Q. I have a pretty good musical ear. I can hear individual tones but I'm not to the point that I can easily hear intervals or chords. When trying to find them on an instrument, it's trial and error until I finaly find it.
One cannot be a performer if they can't recognise these things on demand.
A. It won't happen overnight, but practicing daily will improve your aural skills immensely. The most important part of ear training is audiation, which is a fancy word for your musical imagination, the tape recorder in your mind that holds the melodies that you hear. I'm sure you've had a song stuck in your head before. The trick to ear training is getting all of the musical rudiments (intervals, chords (arpeggiated, of course), scale degrees (using numbers or solfege syllables), and rhythms) stuck in your head one by one, over and over until you never forget what each one sounds like.
I don't recommend using well-known songs for identifying intervals. Here's why: Let's say you use "Here Comes the Bride" for an ascending perfect fourth. This is scale degree 5 ascending to 8 (or 1 an octave higher), or "sol do". Now that you've learned it, you can recognize that pattern whenever it happens. What will happen if you hear scale degree 3 jumping up to scale degree 6, though ("mi la")? (Listen to the beginning of Brahms's Intermezzo for piano in A minor, Op. 76/7 (http://music.barnesandnoble.com/search/product.asp?z=y&PWB=1&EAN=90266388622 click on track 6). This too is a perfect fourth, and sounds VERY different from "sol do"! Would you recognize that as a fourth? Only if you had also learned to hear that one too! Another different-sounding P4 is 7 to 3 ("ti mi")! When I teach ear training, I teach all of my students (and make them memorize) an interval drill that groups together all of the scale-degree combinations that form a single type of interval. My students sing this etude at the beginning of every class.
A far better approach to ear training than using intervals is using scale degrees. When you practice ear training, do identification drills, always singing what you hear (in a comfortable octave) after listening and then after you've learned the correct ID for the rudiment. Also do dictation. Try to write down melodies that you hear (and have the music for so that you can check your work when you are done). Finally, do a lot of sight-singing. Find melodies that you've never heard before and find out how they sound by singing them from the music. Try to avoid using the piano to help you sing, until you get lost. Then back up and find where you went astray using the piano. There's a difference between producing the right pitches for yourself and matching the pitches you hear. (You must be able to do one before you can do the other, of course.)
There are lots of great online ear training resources. One is http://www.good-ear.com/, and another is http://www.musictheory.net/. I'm sure you can find others on your own. Good luck, and let me know if I can help you in any other way!
How come I can't sing and play guitar at the same time?
Q. Is there a reason why I can't do those 2 things at once? Everytime I do, I lose rhythm for both the song and the guitar. Is it because I am a beginner at guitar? Can this be solved, or am I just not meant to do both at the same time?
A. The above answerers get close to it, though the proper term isn't "subconscious," it's "kinesthetic." You really can't make something become subconscious, but you can make it become a matter of kinesthetic awareness, or in short, muscle memory. Also, it's not so much a problem of asking two areas of the brain to work together, it's a matter of overtaxing several areas of th ebrain. As a bass player/singer, I have some experience in this area.
Here's the problem: music is a global function: it uses many areas of the brain in both hemispheres. You're working with mathematical patterns (rhythm), aural sensations (pitch), emotions, etc., all at once. Singing involves language functions as well. Playing guitar involves many of the same musical processing functions as singing, but also involves lots of gross and fine motor functions, and different actions in one hand than in the other. Really, it's a pretty complex activity, brain-wise.
So you take guitar playing, which as you know from the necessary level of concentration just to get from chord to chord as you play, and combine it with the additional brain-workload of singing, and you end up with a matter of difficulty which is pretty understandable.
So what you have to do is work stuff into muscle memory, or in other words, practice kinesthetic awareness. The way I learned to do it was to go slowly and methodically. First, I made sure I was very solid on and aware of what I was playing. Then I figured out how the rhythms of the vocal line fit with what I was playing. As I said, I did this slowly and methodically, working out how things fit together. Then I gradually brought stuff up to tempo.
The more you do this, the easier it gets, though you will probably never get to a point where it comes naturally. It's just too complex an activity to feel natural. The trick, as with so many things in the performing arts, is to make it LOOK natural, even though it isn't.
By the way, it helps to start with something rhythmically simple. Just strumming on steady quarter or half notes while singing works well. It's still pretty complex, since you have to arrange the fingers of one hand into chords, strum with the other hand, and devote lots of brain power to singing. Keeping a simple, steady rhythm in the guitar just reduces one of the many variables in the equation. Once you've got this, you might then think about playing more complex stuff.
The answerer who mentioned not being able to play "hands together" on the piano had it right -- It's a matter of what pianists and drummers cal separation: being able do different things with different parts of the body in a way that seems as though those parts of the body are largely unrelated. It's really a matter of doing that with your brain.
Have fun!
-EdM.
What kind of organ is used in typical reggae?
Q. Like the bob marley stuff. When the organ chords ar one the off beats. What kind of organ is it?
A. Its a Hammond organ-style.
The reggae-organ shuffle is unique to reggae. Typically, a Hammond organ-style sound is used to play chords with a choppy feel. This is known as the bubble. There are specific drawbar settings used on a Hammond console to get the correct sound. This may be the most difficult reggae keyboard rhythm. The 8th beats are played with a space-left-right-left-space-left-right-left pattern. The right-hand part coincides with the rhythm guitar and piano. It makes the music sound faster than it really is. The organ often also plays melodic runs and extra beats. The organ part is typically quite low in the mix, and is often more felt than heard. Examples include the songs "Natural Mystic", "Is This Love" and "Midnight Ravers" by Bob Marley.
Hope this helps:}
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Title : How do you develop advanced tone recognition?
Description : Q. I have a pretty good musical ear. I can hear individual tones but I'm not to the point that I can easily hear intervals or chords. ...