(RIFF only today—I’m behind on gig prep and the weather’s been so extreme that the kids’ school keeps getting canceled.)
RIFFS:
Listening & Hearing
They sound like two words for the same thing.
But I think of them as two distinct-but-complementary skills.
Listening is noticing.
We mostly point this skill outward.
We focus on a piece of music, and notice things like:
how fast (or slow)?
how loud (or quiet)?
what’s happening with the form?
or the lyrics?
what’s the instrumentation?
what sort of decisions were made with the production?
what’s the mood, the key, the texture, the rhythms?
Hearing is perceiving.
We mostly point this skill at our selves.
am I playing in time?
singing in tune?
using enough dynamics?
does my playing sound relaxed?
or am I rushing?
or maybe my vibrato sounds tense & nervous?
What’s working here that I want to carry forward?
and what could use some improvement?
Noticing & Perceiving.
Each informs the other.
Combine them with next week’s crucial skill—labelling & communicating—and you’ve got a self-reinforcing loop. The makings of excellence.
That’s nice in theory, but…
What am I supposed to do with this?
What can YOU start doing TODAY to help improve these skills?
My top recommendation is to pull songs into the DAW.
Use…
Auto-Warp Long Samples in Ableton Live
or Adapt Tempo in Logic Pro
This lets us see the unaltered audio “on the grid”—in relation to the ruler of bars & beats.
Why do this?
Clear your mind.
Your brain is for having ideas, not holding ideas.
You’ll notice a lot of things as you listen. Offload them from your brain by externalizing them.
You can use:
standard notation
TAB
plain English
or a shorthand of your own making.
Now that there’s a measure number for everything you hear, you can use that as a reference: “ah, the banjo enters at measure 35”.
That’s a great place to start improving your listening.
What about your hearing?
You are not good enough…
…at knowing what you’re not good enough at.
Not yet anyway. Our untrained minds don’t have enough bandwidth to perform & critique separately. We have to separate the two acts:
Record yourself.
Listen back.
What should we record? A short part from the song we pulled into the DAW.
Where should we record it? Right there in the DAW, alongside the song.
This gives us a clear reference point. When we listen back, the part we recorded will stick out in some way. It won’t match the original recorded part.
That’s how we know what to focus on.
Learn a part.
Record yourself yourself playing along with it.
Take stock of where it’s good and where it needs attention.
Repeat steps 2 & 3.
Next Wednesday we’ll supercharge this ability with Skill #2: Labelling & Communicating.
See you then.
Josh