To help with the note you hum compared to the note you pick, try reverse engineering.
I’m sure you will be familar Julie Anrews and do re me fa so la ti do. You should also have learnt the C Major.
Try playing the scale and humming each note or even go full Julie and sing the solfege scale note by note.
Pick C sing Do then hum tbe note.
Pick D sing Re then hum the note etc
Get used to how the hummed note sounds against the picked note. Practice until you can hum the scale, then try again finding melodies.
I’ve tried this but it’s really difficult with humming as I hear what’s in my head and not the noise coming out (if you understand what I mean) due to my plastic ears. Tried the singing option but that’s not much better as by ‘do’ sounds more like a croak!
A bit like transcribing I may just have to admit that I’m not going to get this, but thanks (both) for your help.
The melody is what makes the song. Have you ever noticed there are 1000’s of songs with the same chords but they all sound different?
What makes them different is the melody. This is what Justin wants you to learn to hear. Without the melody every song would sound the same.
Hi, I just tried this using Happy Birthday as the tune. Was slow but super rewarding to end up with a tabbed version…I feel I have got the idea of what Justin is asking so ready to start on his suggested tunes now! Up to this point, they were a bit daunting. The basic start helped keep my enthusiasm for doing this - hope it helps a bit…
You bend a string to play a note higher than the one you fret. That could be a half tone, whole tone, a tone and a half or even two tones.
With vibrato you are oscillating the string by usually smaller degrees to keep the note singing out. And there are many different ways to do that. The most common is a similar motion to a bend but you are pulling the string down and let it return to the original pitch and repeat that action for as long as you want the vibrato to ring out. The speed at which you do this can also vary.
The note does not have to be bent to play vibrato but you can add it at the top of a bend as well.
It seems to works like a miracle for me - I realizes that I can repeat the melody on the guitar and I can sing it as well now. And as an side effect, I am learning the notes on the fretboard.
The plan is to improve the basic skills and then learn how to transcribe whole songs as shown by Justin.
Anybody doing something similar? What is your experience?
a bit similar to orf, i’ve been following along with the practical theory course, which has some “play what you hear” lessons that tie in with this, along with the ear training thing. i took one look at this lesson and thought:
yikes!
do i know how to write a tab? no. i need to revise/learn that
i need to go back and do the ear training theory course again
This short is a very useful resource to help with playing a melody and a melodic solo, it’s useful because it helps a great deal with dexterity and helps develop speed. It’s what’s helped me to be able to play some of the stuff that I have learned recently! https://youtu.be/6EyoRwDBSBk?si=Qm95zznzjZZFCmzt
If all melodies always started on the root note of the underlying chord, it would very quickly become very boring and predictable. A similar reason applies to lead guitar solos - starting phrases and licks on the root note will always work but soon become monotonous.
