{"id":32165,"date":"2026-03-23T16:28:33","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T20:28:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/?p=32165"},"modified":"2026-03-25T17:18:37","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T21:18:37","slug":"check-out-these-grooves-that-i-have-my-aural-skills-students-improvise-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/2026\/check-out-these-grooves-that-i-have-my-aural-skills-students-improvise-over\/","title":{"rendered":"Check out these grooves that I have my aural skills students improvise over"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

If you major in music at most universities, you have to take several semesters of aural skills classes. These classes traditionally consist of two main activities: sight-singing and dictation, that is, hearing a melody or chord sequence a few times and then writing it out in notation. Aural skills class was the definite low point of my grad school education, and it helped deter me from studying music as an undergrad. I find sight-singing and dictation to be intensely stressful, because I\u2019m terrible at them and because I have never had to do them in real musical life.<\/p>\r\n

NYU\u2019s new pop music theory sequence has its own aural skills classes, and I am pleasantly surprised to find myself teaching them. I can do it because these classes are very different from the ones that I took. Some of that is the repertoire: Stevie Wonder rather than Beethoven. The structure of the class is different too. The music we\u2019re studying exists as recordings, not notated scores. It was substantially created by ear, and is substantially learned that way. So while we do work on notation-related skills, it can\u2019t be the only thing on the menu. (Most of my students are better readers than I am anyway!) My job is to create classroom activities and assignments that are appropriate to pop music and its learning methods.<\/p>\r\n

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A lot of my own formative music learning came from jamming over repeated grooves, either with other people or over recordings. This is why I put improvisation at the center of my teaching practice. In my experience, the only lasting way to learn theory is to use it to solve problems in an authentic musical context. Jamming with a band is the ideal way to do this problem-solving, but it\u2019s impractical in a class of 25 people, not all of whom play instruments. However, it is practical to have everyone jam over recordings, and in some ways, recordings are better than live instruments. I don\u2019t know anyone who can play funk like James Brown\u2019s band in 1970, but I don\u2019t need to when James Brown\u2019s band is right there on the computer.<\/p>\r\n

Why do music students need to improvise if they aren\u2019t playing jazz?<\/h2>\r\n

You might wonder why improvisation is such a big deal for pop musicians outside of jazz or jam bands. The answer is that improvisation is not just for solos. If you are creating or arranging music in any capacity, improvisation is usually the best way to do it. That\u2019s true for songwriting, but it\u2019s also true for lower-level, more background-y forms of creativity.<\/p>\r\n

Say you\u2019re a guitarist who\u2019s backing a singer-songwriter. They might hand you a chord chart, and set out a basic tempo and feel. Maybe there will be some riffs or countermelodies for you to play too. But most likely, beyond the basic skeleton, whatever you play will be up to you. I guess you could work your ideas out on paper, but it\u2019s vastly more likely that you will be making things up in the moment. This process is so natural that it might not even feel like creativity at all, but it is. The same goes for basslines, drum parts, keyboard parts, backing vocals, production choices, and so on: you might be told what to play in the broad strokes, but you will be inventing a lot of the time. The only time I have been asked to play something exact is when we were trying to do a soundalike cover. Otherwise, my musical life has been wall-to-wall improvising.<\/p>\r\n

Not only do pop students need to learn improvisation as a skill unto itself, but they also benefit from improvisation as a method for learning other things. In their article \u201cSituated Cognition and the Culture of Learning<\/a>\u201d, John Seely Brown, Allan Collins and Paul Duguid argue that education too often focuses on the content of learning while ignoring the context. Say you want to learn a foreign language. If you do it in a classroom, it will be a slow and painful process, and you will lose your knowledge quickly unless you keep up continual effort to maintain it. But if you learn a language through immersion among native speakers, you will pick it up quickly, and it will stick. Brown, Collins and Duguid point out that classroom content knowledge too often comes in the form of \u201calgorithms, routines, and decontextualized definitions that [students] cannot use and that, therefore, lie inert.\u201d You can\u2019t necessarily do the equivalent of moving to a foreign country in a class that meets twice a week, but you can create experiences that inspire students to seek out immersion for themselves.<\/p>\r\n

You can\u2019t undervalue the emotional context of learning. It has to feel good if it\u2019s going to stick. I took a great jazz theory and improv class in college, and I felt good studying the music and doing the improvising. Decades later, I\u2019m still happily chasing down the threads of everything we learned there. Meanwhile, I had such an aversive experience trying to learn the classical counterpoint rules in grad school that I have to look them up all over again every semester, and I will probably never be able to retain them.<\/p>\r\n

Here\u2019s a collection of some of my favorite loops<\/h2>\r\n

I don\u2019t know of a better way to learn improvisation than to simply do it. But you can\u2019t just tell students to improvise, especially if they haven\u2019t done it before; you need to give them some scaffolding. Looped grooves are perfect for that. Here are some of my best ones, which I call jam tracks. They will all loop perfectly if you play them on repeat, but I also put fadeouts on the ends if you want to listen to the playlist straight through.<\/p>\r\n