How "Blurry Hearing" Is Wrecking Your Solos...

Blurry hearing.

What's that?

Think about what the world looks like without your glasses or contact lenses. (If you don't need them, well...aren't you special?!?)

Most people hear music the way people see without their glasses, i.e., without clarity.

Great musicians hear with great clarity. Take Jacob Collier for example. He can tell if a note is sharp or flat by just a few cents.

Don't worry. That's an extreme level of clarity and more than most musicians need in order to make great music.

But be honest…How blurry or clear is your hearing?

There are lots of ways to test, but one of the best is transcribing. The better you can transcribe music—and I'm talking about pitches, rhythms, feel, phrasing, etc.—the sharper your ears will be.

In addition to transcribing your favorite records, you also have to get good at transcribing the music that's in your head.

After all, improvisation is simply figuring out the notes you're hearing in your head and then playing that mental transcription on your instrument.

How do you get good at that?

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times:

Sing.

Sing and then play. Build the connection between your ear, your voice, and your instrument.

I hear there are vision exercises you can do to improve your sight. Not sure if that's true or not, but here's one thing I do know for sure:

Singing will improve your ears.

Do it, and do it often.

Sing transcribed solos. Sing rhythms. Sing the lines you hear in your head.

The stronger the connection between your ears and your fingers, the better a soloist you will be.

Your voice is the bridge between your ears and your hands.

Thinking too much deteriorates that bridge. So does reading music.

That’s why memorizing tunes is so important. If your head is buried in sheet music, your ears will have less bandwidth.

My advice?

Get better at memorizing chord progressions by singing and playing chord-tone solos.

More on that in a minute.

But first, when I say memorizing chord progressions, I don't just mean being able to rattle off the names of the chords.

It's even more important to memorize the sounds of the chords.

Admittedly, this takes time. A lot more time than it takes to merely memorize chord names.

But I promise, it’s worth the time and effort.

Fortunately, you can speed up the memorization process by singing and playing through the chord tone solos like the ones featured in my etude book, Chord Tone Magic.

Once you teach your ears how the chord tones sound, an aural map of the chord progression will start to emerge.

And once you have that map, soloing becomes so much easier and so much more fun because you can forget everything and just play what you hear instead of what you think.

Ya dig?

Get Chord Tone Magic here and start clearing up your blurry hearing today.

Happy shedding,

Jeff