Hear Beyond Your Instrument

I often hear songwriters say that their goal on the guitar or piano is to play "just well enough to write songs". I think what they mean is that they don't want to learn to play things that aren't going to impact their songwriting, but I think it misses a point. (First of all, I think everything can impact your writing, but that's a topic for another article). What we really want to be focused on is not the vocabulary in your fingers but the vocabulary in your head. So today I'd like introduce a way you can broaden that vocabulary without even touching an instrument, and it's as simple as opening your ears.

A core element of any formal music education is something called "ear training". This is the process by which we learn to identify and categorize sounds....melodies (notes in sequence), intervals (distances between notes) and chords (notes that sound simultaneously). While an instrument can be a helpful reference in this process it can also get in the way, by keeping your mind on your fingers and visual relationships rather than on your ears and aural (heard) relationships. So we're going to use our ears and voice as the primary instruments, and use the guitar or keyboard as a reference. Keep in mind that this is not about being a vocalist, so it doesn't matter if you're a strong singer or not. The idea is to use the voice to establish a direct connection to what I'll call your inner ear....."inner" not in the anatomical sense but the musical one.

For the purposes of this exercise you will need to work from an existing song, preferably one you didn't write. It could be on your computer, an I-Pod, or a CD, but most importantly you should be able to move easily from one part of the song to another.

Listen through the entire song and sketch out the form or "map" of the tune. As a writer you should already be familiar with the basic structural elements of song form: verse, lift/pre-chorus/ channel, chorus, and perhaps a bridge, intro, interlude, or outro.
Your map should list all of these sections in the order they appear.

Now listen through the song again. Since we've established where the primary sections are, this time we're listening for a greater level of detail. See if you can figure out how long each section lasts, and more importantly how many times you hear the chords change within each section. This is where the voice comes in: see if you can sing along, but instead of singing the melody try to sing along with the bass or primary rhythm instrument. Note that it doesn't matter whether your voice is low or high, the point is not to match the exact pitch but to give you the clearest outline of when the chords change. More often than not, the note played by the bass or rhythm guitar will be the note that names the chord (called the "root').

If you find that you're having difficulty finding the notes with your voice, try listening to just a small section at a time. You may end up listening to only a couple of beats before you stop the music, but that's OK. With repeated attempts you should be able to zero in on the basic "chord changes" for each section, and once you can sing along you can move to your instrument and try to find the notes you're singing. Don't worry about whether you can find the complete chord that goes with each change.....all we're trying to do in this case is to identify one note for each chord. If you can, fill in these notes on your map or "chord chart", and then see if you can find a pattern to the order the chords appear in.

What we're ultimately trying to accomplish is make your ear aware of chords and how they fit together. The more adept you become at this, the more possible options you'll have open to you in your writing, as you start to hear chord changes in your inner ear that your fingers haven't yet learned. Using the voice to guide the way we can sketch out the basic direction of the chord changes, and then use a chord dictionary (or ask a more skilled player) to suggest some possible options that might fit what you're hearing. This way of thinking should open your ears and broaden your horizons musically, so that when you sit with your instrument you can follow what you hear in your head. This is what it means to hear beyond your instrument: to be limited only by your imagination instead of by your fingers.