Play What You Hear - Getting Your Ears and Fingers In Sync
Play What You Hear - Getting Your Ears and Fingers In SyncWhen you solo your lines should be an extension of what you here in your head. The better you get at guitar, the less you will have to think about what to play and the more you play what you feel. Getting to that level of guitar playing takes some time and practice. But one of the ways you can speed up the process is by training your inner ear to recognize the sounds in your head, and training your fingers to execute those sounds on guitar.
So how do you do that? Well there are many ways. But one very simple thing you can do is to sing the notes you play as you practice. Whenever you are practicing any scale you should always sing or hum the notes as you play them. This will train your fingers to play the sounds that your ears hear.
Can’t sing? Who cares? You don’t need a good voice for this exercise. It isn’t about sounding good; it’s about accurately singing the correct pitch and getting your ears and fingers in sync. So start off slow. Just play one note and try to match your voice to that note. Keep playing it until you can alternate sounding the note and then singing the note. After you get that down pick a melody from a song that you know and then sing or hum along with it while you play it. Then start singing along with the scales you practice.
The next level is to sing along as you improvise over a simple chord change. Try creating simple melodies while you improvise and sing them as you play. (Even better: try singing a melody first and then playing it after). This will really help you break the barriers between what you hear and what you play. If you can’t sing what you play, then what you play isn’t what you hear.
Here is a simple melody to get you started. This is the famous song “Oh When The Saints Go Marching In”. But I just want you to hum or sing the note, but do not say the actual words. I want you to focus your ears on the notes you are playing:
----0--1--3------0--1--3-------0--1--3--0------0------ 0--0---------
-1------------1-------------1----------------------1------3----------3--1--
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0--1--3--3--1---------0--1--3--0-------------------------
--------------------1-------------------1--3--1---------------
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Credit : http://theguitarresource.com/
