If you sing me a few phrases, I can sing them back perfectly, at the right pitch and rhythm. I have to teach aural to kids and a lot of them cannot
pitch a note. So, I think that my ear must be okay if I can pass and teach all the exams there are for classical guitar. So, assuming there's nothing
fundamentally wrong with my listening and my musical ear, I am still baffled how anyone could listen to an Oud player and imitate it. The music goes
by too fast to pick anything up. Even the slow passages have all sorts of subtleties that you can only approximate to. I've sat at my CD player,
pressed 'play' listened to the first few notes, pressed 'pause' and tried to copy what I hear. My imitation is about as good as me trying to copy a
great drawing or painting - it's a cartoon and not a very good one!
I have tried using 'Transcribe' too. I don't get on well with computer technology but I managed to get a simple Taqsim on the software but even at a
slow speed, I couldn't pick up what was going on. It's like asking an electric guitarist to learn by listening to Jimi Hendrix launch into one of his
frenzied solos. Can't be done! I don't actually have a real, do-able, practical solution. |