A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CASE FOR LISTENING TO LEARN, AND LEARNING TO LISTEN
A momentary detour from my series on practicing graces this particular DGB blog space. In lieu of the daily practice catechisms, Zen Master-esque quotations from hallowed sages of the arts, and psychological tricks purported to hack your daily grind to unprecedented growth, I want to impart some thoughts on how we receive information today, instead of how we apply it to our instruments. I want to address learning music by listening to it.
Without doubt, we are all indebted to the ambitious strides that propel today’s tech-driven life. Within the bounds of easy Western living, information is as accessible as it is plentiful, and delivered as swiftly as a thought appears. Just as this body of writing is available to your computer or phone display with minimal caloric investment required of you to find it, any discipline or body of knowledge one may desire to pursue is available without much, if any, sacrifice at all.
But with this giant positive comes what I see as two giant negatives.
The first negative we know is that ANY person (yes, including yours truly) is capable of propagating information which may or may not have undergone any scrutiny or evaluation—any “sniff test” which could effectively determine the validity of it.
The second negative appears via the first. Since ANY person can propagate information regardless of whether or not it is useful or correct, giant throngs of well-meaning people have flooded the gates of your internet bandwidth, often leaving quite the task for you to sift that which is useful from those other things which are not.
Having recently heard some of my favorite guitarists express rhetoric against what appears to be the current trend of younger players relying on YouTube for instruction, my own recollection of hours spent learning my craft was rekindled. In each case I heard, the guitarists all cited that the learning process involved having to listen with great tenacity in attempt to decode what their heroes on their favorite records had played.
Also shared was how they often learned later that they got things wrong in the process. What I found most interesting is that none of these players felt crestfallen upon learning of their errors. In fact, such perceived “wrongness” was ultimately seen as a blessing in disguise, because each guitarist had heard the musical idea they were learning in a unique way, which contributed to how they understand the music they write and play today. The collective theory from all of this blood, sweat, and tears is that a generation of musicians followed their own ears and intuition, resulting in players who all sound uniquely different.
Consequently, all seemed to express a lack of individuality found in today’s younger artists. I hear it as well and agree. The older generation earned their styles and understanding by having to go through the trial and error process. They experimented with different approaches to mimic what they heard, and went down a lot of avenues, hitting dead ends, to discover how to play these ideas. The “mistakes” born out of their hard work set off lightbulb moments, illuminating the path for each artist his/her own way of hearing things, and ultimately, a distinct, easily identifiable voice.
Such discovery, I believe, is a birthright. One is cheating oneself if deprived of the opportunity to discover.
We learn how to speak in a similar manner through immersion and imitation. We listen to how our parents and others around us speak. That collection of people we can consider our “influences” just as the guitarists above cited their playing influences. We hear the words pronounced, and eventually begin imitating, hearing the pronunciation, accents, and later dialect, which then form our speech pattern model, or “style.” Music works in the same way for those who learn by listening to others to gather their material. We learn how to “speak” on our instruments because of what we hear, in a large part anyway. There are other factors, of course, but such contributors lie outside the scope of my aim here.
I spent many years as a transcriber. Before that, I was a voracious listener, consuming everything I loved in tremendous depth by listening to notice as much detail as I could possibly decipher. And NOT just the guitar parts—every musical detail went noticed and appreciated for what it contributed to the music I cherished. As you can probably imagine, I didn’t have much of a life outside!
I must state that I am not against young musicians seeking instruction. That would be foolish of me, since instruction is a great part of my involvement and passion in music today. A good teacher can help you learn to listen uniquely among many other things. What I wish to effectively “call out” here is the idea of blindingly seeking out folks who spoon-feed information, correct or not, and especially because it is easy to do so.
Going to a private lesson is not necessarily a spoon-feeding experience. What I call “spoon-feeding” is a teacher showing a student how to play various licks and phrases. There is no searching or excavating musical territory for the student in such a scenario, and in my humble but firmly rooted estimation, this is not what a real instructor should be doing. Today, one can receive this not only in such lessons, but even easier (and probably more prevalent), through YouTube and the like. By being dependent on having a musical idea simply revealed to you, you rely on your teacher doing the uncovering work for you and, as a result, you do not develop your own hearing and musical instinct. By striving to heighten our listening abilities ourselves, our own sense of phrasing is formed through attempting to duplicate with appreciation, which can unlock understanding as to how those great players before us developed their own voices.
As I always like to say, “Music is a hearing art, FIRST.” If you can’t hear it properly, you won’t be able to play it properly. So please, if you have embarked on the wondrous journey to learn a musical instrument, and you wish to learn a particular lick, or even a song that you love and would like to be able to play, DO NOT go to a teacher or YouTube hoping to be gifted the way. Instead, try the following:
Buy a recording of the music you like if you don’t already own it (DON’T GET IT FOR FREE- that’s an off-topic for another time), and buy a software program designed to help you manipulate the playback of said recording. There are great programs available which aren’t too expensive (see my earlier comments about how wonderfully helpful technology can be today).
