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Pull up the John Mayer Trio set from Where the Light Is, the concert film shot at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles on December 8, 2007.
Now, these aren’t three strangers who got lucky. Pino Palladino, on bass, had played with the Who, Jeff Beck and D’Angelo. Steve Jordan, on drums, had played in the Saturday Night Live band and in Keith Richards’ X-Pensive Winos, and today he’s the Rolling Stones’ drummer. By that night the three of them had been a trio since 2005.
The trio’s first gig was a tsunami benefit in New York in January 2005. Willie Weeks couldn’t make it, so Steve Jordan called Pino. Mayer later told Rolling Stone that “the rehearsal was just unbelievable.”
Four or five days of rehearsal
Here’s the part worth sitting with. When the trio first hit the road in 2005, they didn’t have much rehearsal behind them. Mayer told Rolling Stone that December, “we only rehearsed for four or five days.” They wrote their original tunes in that same stretch, and Mayer wrote some of the lyrics in hotel rooms during the first week of shows. He wrote the words to “Try” in the production office in San Francisco, taped them to the monitor and sang them off it.
They could skimp on rehearsal and still turn on a dime because they weren’t leaning on a chart. They were listening to each other and answering in real time.
Watch Pino in that Los Angeles set. He isn’t recalling what he wrote for the bridge. He’s hearing where Steve just pushed, and putting a note under it that belongs there.
That’s what a trained ear buys you.
Recall versus response
And it’s not that these guys never did the work. They did decades of it. The difference is where the work went.
Most of us pour our practice into recall. Learn the part, drill it till the fingers know it.
Recall’s useful. It’s also the thing that freezes you the second someone calls a tune you never “learned.”
The ear’s what turns recall into response. It’s how you walk into a room cold and still lock into the pocket like you’ve been there for years. (If the drummer half of that is what trips you up, here’s how to lock in with a drummer.)
Hear your way into a tune you can’t play
So build that ear. Take a tune you couldn’t play and hear your way into it, a phrase at a time.
Somewhere along the way you’ll catch a change by ear, or land a note before your fingers know where it is. And the little voice that keeps telling you that you don’t have the ear finally shuts up.
That’s your proof the ear is in there. Then you keep sharpening it. If you want a process to follow, here’s how I transcribe a bass line by ear.
Go deeper
Play What You Hear
Six lessons on learning songs by ear: sing it, find it on the piano, then play it on your instrument.
