this is the hardest part about playing by ear.
i work out an arrangement of a song...
and then i go back and listen to it again...

and when i go back to listen to the original,
i hear another pitch in whatever chord that i am trying to play
that i am not accounting for in my arrangement.

or i go back and listen for the notes i am playing in a song
and i can't hear them anymore.
which makes me wonder if i am even playing the right thing at all.

i mean it sounds right,
except the closer i listen, it still sounds wrong.

part of that is trying to not play all block chords that sound boring.
part of that is my ear just isn't finding all the pitches.
and even if you hear a pitch, that doesn't mean that it should be voiced on the piano.

then i try to hear the piano fills and i realize there are
sections i am missing entirely.



sometimes, i try to hear every single pitch
and i end up hearing nothing at all.
i think professional musicians are wizards or something.

the exact chord changes, even when they sound right...
still feel hidden from me.




don't even get me started on jazz changes.
half the time i can't even be sure of what key i am playing in.

i know, i know.
i just need more practice. there are no shortcuts.

but so often, just when i think i have it...
when i listen closely, i see that it was gone.

like, when you're confronted with a basic chord, do you make the deliberate decision to spice it up with an augmented 7th, or are you essentially just groping in the dark, adding and subtracting more notes until it sounds good to you?

Also, I've noticed you've talked a few times about your boredom with block chords... maybe the issue here isn't so much that you should be looking for more interesting chord extensions so much as you should be trying out different chord inversions. Scramble up the order of the notes... rearrange where you place the root. You might get some voicings that are more inspiring without losing the all-over harmonic integrity of whatever you're trying to play.

(EDIT: Just re-read the OP and I'm not sure I really addressed your issue. I'm actually not sure what kind of response you expect in general)

_____________________

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

>like, when you're confronted with a basic chord, do you make
>the deliberate decision to spice it up with an augmented 7th,
>or are you essentially just groping in the dark, adding and
>subtracting more notes until it sounds good to you?

my go-to is the aug 7th, although sometimes i take stabs in the dark...
just because i stumble upon cool progressions that way.

>
>Also, I've noticed you've talked a few times about your
>boredom with block chords... maybe the issue here isn't so
>much that you should be looking for more interesting chord
>extensions so much as you should be trying out different chord
>inversions. Scramble up the order of the notes... rearrange
>where you place the root. You might get some voicings that are
>more inspiring without losing the all-over harmonic integrity
>of whatever you're trying to play.


this is good.
i only started taking advantage of inversions recently
(i always knew what they were, but it is becoming more second nature to
use them to spice things up. and yes, i have found
that a lot of times a different inversion gave me much closer to
what i was looking for.

and sometimes, using different inversions throughout a song
can make a song feel like it's "moving" without having to change
the harmonic feel of whatever you're playing.)


>
>(EDIT: Just re-read the OP and I'm not sure I really addressed
>your issue. I'm actually not sure what kind of response you
>expect in general)



responses like what you gave.
i didn't have a definite end goal.
just wanted to hear about other ppl's experiences or tips
about playing by ear.

I was trying to play the "Big Time Watts" song the other night and ran into the same issue

i always learned to start from the cantus. try to determine what the root melody is, and note the interval changes from note to note. Get that really tight. On the piano that's the left hand. try to fit it into a key or series of keys. learn the part from there. Then try to change that by swapping intervals (eg 6th instead of the 3rd). This manipulation of the melody will probably reveal where some of the other pitches are coming from. Once you've played around with that a bit you can add in the right hand to fill out harmonic relationships into chords.

Do this over and over and over and over and over and over and over.


█▆▇▅▇█▇▆▄▁▃
Big PEMFin H & z's
"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am 1 thing, a musician." © Miles

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

frustrating then it may make sense to take a break from learning songs and work on learning how to play the instrument. I'm not saying that you need to learn how to read music, but work on learning and hearing chords themselves, separate from songs. You mentioned that you feel like pro musicians are like wizards - I think your mind is just making things more complicated because you haven't learned how to hear and identify the chords themselves and not the individual notes.

Start with really basic stuff. I'm sure you know what a major triad chord sounds like without thinking of the individual notes. Or a minor triad. What about chords with sevenths in them? Can you hear and identify a major 7 vs a dominant 7, without thinking about individual notes? From there, can you identify chords with 9ths? What about chords built on stacked 4ths?

If you're not at this point yet then just work on playing all these chords (and others of course) until you can play them in all keys, without thinking of individual notes. By that point your ear should be well developed enough to hear and identify the chords without being at the keyboard yourself, and that's when you can really master playing songs by ear.

to listen to the bass movement of a song when I'm learning it. Ninety nine percent of the time I can follow the harmonic progression of a tune simply by zeroing in on the bass part as it usually tells me everything I need to know. Now a basic understanding in a few other areas helps to facilitate this process.

Become familiar with some of the basic song forms (blues) and harmonic progressions/cadences (II-V-I, authentic, plagal, deceptive) and see if you can recognize them when they occur within a song. There are only a handful of actual chord types and a great deal of the music that you hear is some variation of a few basic patterns.

When listening to bass/root movements, be aware of the role that each note plays from a diatonic perspective. That is to say, see if you are able to tell if the bass is functioning as the tonic, subdominant, dominant, etc.

