this is a big one. where to start...
i started to earnestly practice and learn guitar, and then later bass specifically, nearly 10 years ago now and i feel like i've made no progress. i mean, i have but not nearly, not even remotely close to a fraction of where i figured i'd be a decade later. i know, everyone is unhappy with their progress as a musician, or artist, or creative in any regard, so is the nature of the beast. but i am objectively not good despite having made it such a ficus of my personal life. daily practice, private lessons for years with some really excellent teachers, constant work on bassing in general... and yet here i am, a sloppy mess that ultimately can't play. well fuff.
it's not like i don't practice. it's not like i don't keep track of what i'm working on to stay on track. it's not like what i'm instructed to work on isn't worthwhile. nearly 2 years of studying jazz has to account for something, right?...... RIGHT? i mean regardless, the amount of time i've spent with the instrument kinda suggests that improvement would have happened, even if not huge. well. sorta? but in what regard? what's missing? why do i still feel like i'm just as much not a bassist as i did approaching 30 years ago?
i have not internalized the language.
that is the conclusion i have come to and i believe i am right. here's why. these parallels will be drawn with my experience with learning spanish back in the ol' college days. back then i took the classes, i learned the syntax, i learned the vocabulary, i learned the history and culture, i did the study abroad thing. yet, i never reached the point of fluency. there was always a disconnect. a frustrating separation between the language and my thoughts, in all practical terms. i would on occasion have dreams in spanish that were completely fluent and natural and that was always a bizarre and exciting experience and it told me it was in there, somewhere, but i could not access it.
music. same thing. i study the theory, i learn the songs, i analyze them, i play them, i learn the harmonies and melodies and compare and contrast, i see how things fit together, yet i remain un-fluent. i have these fleeting moments of clarity where i understand something without "learning" it first, or at least have a vague hunch as to what it is. when it does happen it feels exactly the same, i know it's in me somewhere but i am unable to access it. frustrating.
several months ago i started doing a thing that i really didn't know would have the impact it did. it has really re-contextualized literally everything. because my commute is so ridiculously long i have a huge chunk of time that is effectively wasted while driving. i thought there must be something i can do to bring some value to this time i have with nothing but my thoughts. i decided i was going to learn solfege, more or less. since i was driving my voice was free so doing a deep dive on the major scale seemed like not a waste of time. i created a drone with a tonic and a 5th that lasts about 4 minutes. i settled on a tonic of A simply because it fits my register and at 5am literally the first thing out of my mouth is "do".
for months every day on my commute i would spend about the first 20 minutes locking in with that drone. "do, so, do. dooooooooooooo, soooooooooooooooo, doooooooooooo". eventually adding in re, mi, and fa. sometimes i nailed it, many times i struggled to get them right. some days i'd just really hammer on say, mi, for almost the entire 20 minutes just to really let it sink in. i worked in the whole scale and started to focus on certain intervals, maybe the sound of the do to fa was interesting one day. or the mi, fa, so stuck out to me on another day.
it didn't end in the car. at work there's a constant drone of motors running that i often use to practice my intervals off of. in any given days i probably work with solfege and the major scale likely 45 minutes or so on and off. not a bad amount of time on something through out the day.
i didn't really know what i was doing other than just entertaining myself, more or less. i didn't think this had any real practical application, it was just something i was doing that was peripherally related to music. something i could do while doing non-music related things. but then something interesting happened. unforseen and really profound.
one day i got in my car, put on the drone, and started driving to work. as i began with my solfege i could feel the intervals in a very way. fa had a very specific feel. mi, although right next door, had a completely different feel. they all had very different and specific characteristics. outside of the commute hearing certain cadences really stood out to me. i'd hear a 5-1 or something and just know what it was. my mind had been officially blown.
now i've known since the start that developing ones "ear" was super important. over the years i've paid for numerous online courses that promise to be the one program that will "finally" get your ear in shape. none have worked for me in spite using them for a while. in retrospect, they all have valid information, and the people that have developed these courses no doubt have good ears, but if feels like an NBA player giving instructions on how to drain 3's by saying "just throw the ball in the hoop, it's easy" (i just made a sportsball analogy). ultimately, the information is not helpful because it's just information at best, misleading at worst.
for me it was a daily usage of just playing around with a drone. experimenting with different intervals, seeing how they sound in relation to the tonic, to the 5th, to each other. playing with my own voice and hearing the intervals in my head and then signing them and evaluating them. am i flat? sharp? hitting the wrong interval entirely? did i nail it the first time? this apparently is the work that i needed to do all along that nobody ever told me to do. nobody ever said you need to just play with your voice for months on end, with no ability to touch an instrument in the process. it's just me, my brain, and my voice.
i decided to take it out of the car and into my practice and see how i can use it in a practical way. i decided transcribing commercial jungles would be an apt thing to do since they're short, often just a bar or two long and meant to be catchy and memorable. i found some youtube compilations of classic jungles and got to work. it was bonkers how fast i was able to figure some of them out even before i used my instrument. this was the evidence that i needed to know what i was doing was meaningful. i was beginning to truly understand music in an internal way and not just intellectually. now granted, jungles and nursery rhymes are far from what i want to be doing, but they are a good test bed for practicing my ear.
this is obviously just the beginning. i've only begun the process of learning this language but it seems like the first hurdle has been cleared. i have discovered for myself what internalization feels like and what it can mean to be fluent in music. a layer of opaqueness has been removed and everything is a little more transparent and it's exciting. far more exciting than any technique i may learn on the bass, this is what i've wanted out of music all along.
