Ever listen to music through some kind of filter? You could set filters to only let certain frequencies through, or to remove certain frequencies.,
So, the idea here is to pretend you can do that, and listen, but imagine you can only hear accented notes, say. Hopefully they’ll pop out a bit more. It’s a bit like in art class where they’ll say, for example, focus on the green colours in your field of vision, or in film where they do a colour wash, to remove a certain colour to stylise the film.
Then, as in the ‘focus on green’ idea, you might contrast a green with a strong opposite, like red, to enhance the green.
Yeah? Eh?
What thinketh ye, minions?
Great! I had a nice experience once where I was learning a Bach lute thing and my teacher had me sing the bass line whilst I played it. I guess I naturally hear the top first, so it was similarly ear-opening to do that. Totally changed my perception of the piece.
I’m going to revisit an album and just do a bass listen! Thanks for that :)
I tend to find it hard to hear what the bass is doing while I’m improvising, so I practised listening for the bass, by focusing on what the bass did in relation to everything else, over the course of an album for example. I found this really opened up my ears, so now, when I’m playing in a trio, it feels less like I am soloing on top of the bass, and more like we are improvising a two part counterpoint together.