Originally Posted By: rockstar_not
To Mac and Eddie, unless you both were prodigies, that ability took you years of woodshedding where you had the chords in front of you or someone calling out the chords or telling you the structure as you were playing.


Um, no.

If ALL aspects are taught congruently from the beginning, the process is relatively invisible to the student.

Times have changed things, there are more and more great music teachers out there who have adopted that method, but there are still those who do things that I think should be illegal, such as those teaching piano out of those well known picture books that teach nothing but reading the dots and playing same.

In my case, for some reason I started out playing more by ear than by the charts that the piano teachers placed in front of me. It was "easier" and thus I pulled all kind of tricks as a young kid to get the teacher to play next week's lesson for me, etc. - rather than actually attempt to read the music.

At some point, I got caught at this by a certain sharp teacher, and, of course, there was a bit of an unpleasant confrontation in which the teacher prevailed and I was thus forced to have to learn to read what was on the page.

From that experience, it just seemed a natural to me to try to learn to play the "cool" songs that I heard on the radio and television and on recordings, when there were no charts of such readily available to the kid.

Sometimes I would "find" chord structures that I had no idea how to name at the time, but the ears told me that I'd found the right notes in whatever that song at the time was.

I think it all really depends upon the teaching and learning methods that someone is exposed to in their early musical training more than any other one thing. And time and the empirical results from my own adopted teaching methods and teaching young people myself in private music lessons bears that out.

We've all likely encountered those folks who can sight read and play what's on the chart seemingly rather effortlessly, but cannot play even the simplest I - IV - V progression or song by ear. Many of them balk at having to even try. In my opinion, that is a travesty that condemns a certain teaching method that only teaches the one aspect of the thing, creating "pianists" who are really, IMO, "sight reading robots". Never understanding the underlying and rather simple relationships between the Western Tempered Scale Musics and what someone else has written on a page for them.

I'm wuite certain that the original composers of those notes written on the page could not have come up with the compositions without being able to use the marvelous and infallible abilities of the human ear coupled with the gray matter in between, or, as we call it mostly, "playing by EAR".

A few years later in my piano lessons, coupled of course with the Trumpet lessons, I found out that what I had been doing naturally all along, trying to figure out what others had played on records and such, had a name: "Transcribing".

And, on the other side of that same coin, I've known, worked and played with some rather stellar performers who had managed to use the human ear to teach them to play just about anything they wanted to play, but had managed to stay right where I started at, these kind of musicians are those who cannot read even the simplest of music charts, yet can play seemingly anything by ear.

I am thankful that the music teachers and musicians that influenced me at an early age somehow managed to pound it into my rather thick and stubborn little skull that a well-rounded musician should work on BOTH the reading AND the ear at the same time . Again, my experiences in private instruction bear that out, as the person who is adept at only one of the two sides of this coin often has a generally difficult time adding the one to the other after years of only doing it one way. The first step in such endeavor has often been getting past the human nature of the thing, those who can only read music in order to play a piano piece, or those who can only play by ear, doesn't matter which, have developed a rather stubborn defensive argument against having to back up and deal with it. Attitude. Once you get past that hurdle, most all of them manage to blossom, though. There have been some who have chosen to simply quit, though. And that's a shame.


--Mac

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