Without the necessary aural skills, or the understanding of how to improve them, I had become a real book player and leadsheets were my crutch. I realized that, not only did I have this glaring weakness, this weakness was pathological and affected my entire approach to jazz musicianship. But beyond that it quickly becomes overwhelming to the point of guesswork.Ĭhords I transcribed back in 2015 for the tune Django. I can recognize basic ii-V-I progressions, sometimes, if the recording is high-quality and the chord voicings are simple. Not only am I bad at it, I don’t even know how to do it. But in the many combo rehearsals and jam sessions, I realized how bad I am at recognizing harmonic movement. Not as well or as quickly as I’d like, but I definitely know how to do it. Sure, I can recognize intervals, chord qualities, and scales. And it was only in my recent week at the excellent Jazz Port Townsend workshop that I finally confronted how shitty my jazz aural skills are. I even took a semester of jazz bass lessons *. I took jazz guitar lessons throughout college, and I played with at least eight different combos in that time. In this post I’ll explain how, as well as a possible practice routine for getting better at learning jazz progressions by ear.įirst, I’ll describe my experience with jazz ear training and explain why, despite its obvious importance, it’s been such an elusive practice subject for me. I then realized how I could get an endless supply of simple, clear jazz recordings. Learning actual recordings is pretty much prohibitively difficult at my current skill level.” The basslines and harmony are muffled, the tempos are faster, and the rhythms are more complex. “This technique would work great if I had an endless supply of simple, clear jazz recordings like the one in the video. My thoughts went something along these lines: Last night, I was watching this great LJS video on how to learn jazz tunes by ear.
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