[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by hakkolu

…If I play that note and then the chord, I can definitely hear it, and cannot believe I was unable to hear it in the first place. Is this common among musicians or most musicians can separately hear the notes easily?

Hi h

In my experience, yes. Chords add texture, and guitar harmonics mask notes (or sometimes create illusionary notes). But with time and experience (and discussion and experimentation) things become clearer.

It's probably why transcribers make so many 'guitar-centric' mistakes. I frequently see charts where the chords are misidentified, or chord insets are flat-wrong. It is my belief that most of the transcribers out-there are keyboard players, and unfamiliar with the guitar, the fretboard, and our unique constraints and chord options.

So they just don't hear guitar inversions, or they get the 'flavor' of a chord on the keyboard, and then just select a button which posts a fingering chart for the chord they thought it was at the top of the score.

Hearing is an art which gets better with use. I've spent hundreds of hours watching interviews with jazz guitarists talking about progressions, runs, chord options etc. It's fascinating how detailed the great jazz players are (and refined in many cases).

I have a degree in music, and had enough hours to minor in it as well (they just would not allow me to major and minor in the same subject). And i have extensive keyboard, and solo instrument experience as well as classical training, and 55+ years of guitar.

But the theory was all just the beginning.

I found myself in an argument as to what to 'name' a chord someone was playing in a recording with two other people. The 'notes' were not in dispute (we had guitars in our hands and could play the chord), but it was how we were going to interpret it in context to the song.

And we were never going to actually even play the song. We just started discussing it and fell into disagreements about it. My gigging partner learned Pentatonic from the minor Pentatonic scale and I learned it from the major Pentatonic, so we hear chord progressions and pentatonic runs differently.

There's a lot of flexibility and inherent disagreement in music…despite theory.

Hope this adds the discussion…