I’ve been focusing on learning songs by ear and one thing that I think is worth separating is transcribing to be able to play something or transcribing to be able to write it down.
Because there’s a trap that some musicians will fall into.
You decide to learn a song. You start learning it and transcribing it by ear and it’s going super well. You start to write it down as you figure the song out by ear. And eventually you have the whole thing written down … and you then start to read the music from the page. You leave the recording alone and start to read the music off of the page.
You see the trap?
You start to learn the song by ear, and get through it a little bit, but end up relying on your reading abilities after starting. You leave out the whole ear training part of learning a song by ear.
If the goal is to just have a written copy of the song, then this is fine. If you’re hired to make a transcription for a gig this is fine.
But if you’re learning a song to work on your ear training skills and better be able to understanding music by ear, then this isn’t helping as much as it seems.
The alternative to this is to learn the song by ear all the way through first. Be able to play the song from beginning to end just by ear.
Then write it down.
But don’t write it down until you know the entire song by heart.
This helps you in a few ways. It forces you to internalize the sounds in the song and be able to reproduce them on your instrument. It also helps you memorize songs by how they sound, rather than the notes on the page. It helps with your internal sense of pitch.
I fell into this trap while in high school and college because it was so much easier for me. Music reading came much more naturally than learning by ear. So I ended up relying on that.
But if this sounds familiar to you try learning the entire song by ear first. At first this is going to be difficult. It’ll be hard to remember all of the chord progressions and all the sections and what order to play them in, but with practice it gets a lot easier. Keeping everything straight in your head will be hard to do, but that’s a skill to be improved.
After learning a few songs like this you’ll likely be able to pick up songs much more quickly. It’ll be easier to remember the order of the sections. It’ll be easier to figure out chord progressions. It’ll be easier to play everything in sequence.
I’m not the best at coming up with harmonies by ear, but once I know what the chord progression is I can think of them fairly quickly. If I know what chords are being played then I can come up with harmonies easily.
This is because I know what scale degrees are in each chord. I can think through each note.
You can use this too to figure out what notes will work as a harmony.
Start with the melody and choose another chord tone to start on. That’s the starting note of the harmony.
When the chord changes choose a chord tone of that next chord to sing. That’s the new note.
Continue going through the chord progression and choosing chord tones to sing.
Sight singing is a skill that takes time to develop, but with some dedicated practice it’s something that many people can improve. I highly recommend using solfege, but you can also use scale degree numbers. Interval practice can also be useful because you want to be able hear different intervals in order.
Here are some tips.
Hymnals and folk songs
All religious preferences aside hymnals are a great resource for learning to sight sing. All of the songs are going to be tonal and few will modulate if any. They’ll also likely be fairly simple melodies that are meant to be sung. That might sound like a strange thing to point out, but what I mean is that they will likely be fairly easy to sing. Playing large interval leaps is easier on an instrument than it is with singing, and often vocal music only uses specific intervalic leaps (like thirds or fifths), or uses mostly step-wise motion. They’re written to be sung by many people, not just professional singers.
It’s a great way to get a lot of sight singing practice because most of the hymns will have 3 or 4 parts. That’s extra practice if you learn to sing each of the harmony parts. I recommend singing these parts within your range, even if that means transposing them up or down an octave. The goal is to practice sight singing, rather than putting together a choir.
I love using hymnals as practice because in addition to working on sight singing it also helps you develop an inner sense of harmony and how to create vocal harmonies. You’re practicing singing harmonies and with that you’ll start to internalize how those choral harmony parts are written. They’re not written the same way as pop harmonies (a lot of the time at least), but they’ll help with developing a sense of how chords are voiced within choirs.
Other useful songs are folk songs. Regardless of where they’re from, they’re often not overly complex and were created to be sung by a group of non-professional singers. This means they’ll likely be easier to sing than a songbook of vocal arrangements by a singer like Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston. They’ll also often be tonal or modal, which helps you develop a sense of what each mode or scale sounds like.
