Feel the key of the music by ear!

Did you watch this? I’m curious to know about your experience doing this types of exercises. Specifically limiting yourself to just playing one note :partying_face:

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Amazing! :two_hearts:

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I did watch it, but haven’t tried the exercise yet, as really not sure my ears are up to it!

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I’ve given this a try. I don’t consider myself as having the greatest year, so I was pleasantly surprised at the results when I tried finding the key this way. If I recall correctly, I could determine the key with one note maybe slightly more than half the time. David gave me a great idea: shuffle the jam tracks in pure harmony to practice the skill. Such a cool skill that I want to continue to develop!

It’s hard for me to stick to the rule of just playing one note. Sometimes I give into the temptation to try other notes if my first attempt was wrong.

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@Mike_Leffler, thanks for your answer. I can relate to what you say. Doing this exercise with the jam tracks is part of my daily practice (seven worlds 1st harmonic environment, and pure harmony the 1 and 4 chords only for now). As I am doing these exercises every day, I can see I’m making progress and that’s very encouraging.

Initially I did this exercise only with the seven worlds jam tracks. Now I’m also practicing this with the Pure Harmony tracks. I really enjoy this experience because I can work on identifying a notes in the context of different chords being played in the background. I think that’s a beautiful experience listening. For instance if I play the 4 note on a backing track with chords 1 and 4, listening to the sound of this 4 note over the two chords helps a lot. For instance in chord 1, there is this very specific sound of the 4 note, but then on the 4 chord, it sounds home. I think understanding the chord changes helps identifying the notes. But for now, that works for me because I’m practicing with this very simple chord progression.

I’m trying to stick to playing only one note. What I found also encouraging, is that I’m starting to identify the key also when I’m playing some notes, which are outside of the major scale. That’s really rare when that works, but it’s also encouraging. Now, with this said, none of this works for me when I’m playing with other people. I believe there are many reasons for that. For instance: I’m not relaxed enough, or I can’t identify chords because it either goes too fast, or simply because it’s harder to identify what’s being played compared to sound quality of the backing tracks. In this situation, I’m trying to find the key by playing several notes. But in this case I’m not doing this exercise of note recognition. I’m trying to find the key by identifying the “pattern” of the major scale, by identifying where are my full steps and half steps by listening to which note sounds in or out of the scale. And that’s not what this exercise is about. I’m hoping that at some point I’ll have the same ability as in the video :smile:

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Thanks for your comments Dave! That’s helpful for me to see how you are setting up your practice and it gives me ideas. One thing I often wonder about (Not sure if it’s in this video or another one): David said to ignore the cords and just focus on the melody. I think the point was to not let the chords throw you off. I hadn’t ever considered doing that before he said that. I haven’t worked with that idea enough, But that would be really powerful if I could ignore the cords for a few moments without letting them color what I’m hearing in the melody. Now that I’m thinking about it, I remember that this instruction had to do with identifying the melody. However, I think this idea could help with key recognition too. Good luck with your work here Dave!