Student’s question:
As a student, I have a question about the process of “feeling the numbers.” Recently, I’ve noticed that I’m relying less on consciously thinking about the tonal numbers and more on just playing them on my instrument, and I’m surprised to find that I’m often right. However, sometimes I play the correct notes without really understanding the underlying tonal numbers, which leaves me uncertain about whether I’m practicing correctly. How can I know if I’m truly mastering this skill instead of just guessing?
Mireia’s answer:
All this is very interesting and positive. It sounds like what you are describing is the transition to mastery, so that’s great!
In the first stages of playing by ear, the process feels like THINKING. You listen to the sounds, you think about the tonal numbers, you think about where to find the tonal numbers on your instrument and you play. But once you’ve really mastered these sounds, it’s natural and right that you won’t find yourself thinking so much anymore, but it’s important to realize that the transition is from thinking to KNOWING. It’s not from thinking to GUESSING.
When you’ve mastered these sounds, you’ll simply know the tonal numbers when you hear a melody and likewise, you’ll simply know which notes on your instrument produce these sounds in the key that you are playing in. So it’s very natural that many times you won’t even consciously say the tonal number to yourself. But if somebody were to stop you and ask the tonal number that you just played, you would know that.
So this is what end goal looks like. And this week we are all trying to get there with notes 1, 2 and 3. So I would just encourage you all (especially David Robert who expressed the doubt) to ask yourselves whether your thinking is turning into knowing or if sometimes you are just resorting to guessing, which will probably only slow down your progress.
If you feel like you are falling into the “guessing”, the solution is to slow down and just go back and do more work on the thinking phase. This means thinking very consciously about the tonal numbers, visualizing them all the time, singing them out loud or silently in your mind. Basically, just doing the activities of this week’s lesson. 🙂
