|
What's a Natural Ear?
All of us have a native facility for music. All language is based on tonal and pitch changes, and we all understand the preverbal signals that underly speech. Music simply stretches out sounds we produce, either through our voices or instruments that we have made. We create pleasurable sounds for our amusement and to communicate with each other, and express our emotions to all the world to hear.
A natural ear for music means that you are 'tuned in' to this language, and have a desire to express yourself through music. Repeated experience and experimentation create skills that raise the level of communications.
I learned a lot of my teaching skills from my own children. Both my boys learned to play 'naturally', without reading notes. My oldest son spent about a week at the piano, with directions from me and specific boundaries as to what he was allowed to experiment with, he learned to hear intervals and pitch movement. I didn't know how we had done it, but I attributed it to his 'natural genius'. (He WAS my first kid...)
My second son didn't get such micromanagement from me. He tagged along as I played gigs and learned all the songs by heart as I practiced and recorded my CDs. One day I heard him playing fills on a song that I was singing; he 'heard it in his head and found it on the guitar'. This time I recognized that this was something new, something I had not been taught as a child. I hired him immediately as my new bass player - he did a great job; he had good rhythm and a feel for music.
We didn't waste anytime on unnecessary details on 'learning to read music'. I didn't have time to tell him why anything worked; I just taught him the songs that I needed for him to know and booked the gigs. I did tell him which key we were in on each song - it helped him catalogue in his mind the differences between the songs. Pretty soon he started noticing on his own the similarities between tunes and chord progressions.
When I finally got around to explaining the theory behind the patterns, he got it immediately. Both my sons have always depended on their ears to drive their fingers, without analyzing or forming any words. They played automatically, by ear, and had learned to do so in an amazingly short period of time.
In the academic world, students are shamed for avoiding musical text. This is backwards! First the ears should be trained, then the documentation explored and analyzed. Paper music was high tech in the 17th century, but if Mozart were alive today, he'd be handing out CDs or MP3s and utilizing the most direct method available to spread his work. Paper is seldom used today in professionals' rehearsals, unless it is to scribble down new lyrics or to document the new progression in a key change. Most performing musicians don't even do that, because they've done these patterns so often that it has become automatic.
Humans love melody, harmony and rhythm. The more complicated, the easier it is retained. All young kids recognize the Champs' song "Tequila" as soon as they hear the first phrase. The rhythm is so complex it cannot be written down, but I can teach a kid to play it in minutes. Hot Cross Buns doesn't stand a chance.
MORE ABOUT OUR MUSIC CAMPS >> | 
