Understanding Basic Music Theory - Catherine Schmidt-Jones [79]
If you play a melody instrument (one that plays only one note at a time), there are different bits of information that help you recognize what the next note will be: how far it is from the note you are on (see Interval), where it is in the key (see Beginning Harmonic Analysis) or where it is in the chord (see Triads). These three things are all related to each other, of course - and a musician with a well-trained ear will be aware of all of them, at least subconsciously - but you may find at first that one works better for you than the others. You may want to experiment: is it easier for you to think of the next note as being a perfect fourth higher than the note you are on, or as being the root of the chord, or as being the fifth note in the scale of the key?
As of this writing, petersax-online had many exercises graded from simple to more difficult to help the beginner practice playing what you hear.
Improvisation
This is the skill you need for jazz. Blues, rock, and many Non-Western traditions also use improvisation.
Suggestions
Know your scales and arpeggios. A good improviser, given the name of a chord, can quickly play not only the notes of the chord but also the scale implied by the chord. Any decent book on playing jazz, or any teacher familiar with jazz, will introduce the student to these chords and scales.
There are now many book/CD combinations available to help the beginning improviser in many different genres and on many different instruments. A good book of this type will give the student a chance to improvise on many familiar tunes, and some also introduce the music theory involved. At the time of this writing, one source of a large variety of such books was jazzbooks.com .
The exercises at the petersax site mentioned above would also be useful for the beginning improviser.
Listen to jazz often. Listen to the improvisers you admire, and if a particular solo really appeals to you, listen to it many times, find the notes on your instrument, and then try writing it down as accurately as you can. Many famous improvisors, when interviewed, mention how useful it was to them to learn from other soloists by transcribing their solos in this way.
Figure out how to play your favorite jazz (or blues or rock) licks (short motives that show up in many pieces in the same genre) on your instrument. Practice stringing them together in ways that make sense to you, but are different from what you've heard. Add your own variations.
Find a teacher who is familiar with the type of improvisation you want to learn, join a jazz band, and/or get together with other musicians who also want to practise improvisation and take turns playing background/rhythm for each other.
Recognizing Intervals and Writing Music Down
This is the skill that allowed Beethoven to continue composing masterpieces even after he became deaf. If you are interested in composing, arranging, music theory, musicology, or just being able to write down a tune quickly and accurately, you'll want to be able to make that quick connection between what you hear and written music.
Suggestions
Before you can do this, you must know your major and minor keys and scales and your Intervals. You may also want to understand Transposition, since you may find it easier to work in some keys than in others.
As of this writing, Teoria Musical was a free ear training website that worked well, and the commercial site TrainEar included a free online version.
Once again, practice is the best way to become good at this. Start with tunes that you know well, but don't know what the (written) notes are. Listen to them in your head (or play a recording) while trying to write them down. Then play what you have written, noticing where you were correct and where you made mistakes. Which intervals are you good at hearing? Which do you have trouble identifying? Do you often mistake one particular interval for another? Do you tend to identify a note by its interval from the previous