Sight singing books
There are books on sight singing that have tons of graded examples. Some books will also have lessons within them which include tips for singing specific intervals or exercises for improving your internal sense of pitch. Each of the examples is slightly more difficult than the previous example. These books will also likely include music in different keys, modes, scales, time signatures, and with different grooves. The examples I’ve seen in sight singing books are often fairly short, allowing for multiple read throughs and to allow for them to be taught and used in classes or exams.
They may also include rhythms to be sight read as well. These can be useful because sight reading rhythms can be tricky. These will also likely be in different time signatures and with different subdivisions of the beat, like 8th notes as well as 16th notes and 8th note triplets.
These books might be fairly expensive because they’re often used in college level courses on sight singing, but if your local library has one then they can be a great resource.
Instrumental music
Instrumental music can be another great resource for finding music to sight sing. Specifically orchestral pieces can be useful. I recommend using pieces that are tonal. Start with easier sections of the music, and work your way through other, more difficult, sections of the music.
It doesn’t matter if it’s specifically vocal music because the goal is to be able to hear the intervals and be able to vocalize those intervals and notes. Whether or not it’s vocal music doesn’t matter so much.
The only place it might matter is when you’re trying to sight sing instrumental music that doesn’t translate to the voice well. But again the goal is to practice hearing different intervals and relationships between notes. The goal isn’t to sound like the instrument that you’re sight singing.
Kodaly songbooks
This is how you can tell that I’ve taught music. The Kodaly approach to music education focuses on using songs that get slightly more difficult. You start singing songs with only two solfege syllables. Then you sing songs with progressively more solfege syllables. The songs get more difficult as you go. Other concepts are taught through those songs.
If you can find a Kodaly songbook, the examples are great sight singing practice for beginners. The first few songs will likely only use solfege syllables sol and mi, and the next few will use sol, la, and mi. As you go through the book the whole scale will be used, and then different scales will be used.
They can be a great resource to get yourself started because they start so simple and get progressively more complex as you get to the later examples. You can also practice specific groups of solfege syllables if there are specific syllables that are hard for you to hear.
Lyrics
If the song that you’re sight singing has lyrics, a good challenge can be to sing the lyrics as well. This is yet another reason why I’m a fan of using hymnals and folk songs for sight singing practice.
Once you’ve sung through the song and know how the notes are supposed to sound I highly recommend trying to sing through it while singing the lyrics as well. It’s another challenge to add to improve your sight singing skills even more.
If you’ve never tried to sight sing something while singing lyrics, rather than solfege syllables, it can be quite difficult because you can’t rely on that specific tool and have to hear it in your head without it.
Final notes
Sight singing can take some time to improve, but all it takes is practice. With some dedicated practice it’s definitely do-able. One of my biggest tips, that I didn’t include above because it’s so specific, is to join a choir and sight sing at the gig. That’s one thing I did while I was at Berklee. I sang bass for a local church choir and most of the time I wasn’t given the music ahead of time. So when I showed up to sing that day I was often sight singing. That alone helped my sight singing the most because it was so immediate and so hands on. I had no choice but to figure out how to sing the parts. I will say it did help because there was an organ player who often doubled the bass part so I could follow along with the organ if I needed to.
I hope these tips are useful and help you improve your sight singing skills.
Continuing off of yesterday’s post about forming good habits I wanted to make a post about an approach to practice that I’ve been adopting more recently.
I’ve been focusing on different things depending on what day I’m practicing. I’ll focus on one technique on day, and the next time I practice I’ll focus on a different technique.
This has been helpful recently especially because I don’t have the same amount of practice time I used to have so I can’t practice as much as I used to be able to.
So I can’t focus on everything I’d want to in one practice session. If I tried to I’d spend maybe 5 minutes on some things, and that just isn’t enough time to make any progress.
Separate things into days
As an example on guitar I might focus on alternate picking on one day, sweep picking on another day, vibrato on a different day, and rhythm guitar playing on yet another day.
