Quote:
Originally Posted by Andyrondack
My approach to learning the guitar is not original, I got it from this guy after I had been playing for a year or so.
https://gypsyjazzuk.wordpress.com/36-2/curly-clayton/
Curly told me to get rid of the chord dictionary and over a few free lessons got me writing reams of notes on how scales and chords arise out of intervals. I'll allways be grateful to Curly because all genres of music arise out of intervals, so basically when I wanted to learn scales and chords in a new positions I just did what Curly taught me, start with EADGBE and work it out from there with nothing more than an awareness of what intervals you are searching for .
Mostly I play folky traditional stuff and knowing intervals really helps finding melodies by ear, just the other day I was trying to re-learn a fiddle tune I had forgotten, I found a recording and transcription of the tune online, tried my best to not look at the transcription and looped the tune on Soundslice, it was in a different key but that's not an issue if you think intervals, I got most of the melody except for a two note phrase I wasn't sure about,
it occured to me that the phrase I was looking for sounded very much like the previous phrase just a scale tone higher and that was a repetition of the previous phrase a tone below that, I looked the intervals of the other phrases they were both thirds and so the mystery phrase turned out to be the same.
Intervals are the basis for ear training that lots of singers and musicians engage in, though it seems to me more interesting to internalise what the intervals sound like by learning proper tunes.
Curly's approach is not quick, scale patterns chord shapes, CAGED have no place so it takes time to work through. |
Interesting....thanks for sharing this!
My own pathway with ear training stems back to literally playing old LP records and picking the needle up and putting it down again and again and then reproducing that sound on the guitar. This is back in the mid 60's when you had "chord books" and that was about it, other than other folks to show you the way. What I hadn't known then was that this became quite internalized, as you suggested, and that my ear was sensitized to a lot "stuff" including intervals that many years later has served me well with composing. Who knew!
As I've indicated in an earlier post here, a number of items sustain my search for creatively finding, and exploring my originals including chords, phrases, individual notes strung together, noodling, personal mood, other artists material, alternate tunings and composing to a potential song title that arises in the creative process.
"Fretful" the original instrumental in my signature is an example of a tune where I wanted to explore chaining more individual notes together, so the simplicity of this was by design in the composing. A little theory helped helped find the middle section of this tune, as I recall. Note spacing and phrasing were also important with this one.
How this all arises is very interesting. Thanks once again!