![]() ![]() It provides dynamic backing tracks for any number of jazz standards. IReal Pro is a great play-along app for jazz practice. Perhaps there are really two skills that I need to practice: hearing/singing bass lines, and using the bass line to intuit the harmonic movement. But what to do when dealing with recordings where the bass line is muffled, walking quickly, or avoiding the root? In my experience, a majority of great jazz recordings have basslines that I can’t follow easily, causing me to fall back to frustrating guesswork. This too is good advice, and has helped me in many cases. To this, most musicians will say to follow the bass line and learn to sing it. Rather than becoming a better guesser, I’d like to not have to guess at all. I make semi-educated guesses until I find the chord that seems to fit.īut I this guesswork is time-consuming and excruciating, and the benefits are questionable. But, like I mentioned, I actually don’t know how to learn tunes by ear. This is all well and good, and I’m sure this is great advice for many musicians. Do this enough, and you’ll recognize common harmonic devices and progressions. Play along with recordings on your instrument until you know the harmony. In my experience, most musicians will say that to get better at learning chord progressions by ear, you just need to do it more. *My semester of jazz bass was during my final semester of college, and I had a crippling case of senioritis preventing me from practicing. I don’t want crutches, and I want to level up my musicianship. I’m at a point now where I want that to change. I could get by with this crutch (sort of) but it hindered my ability to learn tunes, to play what I hear, and to sit in at jam sessions. Without the necessary aural skills, or the understanding of how to improve them, I had become a real book player and leadsheets were my crutch. I realized that, not only did I have this glaring weakness, this weakness was pathological and affected my entire approach to jazz musicianship. But beyond that it quickly becomes overwhelming to the point of guesswork.Ĭhords I transcribed back in 2015 for the tune Django. I can recognize basic ii-V-I progressions, sometimes, if the recording is high-quality and the chord voicings are simple. Not only am I bad at it, I don’t even know how to do it. But in the many combo rehearsals and jam sessions, I realized how bad I am at recognizing harmonic movement. Not as well or as quickly as I’d like, but I definitely know how to do it. Sure, I can recognize intervals, chord qualities, and scales. And it was only in my recent week at the excellent Jazz Port Townsend workshop that I finally confronted how shitty my jazz aural skills are. ![]() I even took a semester of jazz bass lessons *. I took jazz guitar lessons throughout college, and I played with at least eight different combos in that time. In this post I’ll explain how, as well as a possible practice routine for getting better at learning jazz progressions by ear.įirst, I’ll describe my experience with jazz ear training and explain why, despite its obvious importance, it’s been such an elusive practice subject for me. I then realized how I could get an endless supply of simple, clear jazz recordings. Learning actual recordings is pretty much prohibitively difficult at my current skill level.” The basslines and harmony are muffled, the tempos are faster, and the rhythms are more complex. “This technique would work great if I had an endless supply of simple, clear jazz recordings like the one in the video. My thoughts went something along these lines: Last night, I was watching this great LJS video on how to learn jazz tunes by ear. ![]()
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