Listening

Why would any sane person put pieces of metal on the ends of one’s fingers and then spend 10,000 hours doing thumb-middle-index-thumb-middle-index-thumb-middle with their right hand over and over and over in front of a metronome? 

So people can listen.

Why would a reasonable person try to hyper-extend a pinky seven inches above the rest of the left hand just to get a decent Bill Monroe chop chord?  Or spend hours pulling on catgut until blisters as big as silver dollars arise on the index finger of the right hand?

So people can listen.

Isn’t that what it is all about?  Listening?

We spent the last several blog posts learning about what musicians do to produce a good groove.  I now want to turn to our ears – and the subject of listening – and really hearing this groove.  This is important whether or not you are a musician.  Building listening skills can greatly deepen your experience with the music if you don’t pick and can significantly accelerate your learning processes if you do pick.

Let me start with a musician’s perspective.  Most folks who pick don’t think of playing and listening as two separate things.  But I think you’ll find it is helpful to do just that.  You have playing skills and listening skills – and these are different from each other.  Let’s briefly cover playing skills first.

Playing skills involve getting your fast-twitch muscles to twitch at exactly the right time, and then committing it to memory.  People talk about muscle memory.  This is a bit of a misnomer (because it happens primarily in your brain and nervous system and not your muscles) but is an important part of execution – i.e. playing skills.  Muscle memory is when you don’t have to think about the individual notes but instead think at the phrase or maybe even think at the emotional level.  For example: I am playing this break and feel like I should add some drama here and I know just the lick and here it goes… 

In the “training” phase (before you have muscle memory of a particular lick) the thinking part might go:  “index finger, second fret, first string, pick down, then middle finger on the third string, fourth fret, pick up” and so forth.  When you get this sequence in muscle memory you no longer need to think in these individual “string, finger, pick direction” terms but at the higher level of: “I know this perfect lick, it feels just right and here it goes”…  This is absolutely essential to perform good music, because the conscious processes in your brain can’t possibly think fast enough to play at the speed of a song if they are going note-by-note.   Nor would it be possible to follow those emotional hunches that come up when you are taking a break that “this lick feels like it will fit.”  

Now to the listening part... When a musician is executing a series of notes, that musician is also obviously listening to the notes as they are being played.  But you will find it helpful to view the listening part of this as a totally separate process.   In fact, just as you are training your fast twitch muscles and imbedding countless phrases into muscle memory, your ear is simultaneously getting trained to recognize this series of notes as a “lick”.  Believe me, once you’ve spent 400 hours trying to get that eight notes that constitute the reverse roll lick in Earl’s breakdown just right, you will instantly recognize it when you hear it on XM61.  So your ear has gotten trained in the process.

Further, you also can train your ear to hear all the subtleties we discussed last time such as timing and syncopation.  For example, if you are paying attention to the right things, you can hear when musicians start rushing the beat or perhaps playing behind the beat for a phrase or two.  Even if you are not a musician, the next time you are sitting at a bluegrass concert, concentrate on the mandolin break to see if he is rushing.  See if you can detect the bass player trying desperately to hold things back.  Listen for the duration of each bass note.  Are they consistent?  Are they sustained or staccato?  I will be posting on how to listen to each individual instrument in future editions of this blog so stay tuned.

There is another important benefit of thinking about the playing and listening processes as separate things.  Playing skills and listening skills can progress at different rates and being aware of this can shed light on problems that might be happening in your performances. For example, sometimes my playing skills progress very rapidly and my listening skills might lag behind a bit.  Boy, do I sound good to myself!!!  Quit the day job and buy a bus!!!  This is because I am playing better than my ability to listen.  My licks all sound fantastic to me – I’ve got all these great new licks in muscle memory now and can actually execute them!  However, little do I know that my ear hasn’t progressed quite to the point where I can discern some of the subtleties missing in these licks that other players perhaps have mastered. 

How about the reverse… listening skills become better than playing skills? Yep, that has happened to me too.  Sometimes my listening skills have progressed rapidly and perhaps my playing skills have not.  Maybe I’ve gotten to the point of where I start to hear and recognize the subtleties that my buddies are playing in that great new lick I learned last month and realize all of the sudden that even though I know the lick, it doesn’t sound quite right.  At this point in time it sounds to me like I’m going backwards (e.g. getting worse) because I’ve spend a zillion hours on that lick and my ear has learned to hear that it is not quite right at this point when it used to sound great.   My listening skills have improved and my playing skills have remained the same.

Boy this is depressing – in fact, the more I play the worse I sound!  If you are a musician, I can guarantee you have experienced this more than once – and it makes you feel like you want to go wrap your ’23 Loar around the nearest oak tree.  Some people call this “plateauing” and it happens to all of us, and is probably the biggest cause of a potentially good musician giving up music for good and going out and getting a real job (which he is going to need to pay for that broken Loar).

As you develop your listening skills, you will find you can listen to music at all different levels.  When you turn your attention to each phrase and note, you can start to hear recognizable licks – and how they are being executed.  You can hear the different types of lilts or grooves in each individual song.  Is it greasy?  Driving?  Peppy?  What are the chords to the song?  Does it go from a I to a V or a IV? (I will cover Nashville notation and how to hear chords in a future blog post.)  What about the vocal arrangement?  Is it two harmonies above the lead or tenor-above the lead and baritone below?  You can also start to make a pretty good guess as to what key the song is in, even if you don’t have perfect pitch (hint: listen for open strings).  Just be careful you don’t drive off the road!

Keep on pickin’!