As I stated earlier, there are only a few basic chord types with a number of variations depending on the intervals present. Familiarize yourself with different chord intervals and note the "color" that they produce. A +4/b5/+11 interval has a very distinct color and once your are familiar with it, you'll find it is quite easy to pick out in an arrangement.

As for voicings, be sure to know the close positions first and then you can experiment with techniques like drop-2 and drop-3. Try to keep your voice leading as smooth as possible.

Here's some helpful advice: Read as much as you can...and practice, listen as much as you can...and practice... then practice some more.

I hope this helps.

and so much of this stuff has become infinitely more easy to study than it used to be, what with all the lessons on YouTube.

_____________________

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

good advice in here.
i feel encouraged.

And opine that the best thing you can figure out is what you want from playing piano. If you can figure that out you can focus your efforts on shortcuts that can get you there.

The goal is always, IMHO, to make the theory you need for what you want to do intuitive rather than part of your thought process.

Using myself as an example, I'm a terrible musician from a theoretical perspective. I could never sit in on a jazz jam and rip a solo, or even follow a progression that includes goofy augmented or diminished shit.

Where I'm at today is pretty simple: I need to have an idea of how a song goes, and figure out then how I can convey that in a unique way. It's been 30 years since I studied any theory, and 20 since I used any advanced theory on a regular basis.

I'm lucky in a way since in folk music, theory & technique frequently less valuable than intuition, so I have a ton of fun just playing shit without worrying if I'm playing something exactly how Roscoe Holcomb played it.. It might be harder for you to get to that point if you're trying to play '70s soul records faithfully, but I'd say give that up for a little and go but yourself a fakebook. The Beatles, CSN, Neil Young and S&G fakebooks i used in jr high have crappy arrangements of a bunch if my favorite tunes,, but their real value was helping me get familiar with the fingerboard in ways that sounded close enough that eventually I could correct my arrangements on those by ear, and even work off that famiarity coupled with my basic grasp of theory to work on my own arrangements.

-------
so I'm in a band now:
album ---> http://greenwoodburns.bandcamp.com/releases
Soundcloud ---> http://soundcloud.com/greenwood-burns

my own stuff -->http://soundcloud.com/lonesomedstringband

avy by buckshot_defunct

Talking about chords variations qualifies as 'in-depth music discussion'. Your posts are all rooted in the exact same 'What is hip' foundation. I think you might find yourself more comfortable in the comments section of a hip hop gossip publication. That's where people argue about what is hip without any analysis of the actual music.

"In retrospect...artist A was really popular on hot97 in 2002 but their music was wack".

Why was their music wack? "It just was". It's totally self-evident when something is hip or not. We're trying to talk about music. You want to talk about the 'music scene'. Go find a scenester discussion board and try to put your finger on the pulse of your very limited world and understanding of music. Thanks.

>We're trying to talk about music.
>You want to talk about the 'music scene'.
>Go find a scenester discussion board and try to put your
>finger on the pulse of your very limited world and
>understanding of music. Thanks.

unless i'm mistaken, is that not what the lesson (or furthermore okayplayer) is?
they made a new forum in 2006 specifically for the type of music theory discussion this thread falls under.
it's located here:

http://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topics&forum=26

thanks.

...but then i realized that i will never be bored enough
to argue with somebody that thinks a conversation about
the chords found in music does not qualify as a discussion about music.

i can't sink that low or fly that high.

please try to have a great day.





>unless i'm mistaken, is that not what the lesson (or
>furthermore okayplayer) is?
>they made a new forum in 2006 specifically for the type of
>music theory discussion this thread falls under.
>it's located here:
>
>http://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topics&forum=26
>
>thanks.

>and when i go back to listen to the original,
>i hear another pitch in whatever chord that i am trying to
>play
>that i am not accounting for in my arrangement.
>
>or i go back and listen for the notes i am playing in a song
>and i can't hear them anymore.
>which makes me wonder if i am even playing the right thing at
>all.

AFKAP's suggestion about inversion is really on point for this problem. This is especially the case if we're talking about jazz (or jazz-ish) music, where players are known, in part, for how they arrange and layer their chord structures.

Similarly, players have different styles if they are soloing in a group, playing absolutely solo (i.e., solo piano or guitar), or backing in a band. The mistake that I think some players make (not that I'm an expert or anything) is that they try to play everything at once: backing, melody, harmony, every tone that's coming out of a speaker at a given time. It's helpful to step back and isolate parts one at a time, and then - if you're trying to write a full arrangement - work on combining them into a whole after the fact.

>sometimes, i try to hear every single pitch
>and i end up hearing nothing at all.
>i think professional musicians are wizards or something.

They're pros. But remember that even they are usually building off of chord charts, progressions, *something* ... I've talked to some great players who couldn't do what you seem to want to do, at least not without effort.

Final note: it's often the simplest stuff that is the hardest to work through and get right. Abdullah Ibrahim has some of the most beautiful, sparse piano work I can think of, stuff that sounds like it should be easy to sound out. But I've transcribed a few tunes and, precisely because of my own difficulties in identifying *how* a chord is being played, they sound right but not right. That is, the chords are correct, even down to some of the extra details. But it's still not *right*....

In other words, it's not you. It's just stuff to work with and turn into part of the fun of playing music, part of the challenge and the payoff.

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~