I’ll do the same with different theory ideas. I’ll practice arpeggios and scales on different days. I might even separate that into practicing one specific group of scales like pentatonic scales on one day and then major scales and those modes on a different day.
This approach allows you to dedicate enough time to specific techniques and improve those techniques, while also allowing you to not need long practice sessions.
Ideally, yes, you’d be able to practice everything in every practice session, regularly. But if you don’t have time to do that then this approach can be incredibly useful to use. It’ll allow you to make progress, even if it is over a shortened time frame.
Look at weekly practice
Another way to think about this same idea is to look at your practice habits over the course of a week. If you can only practice for a few days a week, take a look at the total amount of things you practice during that entire week. Rather than looking at single days, take a look at how much you work on in a week.
This can allow you to have a little bit more flexibility.
If on one day you only practiced scales, arpeggios, and modes, maybe the next practice session you work on a few pieces of technique. Then after that you work on ear training.
This means that over the course of the entire week you’ve worked on a number of different things; scales, modes, arpeggios, technique, and ear training. So you’re looking at things from an elongated time frame.
Final notes
The better you get at your instrument, the slower progress will be. At the beginning you may see large improvements right away, but as you get better it takes more work and more time to improve even more.
This also means that 5 minutes of practice won’t be enough to improve certain things. Eventually 10 or even 15 minutes won’t be enough. Unless you get incredibly specific with what you’re working on for those 15 minutes, you eventually won’t be able to make a whole lot of progress just practicing for that little amount of time.
This means you either need to increase the amount of time you’re practicing for, or practice specific skills for that amount of time. If you have a limited amount of time to practice then you’ll need to choose specific skills to practice.
Many things related to playing an instrument have to do with small movements that you aren’t necessarily thinking consciously about. Habits. Muscle memory. Forming good playing habits takes time, and patience because you need to play things slow enough that you can consciously think about each of those movements.
Something like keeping your fingers close to the fretboard on guitar is something that’s hard to think about it consciously if you’re playing a difficult passage. It might need to be slowed down quite a bit, practiced at a slower speed while thinking consciously about keeping your fingers close to the fingerboard.
The same can be said with moving efficiently on piano, especially with something like stride piano. Keeping the fingers close to the instrument and moving efficiently is something that needs to be practiced consciously to form as a habit.
The goal is to form it into a playing habit that you don’t need to think about later.
Use your hand to tap. Often singers are singing standing up or moving around and walking around on stage so tapping your foot isn’t an option, but you can tap your hand.
I’ve seen singers do this by tapping their hand against the microphone. They hold it with their thumb, index and middle fingers, and tap with their pinky and ring finger. It can help keep the beat a lot because you’re doing something physical while singing. It’s the same idea as tapping your foot, but because the feet aren’t available you can use your fingers.
The same can be said with nodding your head or moving to the beat. They’re all methods of keeping a beat physically so that you can have a better internal beat.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Meshuggah recently, specifically the song “Clockworks.” I couldn’t figure out the time signature so I looked for a YouTube video to explain it and found this useful video.
I recommend listening to the song and watching the video because it’s interesting and helpful to learn to count more complicated odd meter groupings, but this post is about how to practice counting groups of 3 and 2.
What are odd meters?
Odd meters are time signatures (meters) that have an odd number of beats. Odd meters like 7/8 and 5/8 can be counted in different ways because they have an odd number of beats. Often musicians will divide the measures into groupings of three and two eighth notes. It’s useful to remember that the eighth note grouping changes, but the speed of the eighth notes doesn’t change. This will feel like having different lengths of quarter notes. Some beats will feel like dotted quarters and others will feel like regular quarter notes.
And when dividing up odd meters into groups of three’s and two’s musicians will often just count up to three or two, rather than counting up to five or seven. This is to help make counting a little easier, especially with faster tempos. It also will help a lot more when getting into more complicated odd meters like 11/8, 13/8, or 15/16. It can help with counting meters like 8/8, 12/8, or 9/8 even though they may not be “odd” meters.
