13 - Ear Training

Sound out licks

If you love the autodidactical way of learning, you may try to sound out some cool licks from Django and his cousins.
Djangolizer shows you for each chord, which notes could be played.

Listen to the masters

Try to catch the notes of a master lick and analyse them...
Has the lick more arpeggio notes or scale notes?
Are there patterns in the melody?
What's the phrasing? Plays the master an octave lick or a tremolo?
Does the lick start on the beat or on the off beat?
And so on...

Combine the practical learning with the cognitive learning

After you found the right notes and groove of the lick, try to understand, why the master played exactly those notes at that point.

Eartraining with arpeggios and scales

Because Djangolizer serves you different kinds of scales with two mouse clicks, you get the chance to compare and study them easily. Not only optically but also acoustically.

Put a Cm7 chord into the chord table and choose the Dorian scale. Where are the notes? How does it sound?
After a few times playing up and down, you can switch to the Melodic Minor scale and compare, where the notes changed. Play Melodic Minor a few times up and down. How sounds the difference? And what about the Harmonic Minor scale...?

For doing the comparison more easily, program the Cm7 chord in three following measures in the grid and put in each one a different scale. Now you can change the scale view just by using the arrow keys.
Of course you should do this also with dominant and major scales. Especially the dominant scales (and chords) can vary in their sound from quite tensionless to very disharmonic.

Sing the tones of the arpeggios and scales! But, sing them first, and then check with your guitar, if you got them right, otherwise this exercise will not help. The day, you can sing all the arpeggios and scale up and down, you made it. You can call yourself musician. You will connect melodies with their scales and hear clearly, when a song changes his tonality.

Django could improvise immediately a solo to any song, even to those he never had heard before. He trained his ears very well.