Stop 4 of 5
Call and response: playing by ear
Listen, sing and repeat phrases: your ear as a teacher.
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Stop 4 of 5
Listen, sing and repeat phrases: your ear as a teacher.
You now have box one, alternate picking and legato. Next comes the skill that turns those tools into music: listening and answering. In this stop you train your ear as the most reliable teacher you will ever have: you'll hear short phrases, sing them, find them on the guitar and, finally, answer them as in a conversation. This is exactly how generations of blues musicians learned, long before tab existed.
Press Listen and don't look at the numbers yet. There are four bars: in the first two someone "asks", in the next two someone "answers".
Did you notice the difference? The first phrase rises and stops on D, as if it were waiting for something. The second starts almost the same way, but falls and settles on A, the root: it sounds like a conclusion. Neither is hard to play; what's interesting is the relationship between them. One leaves a door open, the other closes it.
That relationship is one of the oldest and most powerful ideas in music. Once you understand it, improvising stops being "playing notes from the scale" and becomes conversation.
Call and response is a dialogue: one phrase proposes, another replies. It can happen between two people, between a singer and a choir, between the voice and the guitar, or inside a single solo, when you ask yourself a question and answer it.
In the blues this dialogue is everywhere. The 12-bar form you already know usually splits into three four-bar blocks: very often the singer sings a line, repeats it, and the third line "answers" it; and in the gaps between sung phrases, the guitar replies to the voice. That's why blues bars have so much room in them: they're built for dialogue.
Playing by ear isn't a mysterious gift: it's a skill you train with a simple method. Whenever you hear a phrase you want to learn, follow these four steps:
To practise step 2, switch on this drone: it's A, the root. Sing the root with it, then sing up to the next note of the scale and back. Then play it on the guitar (string 4 fret 7 → string 3 fret 5) and check that it matches your voice.
When you sing, your brain has to decide the pitch of each note before producing it. That small effort turns a sound that simply "passes through" your ears into an idea you can remember and manipulate. That's why ear-training methods all over the world, from conservatory solfège to the oral teaching of flamenco or blues, ask you to sing before you play.
Besides, inside box one your task is easier than it looks: there are only five possible notes per octave. If the note you're after isn't the one you tried, it's at most one or two scale notes away.
The most effective ear exercise is the echo: someone plays a short phrase and you repeat it straight away, exactly. Start with one-bar phrases. First, listen to the pitches only, with no rhythm and no tab:
Did you find it? Four falling notes: E, D, C, A. Now compare with the tab and play it with the exact rhythm:
Carry on with these three. Go through the whole process with each one: listen with the tab covered (your hand will do), sing, find, and only then check.
Now that you can repeat phrases, let's answer them. Listen to this two-bar call. It ends on E: not the root, so it asks for more.
There are many possible answers. Here are two. The first imitates the start of the call and changes the ending to fall to the root. The second uses a different rhythm but also closes at home.
Notice two devices that almost always work:
Call
Tends to rise, or to stop on notes such as D, E or G. It leaves tension in the air, like a sentence ending with a comma or a question mark.
Response
Tends to fall and land on A. It resolves the tension: the sentence with a full stop. A handy detail: make it the same length as the call.
Now the backing plays the band. In the first exercise the blues stays on A7 and you play both parts: the written call in bars 1-2 and your own response in bars 3-4.
Goal: Play the written call ten times in a row and answer it each time with a two-bar phrase that ends on a root, without losing the pulse.
The 12-bar blues has six pairs of two bars. Use the odd ones to ask (bars 1-2, 5-6, 9-10) and the even ones to answer (3-4, 7-8, 11-12). You can ask with any of the echoes in this stop and answer with a phrase of your own.
If you practise with someone else, even better: one asks, the other answers, and on the next chorus you swap roles.
Goal: Go through a whole blues alternating two bars of call and two of response, ending each response on a root.
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