This is going to be a series on something very important to a musician, your ear. Having a good ear is at the top of the mountain of things you need to be a good player. Being able to put what's in your head out into your instrument, pick up on a jam without knowing the key, being able to learn songs quickly, being able to know what chord you want to use and how to figure out what you want to solo with are all very well dependant on your ear. We are going to look at a bunch of ways to exercise your ear and get it into shape!
The first thing we are going to exercise your ear with is what I call "shuffle zone." We are going to use being a guitar player as the instrument of choice on this. You can use any one you like though. As a guitar player tune up to standard pitch, plug in and get near a radio. Put the radio dial on shuffle. Whatever station it lands on crank up the music. What you want to try and do is play along with the song and try and figure it out. There is no rewind or start over. You only have the time the song is playing to work with. What you want to do is try and figure out the chords by just doing single notes on your guitar. Once you get an idea of where your at and where to go, start trying to incorporate the major, minor or whatever chords are actually being played. Don't worry about soloing yet. Just try your best to learn the song that's going on at the time. It does not matter what style of music the radio lands on when you shuffle. It can be the crappiest bubble gum pop or a type of music you hate. Your goal is just to be able to get your ear to figure out the song. Once the song ends just start on the next song that comes on. If a commercial jingle comes on just try and play with it too. After a while hit shuffle again and start the whole process over again on whatever station it lands on. You also don't have to use a radio. Pandora, Sirius XM of put random music on from YouTube will work just as well. The point is to get something you are not familiar with and work your ear trying to learn it. It might take a bunch of times doing this to be able to pick up songs quickly but after a while you will be playing along with songs you never heard before! You will also find out most songs sound the same! The same order of structure and beats and a ton of other things! I have used this technique many many times. It has benefited my ear and taught me a ton of songs and also turned me on to a bunch of new music that I would never have found otherwise. So listen playa..... Go get your gitfizzle and git to strumming and pazickin with the "shuffle zone!" Fo' Shizzle my nizzle!
sidenote: and for anyone who has never seen the movie goonies, the picture is of the "truffle shuffle" that the character "chunk" does in that movie....i needed some kind of picture for shuffle and that is the funniest thing i could find!
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