversations until you become fluent. It's clear in human languages that one is much faster than the other. Sure babies are geared for it, but I think the babbling would work for adults too if they became cute as a baby or puppy, got over themselves, and could shamelessly babble onto other's conversations. The best book on the matter I've read of how to learn by ear is "The Gift of Music" by Victor Wooten. It's kind of weird in that it's written as a fiction book, but there are definitely music lessons. And if some of them feel too out there, just listen to him play. He's a master, not a stoner pretender. There's also "Thinking in Jazz", but I am only a fourth or third of the way and so far it's mostly about the historical and cultural background of improvisers. It's not gotten too into the weeds musically speaking.

Jeff_Brown 3y ago
Omg now I really want to learn a natural language by babble-bombing other peoples' conversations.
cevn 3y ago
Honestly, this approach makes a lot of sense. The transcription piece was something I have looked for in the past and not found. Thanks for your advice, I think I will check on those books as well. edit: This Seventh String software has an old school interface, but it's actually brilliant. This completely changes my approach, thank you!!