Learn to develop your ears and your ability to identify chord tones and how to land on good notes when soloing!
View the full lesson at Re-Active Listening ™ | JustinGuitar
Wish this lesson you had an acoustic guitar… so informative… will practise…
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Technically, the odds of getting a good note using this technique is 6 out of 8, but that doesn’t make the exercise any less useful or awesome…
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2 posts were split to a new topic: How can I train myself to memorise the notes on the fretboard?
5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Major Scale Pattern 1, Major Scale Maestro 1
GarageBand has a nice feature where you can get it to auto play a chord and you can filter by whichever key you want. I find it very useful for re active listening exercises when I don’t want to dig out my looper.
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A post was split to a new topic: Can you adapt the metronome app to auto-increase the tempo?
Should I know by memory where the tones of each chord are?
For example, when improvising in the key of G, I encounter the D chord: this is the V chord and it’s made of DF#A, which are respectively the 5th, 7th, and 2nd notes of the scale - but do I have to think about this when playing? or at least, be aware of it? Should I be able to say in a fraction of a second “oh, this is the IV chord, its tones are here here and here on the fretboard! Easy!”. When playing I can clearly hear when I am playing a chord tone or not, and I can follow the chord progression, but I am not sure if just trusting the ears is enough… I like the theory too much 
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Hello - love this lesson and plan to get a looper pedal to start making my own progressions. In the mean time I’ve found some basic backing tracks on Youtube. Can you point me to the backing tracks Justin mentioned that he made avaialable in the lesson?
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3 posts were split to a new topic: Can anyone recommend an easy to use, inexpensive looper pedal?
Not sure anyone answered. I think eventually people learn to overlay the CAGED patterns on to the scale patterns Not something I can do.
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Hi can anyone help me out? I am struggling with remembering the good notes to land on within the chord. what should i be listening for when playing. also finding it hard to practice this. has anyone go any other ways that they practise reactive listening. i have tried having a go with the chord changes and it is confusing as I’m stuck trying to remember the good notes over each chord.
what is a good foundation to start with
when should i move to playing with multiple chords
what should i be looking out for and focusing on while doing the exercise in my practise routine
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I haven’t done this exercise in a while, but I think I know where you are going wrong.
This is not a memory exercise… It’s a listening exercise. You want to find the notes that go with the chord by ear, not from memory.
When practicing this, I found it helpful to play some slow jam tracks from YouTube that stayed on the same chord for several measures. This gives you a much better chance of finding the “good” notes before the chord changes.
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Hi Leo
The object of re-active listening isn’t to memorise what you play, it’s to eventually play by ear.
The idea is to listen to the backing track and listen to what you are playing and trying to instinctively blend the two together. It probably won’t happen too well at the start but your ‘skill’ will improve over time.
All the notes of the major scale will sound sort of ok but some will sound better than others. That’s because they will blend in with the chord - they will be tones of that chord.
Start off simple. Just play one or two notes, maybe just on the treble strings and LISTEN. Do any of those notes blend well with the chord?
It doesn’t matter what the actual notes are (as long as you stick to the major scale finger pattern)
It doesn’t matter what the chord you are playing over is - do they blend together well?
Play a little 3 or 4 note pattern. Now the last note is the important one - the landing note - hold that note. You want this one to blend well with the underlying chord.
That landing note will be a different note as the chords change so you can vary your pattern using different notes.
Do all this by ear, NOT by knowing what the chords and notes are.
Over time, you will start to hit those landing notes instinctively. Your fingers will just go to the right notes and if you miss the right note, you will quickly move to a better note giving variation to your pattern!
At the start it sounds crazy that this will happen. You’ll think no way can I ever do this!
Stick with it and it WILL happen!
Ps. If you aren’t sure whether you can hear this blending - move the whole finger pattern up one semitone. It won’t sound good!!
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Hey Justin,
I finally tried out an open mic night; this was my second one. We did our first one last month. My wife is a classically trained pianist, so she’s my “jam buddy.”
She suggested that we improv something as early as possible in the open mic journey so I can realize I don’t need to bank on learning cover songs as my only option.
I’m only sending this video because the open mic night was last night, and I had your Reactive listening class today you mentioned at the end about sending a link if we try out your advice. I know you stay very busy, but I sent it anyway if you have a chance to check it out. I really appreciate all of your help and absolutely love your theory course. Honestly, I think your theory course brings all of this together! I’m shocked at how much I love theory and can’t stop thinking about it at times, it’s like a blessing and a curse! LOL
Anyway, thanks for everything you do!
Josh Mattison
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20 posts were split to a new topic: I’m confused about the C major scale and where the major chords are
Hi!
I am still a bit confused about how to work my way through all those lessons and when to move on to the next video. Do you recommend watching all videos first and then follow the suggested practice? Or one video from each Grade?
Can you please give me some directions?
Thank you!
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Hi @sariplays
Not sure what you mean by watching a video from each grade?
This Major Scale Maestro module is in Grade4 and is a module that needs a lot of time to work through.
I would say take it one lesson at a time and give yourself weeks or even months to learn and practice the elements of the lesson before moving on to the next lesson.
This is the first part. The second part is in Grade5.
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Odd that this lessons comes up again as it’s also in Grade 2 Module 11. I first watched it in 2022 and 2023 and still now don’t understand about chord tones or ‘home’ notes!
I have a better understanding of the Major Scale now and can playing to a fairly decent speed but improvisation still eludes me. As I have said before the BT is just noise in the background, which, if I increase in volume, drowns out my my ‘playing’! The BT that Justin suggested we use from this lesson https://www.justinguitar.com/guitar-lessons/chords-in-keys-for-jamming-mm-002#resources is obviously based on a very well know song and I know what the chords should be if that is correct but can’t hear them in the BT.
Have got to the point where I quite often don’t use the BT and improvise without it.
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I recall you saying this a number of times before Stuart. Is it possible you suffer from amusia (tone deafness)?
Perhaps improvisation isn’t for you? Maybe you would be better off going down the more traditional path of learning songs by rote? I don’t mean campfire songs that are basically three minutes of strumming four chords. That gets boring really fast. I’m thinking of something more complicated that involves playing a melody. Perhaps finger picking?
I don’t mean to discourage you, but if you literally can’t hear the chord changes in a backing track, I don’t think you’re ever going to get it.
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