Quote:
Originally Posted by Andyrondack
As far as instruments such as guitar are concerned I think a great exercise is to memorise the 'melody' of a major scale and recreate that 'scale tune' starting from any random fret.
You see so many posts from people asking how to find scales on the fretboard but nobody seems to think about just using their ears, it's all pictures and diagrams because that's what books and the internet is full of. I guess nobody yet worked out a way to monetise the sound of a scale or arrpegio so that aproach gets ignored.
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There are a number of us older folks who started learning before the internet came into being and learned a lot from recordings using our ears. Since then, things have really changed.
I was severely taken to task some years ago in these forums for having the audacity to suggest that it would be good ear training to learn to tune one's guitar by ear. I was absolutely stunned by this. I couldn't believe that people had changed that much since when I was learning to play guitar. At that time, people still "piled on" in threads so that if somebody went after another, other people jumped in to get their punches in too. Several people went after me on this. There are many questions asked around here that we used to just figure out ourselves, so there really does seem to be a fundamental shift toward total complacent dependency on somebody having to show people how to do things with the guitar that if one were self-motivated enough, could figure out in the course of the learning process.
Back in the early 80s, I attended the first of John Stropes' Fingerstyle Festivals at UW campus in Milwaukee. Leo Kottke was one of the instructors. In his seminar, he talked about the value of tuning your guitar by ear, and how the ear "gets lazy" if you don't use it. He wasn't advocating that we should always tune by ear because obviously there are situations in which a tuner makes good practical sense, but there are also times when tuning by ear can be done and we should take advantage of those time. One example of such a time is when playing at home by myself.
I experienced the effectiveness of this first hand when I was playing in a church band in a church that had a piano that was usually out of tune because they didn't have the funds to get it tuned regularly. There was another guitar player in the band and he always used an electronic tuner with a big needle that told him when his guitar string matched the correct note.
I always tuned my guitar by ear to the piano so that it played in tune with the out of tune piano. This other player's guitar sounded awfully out of tune with the piano, so I started tuning his guitar for him too since he simply couldn't hear it.
Music is first and foremost a hearing art. Being able to pick out melodies, hear chords, and just figure stuff out is an important skill. Just like picking out melodies, being able to pick out a scale is really the same thing, since the scale is essentially just another melody (i.e. a series of notes).
Being able to read TAB and standard notation are good things to know, since there is little point in purposely limiting our ability to learn new music. But these are (in my opinion) secondary skills as compared to the skill of using one's ear.
Tony