Slow the recording down to various speeds. This is so you can listen more closely to details which might escape your attention at regular speed.
Make a short selection of the phrase you wish to learn and loop it, listening again and again. Give close attention to the notes, the rhythmic inflections which may seem different when altering speed, the articulations. Are they striking every note with the pick or fingers? Or does it sound as if they might be slurring (hammering, pulling off, or sliding) some notes? Each type of articulation has its own distinct sound, and usually the differences can be heard. Keeping your guitar in hand is great if you need it for quick comparisons.
Transpose the key up or down and listen again (software permitting). Different keys produce different colors, which change how you hear the timbres. Believe it or not, this can, on occasion, help resolve some sticking points.
Condense the normal stereo sound (provided the recording was in stereo originally) into mono playback, and isolate left and right channels. Some programs allow you to do this as well as phase cancellation, a process which can minimize vocals, kick drums, bass, or any other distracting instruments usually panned down the center of the stereo field. This can reveal some VERY interesting details you might never have heard under normal listening conditions, and even unravel answers to unclear spots.
Use EQ. Again, provided your software boasts this feature, equalization can be mighty useful when a detail in a particular frequency range is difficult to hear due to clashes caused by other instruments. If you do not know where to begin adjusting, think broad stroke: “Is the sound I’m trying to hear high or low?” A graphic equalizer, as its name implies, provides a pictorial interface of individual volume controls, or bands, where you can listen with an imagination of such high, middle, and low frequencies, and make alterations. If there are many adjustable bands, you have the option of highlighting or removing finer sonic detail. Also remember that musical notes can be represented numerically, and each note on the scale has a mathematical value which might fall on or near a particular band. Knowing this frequency can help you get closer to what you wish to pinpoint.
Listen with headphones, and alternately, with speakers. Each source provides a different experience for your ears, so use these perspectives to cross-reference one another.
Don’t listen at extreme volumes when doing this kind of work. Fun fact: the best audio engineers in the world listen to their work at a lower volume playback because finer details and overall balance are more discernible. Also, high volume will hurt your hearing over time. Listen softer today, so that you may live to listen another day.
Take frequent breaks to avoid ear fatigue. Trust me on that one- I have made this mistake on occasion. You can and will begin to hear things that aren’t there when your obejectivity is soiled from overwork.
Understand that this process isn’t necessarily a one day commitment; you may have to come back another day with fresh ears. The differences after some time away can be shocking.
As you listen, notice that, for example, an open E note on your guitar has a different timbre (sound quality) than the same pitched E on a different string when fretted with your finger, so try listening for these things on the recording. If the note is an open one, it may have a brighter, brassier quality with greater sustain. If, however, a note is fretted, you might hear what sounds like a finger lift at the end of a it, ruling out the natural decay of an open string. Hearing an overlap of one note ringing into the next one will reveal a cross-string fingering. Listening to what happens before and after such a seemingly minute detail can unlock an entire fingering the player used for a specific passage, which might just be anything but standard or predictable.
Timbre can tell you an awful lot. The mind, and its knowledge of the fingerboard, will come into play as you try to assemble a phrase. This forces you to learn how to think about fingering and positioning of notes on the fretboard which, in time, will give you a deeper understanding of the instrument than ANY book or YouTube video can. I promise.
When I first started transcribing for myself, all I had was something simply called “Sound Recorder,” a standard application on early Windows computers. It had virtually none of the awesome features I outlined earlier. Those before me used vinyl records which they manually slowed down with a hand on the turntable to decipher a phrase, and they had too had to learn to mentally compensate for the differences in pitch as they slowed down the playback. It is much easier today, so you would be silly not to take advantage of the listening-assistance tech available.
Some might say this is hard work and, instead, seek the warm, musical largesse of a selfless YouTube teacher revealing how to play “X and Y song or riff, step by step”- if you’re that person, I don’t know what to tell you. If you love music, your motivation will see you through to developing an ability you didn’t have before. If you don’t want to work hard? Well, you can go back to your environmentally unchallenging life playing video games and other equally enriching, instant gratification activities that bring benefit to so many others in the world.
Lastly, don’t worry about getting anything “wrong.” Many great players before us did and, as you read above, are grateful for the experience! Who knows, your conclusion may end up being more “right” than what the YouTube authorities figured. You might also feel a sense of reward from your efforts. Should you indeed end up being wrong, just remember that you learned how to play something you like uniquely, and this discovery will put you on your rightful path to being as unique a player as you are an individual.