Ear Training & Phrases: Minor Triad + Tension 2 || Jazz Guitar Lessons Daily 52 

From our free, Jazz Guitar Lessons Daily Series: Lesson 52
Tuesdays - Melodic Ear Training
3/23/21
The greatest jazz improvisors and composers have always been masters of developing melodic phrases. When we listen to them it’s rare that we ever hear something that simply sounds like a scale pattern or a sequence. Not that they aren’t using those ingredients in their playing… but that when they do use them, they’re serving a larger purpose. One that’s about telling a story where they’re sharing ideas, themes, and using lyrical phrases to express something much deeper than pitches can take us… humanness.
To me, once we cross the boundary of beginner into intermediate guitar playing, we should start putting more and more of our attention on how to begin working towards this. The usually approach to learning is to spend decades shedding scales and arpeggios and performing tunes, cross our fingers, and hope that one day the music gods will grant us entrance into the magical world of high tier musicianship. Screw that. Why sit around waiting to see what might happen? And even more absurd… why sit around wasting decades never being sure if you’ll get what you’re after musically? Start working on it. Understand the end goal of what you’re after in the big picture, reverse engineer it, break it down into practical baby steps, and start taking those baby steps as frequently as you can. Yes, some elements of this process will remain out of your control, and you’ll get to enjoy the process of watching them unfold and surprise you with what happens. But this will at least give you SOME element of control over your progress, and you’ll get to start seeing elements of this human-based musicianship start popping up in your music much sooner in your journey than you would if you didn’t focus on these elements consciously during your practice time.
One of the best things you can do is to begin breaking through the music theory of it all, learn to develop your ears to HEAR the emotions and desires of individual notes (there are only 12 of them in any give tonal situation), and start getting used to playing thematic, lyrical phrases using those emotions. Not trying to cram all of your coolest tricks into every phrase, but removing yourself and your ideas about what WOULD BE cool (intellectually) from the picture and giving the note themselves room to breathe and exist and tell their story. As you get better at this skill, you’ll find “your” ideas don’t really feel like “yours” anymore, and they will happen spontaneously and naturally. You’ll also notice that you’re able to improvise melodic ideas that sound musical in a much more consistent way than ever before.
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