#1 – Sing Along With What You Play

WHY IT MAKES YOU MORE USEFUL:

It teaches you to hear a note before you play it.  This enables you to more easily play what’s in your head. Also, it greatly improves your phrasing, which makes your playing more interesting. 

WHAT TO DO:

Start by just playing a simple scale—the major scale, the pentatonic scale, the blues scale, whatever.  Go slowly and sing along.  Try moving back and forth as you go, moving up, then down a little, then back up some more.  

Invest in background tracks made for improv practice.  Pick a slow track and play long notes at first.  Next try skipping notes, jumping to a note farther up or down the scales.  Be aware of your singing and breathing and how it affects your playing.  If you can’t do it the first time, keep trying.  Like anything else, you’ll get better at this the more you do it.  

When you’ve gained a little confidence, try this onstage, in front of real people.  They’ll never hear you, and if they see your lips moving, they’ll think you’re being an artiste.  

When you can hear something in your head and then play it without missing a note, you’ve crossed over from playing patterns and memorized motifs to real, honest improvising.  Real improvising comes from your head, not your hands.  

Also, this improves the phrasing, or musicality of your improvising.  When you sing, you have to pause to breathe.  If you’re singing along with what you’re playing, you’ll naturally pause your playing while you pause to breathe.  This goes a long way toward curing a run-on style of improvising.  Even 4 bars of constant 8th or 16th notes is tedious and boring.  Singing along forces you to think in phrases, and will result in much, much better sounding solos and other little things you might improvise. 

Lastly, it internalizes everything.  You need the music to start from inside you, not your instrument.  Ideally, you should never, ever be surprised by something that comes out of your instrument.  It should start inside you and work it’s way out into your instrument.  

This is partly about training your ear and partly about learning to connect the notes your hear with the physical act of playing your instrument.   You hear a note in your head, and then you feel where it is on your instrument.  You connect the two.

THOUGHTS:

There was a time I couldn’t do this.  I clearly remember sitting at my parents’ piano, trying to play the melody to a Christmas carol without any music.  I could hear the melody in my head, but I couldn’t get it into my hands.  I’d find the first note, then sing the next note, then try to find it on the keyboard.  I’d miss every time, or if I hit one right, I was just lucky.  It really, really frustrated me.  

And then one day in my high school band class, the band director said, “Can you hear the notes in your head before you play them?”  

He had my undivided attention.  

“We’ll start with the interval of a fourth.  For instance, a C up to an F.  Does that sound like anything you’ve heard?  It should—it’s the opening to ‘Here Comes The Bride’.  If you see an interval of a fourth on the music, then start on the first note, hum ‘Here Comes The Bride’, and you’ll know how the second note should sound.”

I tried it, and it worked.  I went home and sat at the piano playing random note after random note, then singing ‘Here Comes The Bride’ starting on that note.  

That day he also gave us other songs for other intervals (‘My Bonnie’ for a major 6), and let me tell you—I felt like he’d let me in on a priceless secret.  I’d listen to songs on the radio or my record player and try to identify the intervals.  After a while I got pretty good at it, and found that my ability to pick out a melody on the piano was getting much faster.  I’m pretty good at it after all these years, but only on piano and in my head.  The guitar is an entirely different animal, and I have a long way to go on THAT instrument.  So I work at it.  Sometimes when I’m driving in my car or the work truck, I’ll think of a melody and see if I can play it on the guitar neck—in my head.  I get it wrong a lot, but every once in a while I’ll get a revelation and think, “Okay, that little nugget was worth missing my turn.”   

Be curious.  

This is an excerpt from my new book, “The Useful Musician”, available on Amazon.