The Workout Part 2
(19 Dec 03)
Ear training
Ear training is an essential part of your development as a musician, regardless of HOW you train your ears. If you really do wanna include e.t. into your practicing sessions, there are a bunch of different exercises you can do.
Example: Play a note on your guitar. Let this be the root, some kind of a reference note for you. Then, sing (!) a simple phrase or lick, and try to play it. Don't worry about fingerings at first, simply play the melody or riff you just sung. This will (if you keep doing it) not only provide you with some cool new ideas, but it'll also enable to do this while improvising... you can imagine some phrase that you wanna play, and then play it.
Or... listen to a song you like, and try to play some of the melodies you hear in that song. Don't limit yourself to guitar-melodies only, but also try to play i.e. vocal melodies, drum patterns (using percussive sounds, like muted strings) etc.
This will not only improve your hearing, but it also might give you some neat new ideas. A singer often uses intervals that might be unusual for guitarists, same goes for instruments like the saxophone etc.
Another thing you can try is: take a simple melody that you know very well but haven't played before (for example a famous lullabye, a Christmas carol or some kind of hymn). Now, take your guitar, pick any note and try to play that melody. Try to find the right notes with the least possible amount of attempts.
Once you have that down, try to harmonize it... add bass notes on the lower strings, or play some chords at the right spot.
Again, this will help to improve your ears, but one other cool side-effect is: imagine you walk down the street, you don't have a guitar with you, and all of a sudden you think of this really really cool melody. If you are not able to write it down in notes just like that, or if you don't have some recording-device with you, you might forget the melody. But if you're used to it, you can pick up your guitar once you're home again, and play the melody you have in your mind.
Other exercises:
- Play a note, then pick any interval (i.e. a major third), and try to sing it. Then, play it on the guitar and see how close you came.
- Record a tape (or MP3) of yourself playing random notes... two of them, with a break between every couple of notes. Record like 20 minutes of that. Then, the next day, listen to it with your guitar in hand, and try to play the notes on the guitar after hearing them. Some of them you might remember from the day before, but if you actually have recorded like 20 minutes of that, you most likely won't have memorized all the notes you played.
There are bunch of other exercises, but those are some rather helpful basic exercises which can be altered based on what you wanna work on.
The "listen to a record and then try to play some of the melodies you hear on the guitar" leads us to another thing you wanna work on...
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