ear training

[Arnold Schnitzer]

Originally Posted by Paul Warburton

I'm ALL about ears. I learned to play the bass with them. ( no, I don't have any calluses on them) To this day, I couldn't survive musically without a pair of pretty well honed ones. Being self-taught, and being fairly under educated in any real literal musical sense, I would have been dead in the water many years ago without them.

I too grew up musically during an era where reading charts on stage was frowned upon. The bandleader either gave you the key by the amount of fingers he pointed down (flats) or up (sharps), and if you knew the tune, great. If you didn't, you watched the piano player's left hand and listened for the harmonic movement and cadences. And if you did not have the changes down by the second or third time around, you didn't work with those guys again. Some bandleaders didn't bother telling their sidemen anything, they just started playing. With the key of the last tune in your head, you figured out the new key and jumped in. We didn't have a thing called a Real Book. Paul, I bet you know the changes to thousands of songs, even if you (like me) can't remember their names...