5/8 counted as “2 + 3”
Above is one way to count 5/8. The beats are divided into a group of two and a group of three. Musicians would say this as “2 + 3” and will count it as “1 2 1 2 3 / 1 2 1 2 3″, with the bold “1s” being strong beats. Below is the other way to count 5/8, which is “3 + 2” which would be counted as “1 2 3 1 2 / 1 2 3 1 2.”
5/8 counted as “3 + 2”
7/8 has three different ways that it can be divided up. Below is “2 + 2 + 3”, which would be counted as “1 2 1 2 1 2 3 / 1 2 1 2 1 2 3″, with the bold “1s” being strong beats.
7/8 counted as “2 + 2 + 3”
Below are the other two ways that 7/8 can be divided up. They’re “2 + 3 + 2” which will be counted as “1 2 1 2 3 1 2 / 1 2 1 2 3 1 2″ and “3 + 2 + 2” which is counted as “1 2 3 1 2 1 2 / 1 2 3 1 2 1 2.”
7/8 counted as “2 + 3 + 2”7/8 counted as “3 + 2 + 2”
Getting used to these five different odd meter divisions is a great start to learning how to count odd meters. The better you get at counting these the easier it will be to learn other odd meters.
At first counting these will feel strange because the changing feel of the beat. It may also feel like all of them end up being the same, but they have very different rhythmic feels in actual music. One thing that can help with this is by emphasizing the first beat much more than the others.
Short beats vs. long beats
Eventually the goal is to be able to feel the beats as “long” and “short” beats, rather than having to count all of the “2s” and “3s.” This will happen with practice and time, but it will take time and practice and patience because the grooves that are played in odd meters are different than 4/4 and 3/4 grooves.
I personally wouldn’t count using three’s and two’s unless I was learning a new meter. After that initial read through I’d change it to “ta-ka-ta” for a group of three and “ta-ka” for a group of two. Those syllables are slightly easier for me than counting numbers the whole time. And it produces the same effect of counting the correct number of groups.
If there are syllables that make this easier for you then feel free to count them that way too. Other syllables I’ve heard used are “ta-di” for a group of two and “ta-ki-da” for a group of three. But make sure that those syllables are keeping a constant 8th note, because one problem I see students make when learning to count odd meters is they count the group of three as a triplet; speeding it up to fit it in the same amount of time as the group of two. That’s not the same rhythm. These rhythms should feel uneven. Some of the beats are longer than other beats.
Once you’re comfortable with those meters watch the two videos above to get an idea of some even more complicated odd meters and groupings of two’s and three’s.
As an ensemble director you have to be able to listen to lots of stuff at once. You’ve got to be able to listen to all of the different instruments when they’re playing all at the same time. This is a skill that some people naturally develop after hearing the same music multiple times, but it’s something that can also be practiced.
One way you can practice this is by listening to music. Listen to music and try to hear each instrument on it’s own. It can be any type of music too because this skill isn’t specific to one genre. If you’re listening to a rock song try to just hear the bass. Then try to just hear the drums. Percussion is often easier to hear because it’s often the most different in sound. Then try to listen to the guitars. Lastly listen to the singer.
Vocals is often what people focus on the most in songs, so I like to pay attention to that last. It can also be the thing that is quite literally mixed to be the loudest in the song. So for multiple reasons it’s easiest to listen to.
After listening to each individual instrument try to pay attention to two at once. Listen to the drums and vocals first. Those are likely the easiest to hear at the same time because they’re often the loudest and most distinct. Then try to hear the drums and guitar, or the drums and bass. Then listen to the bass and guitar together. How do they relate to each other? Lastly listen to the vocals with the other instruments.
The more you listen like this the easier it’ll get.
Eventually listening to music will be a much more immersive experience, regardless of what genre you listen to. Listening to a folk band will be more detailed because you’ll be able to hear how the fiddle and the mandolin interact and how that all relates to the bass, drums, and banjo or guitar. The same can be said for electronic music or jazz music and basically all genres of music.
It makes many genres of music easier to appreciate when you can listen in detail.
