David Motto’s Practice Tip of the Week:
Listening to Recordings

Playing the Right Notes is Not Enough

In addition to learning the notes of the song you’re working on, it’s important to understand the correct way to play those notes. Of course the term “correct” is open to debate, but there are accepted ways of playing certain styles of music.

Grasping the style of the music is not as simple as placing it in a broad category like rock, classical, R&B, or jazz. There’s more to it than that.

Jazz players use different phrasing for New Orleans and Bebop tunes. In the world of classical music, there are stylistic differences between pieces from the Baroque era versus those from the Romantic era. In pop music, guitarists would never use the same tone playing 1950’s rock, 70’s R&B, or 90’s metal.

These differences are not always obvious, especially if you’re learning from sheet music.

Listening to Recordings – An Essential Step in the Practice Process

To make your musical decisions easier, you’ll want to do some homework. In addition to learning as much as you can about the song you’re learning, you’ll make more progress by knowing the ways the song has been performed in the past. Listen to recordings and watch online videos of master musicians playing the music you’re learning.

Here are a few things to pay attention to and think about as you listen:

• Tone, tempo, articulations, and phrasing
• Which notes get emphasized in melodies
• The exact rhythms
• What it would be like to be the performer on the recording
• Which areas of the song you want to improve

If you listen to many recordings of the same song, you will hear different interpretations from each of the artists. These interpretations can serve as inspiration for you as you’re learning your music.

Benefits of Listening to Recordings

Listening to recordings is a type of musical homework. Doing this homework will give you the knowledge and confidence that you are performing a given style of music correctly.

And, there are many side benefits to listening to recordings, including:

• Listening to recordings helps you learn faster.
• Recordings also make memorization much, much easier.
• You’ll come across other artists, songs, and composers in your genre.
• You’ll expand your musical universe. (I can’t tell you how many times YouTube or Wikipedia has sent me on hours-long explorations into some really great music!)

Go have fun listening to the song you’re practicing. There are recordings for virtually any music you can think of easily available. Listening is not only fun, it’s also well worth the short amount of time it will take to do.

In the 21st century, listening to a song before you learn how to play it should be as normal as starting a car before you drive it. While you could move a car without starting the motor, why would you want to do all that extra work?

To Your Musical Success!
David Motto