When I attended Oberlin College in the eighties, it might have been de rigeur for the conservatory students, but as far as the mostly self-instructed guitarists out there were concerned, who knew? Certainly wasn’t taught in my secondary lessons. I did sing in a madrigals group in high school, and with a community orchestra in college, so it’s nice to put some of that training into something of immediate and powerful use. And it feels very powerful. I’ll be curious to hear where it’s taken you.
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Hmm, well, I guess here’s my perspective on note choices within improv, and I’ll get to how solfege ties into it. This got a lot longer than I intended but I realized I can turn it into something I share with students, so, here goes.
I think the ideal end point is that, in real time, we ‘hear’ an idea in our heads and can execute that idea on our instrument right away.
I pick that process apart and there’s a few stages:
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Hearing the idea: we have some music in our heads.
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Translation: we have to have some means for that information in our heads to be organized into signals and actionable steps that our hands can perform
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Execution: our hands ‘actualizing’ the idea in our heads and producing the sounds for us and others to hear.
Most of us probably don’t have problems with stage #1, it’s just that in the beginning the things that kick around in there might be very simple. Stage #2, for me, means that we have to turn the ‘idea’ into some sort of language or code. This is where I think solfege is extremely useful, but I’m going to cycle back to that in a minute. More people probably work with numbers, and that works too - for example, you hear some idea in your head and you ‘realize’ (not cerebral, necessarily, but intuitively) that the idea is to play, all ascending, 1, b3, #4, then 5. I think a lot of people reading this can probably ‘hear’ that sequence without a guitar in their hands. And then stage #3 is knowing how to play that sequence of notes/intervals in any fingering and in any key. In terms of improvisation, this may mean that your hands have wound up at some point on the fretboard, and you’re in whatever key you’re in (maybe the key to the piece is changing quickly, so…there you are) and you have an idea, and, ideally, you can then translate that idea into musical language that can then be turned into actionable steps your hands can take on the instrument to produce the sounds.
I think for a lot of people these steps happen intuitively and without much study, but the stages are still there. When the music is harmonically simple - for example, all in one key, or mostly blues-based, these processes are simpler; fewer permutations of code that have to be translated from head all the way to hands, and less fretboard organization needed if the music doesn’t change keys or modes or what have you.
There’s another piece of this which I think can allow us to clearly articulate what ‘noodling’ is and isn’t. If our hands are just running physical patterns, or maybe moving around scales not in a reaction to what was an idea we initially ‘heard’ in our heads, then it still might sound good, but in my little model here, we’re just sort of randomly playing notes and patterns and hoping something sounds cool. The ‘intent’ behind the final product is different: rather than coming from an idea in our heads, it’s just us physically moving our fingers around. The latter not being worse, but the note choices are more random. There’s less control.
I think we can debate about the importance of ‘hearing’ the improv beforehand vs just making some notes happen, and there’s lots of grey area for sure. I think in the jazz world it is emphasized that we want to be ‘hearing’ while in rock or metal there’s more leeway. In some styles like rock I think often the effect of having a bunch of notes, or just being the correct scale with good rhythms and phrasing and having appropriate tone, is enough to make for an appealing and genre appropriate result, rather than having this high level of control over pitch choices.
If we want to get more articulate - either because we’re playing more harmonically intricate music, or just because we want to have more intent and control over our pitch choices, solfege is super duper helpful for stage #2. For example, say we really want to ingrain the sound of two cells, but we also want to be very clear about how they are different. The more we SING “do re mi so” and also sing “do mi re so” the more we are solidifying the connection between the sound and the musical data. We’ll not just know intellectually that mi so is a minor third interval while re so is a fourth interval, but we’ll also be feeling it in our bodies and hearing it while simultaneously producing the sound. When we do this we’re not just hoping that hearing the idea (#1) and knowing the fretboard (#3) will lead to us being able to improvise with the cell, we’re taking action to integrate and connect this two things in the translation phase (#2)
So the singing does’t really have much to do with ‘singing’ - it’s a practice activity to solidify and better ingrain musical data/concepts/language/melodies etc.
There’s an added piece to it which is really important and really valuable for musical progress and expanding improvisational vocabulary. Above, I was basically talking about being able to better translate what we hear in our hands to what we can play (and improvise, in real time) on the guitar. But if we are also trying to learn new musical concepts, new harmonic techniques, etc, and we’re having trouble really clearly hearing the idea in our hands, we can use solfege to again simultaneously create the new sounds and solidify theoretical understanding of what the sounds really are.
For example if the Maj7#11 sound is new to someone, they can sing along to an arpeggio “do, mi, fi, so, ti” (or even omit the natural 5 and sing do, mi, fi ti, in this case) and do it with the guitar or piano to not just be hearing the sequence but also creating it with the voice. It’s a great stage for ingraining the sound, and then it can gradually become something we ‘hear’ and these processes allow us to develop and integrate new harmonic vocabulary.
What I recommend is when folks are listening to music and hear something that really perks their ears up, they should sit down and figure out what it was, analyze it harmonically and melodically and sing the line in solfege and get very comfortable doing so. (If it’s a chordal idea that is trickier, but there are still similar methods I recommend.) Obviously there can be more to it, but this is such a huge step in developing new, more harmonically intricate vocabulary. It’s something I’ve done a lot of!
And none of these ideas are really ‘mine’ per se, I think this is the way a lot of the jazz school perspective works and one of many reasons why movable do solfege is used for ear training.
So conclusion: solfege can help solidify what we already ‘hear’ and then be able to actually play what we hear on our instruments, with more control and clarity, and it can also help us expand what we ‘hear’ and learn and integrate new vocabulary, which is huge.
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Omg, thanks @JakeEstner, thanks for posting more great information than I can pull quote here. And to @Troy for seeing the thread relevant enough to move from General Music Discussion.
For the uninitiated, modern chromatic solfege boils down to singable note names not necessarily dependent on a fixed point in our system of keys.
Here’s one way to get started:
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Hear a phrase fragment in ones head. “Happy Birthday,” is a good one, four notes, short, memorable.
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Referencing sheet music for the same (assumes you don’t already have it mapped in your mind) determine what scalar degrees are in the fragment:
‘hap - py birth - day’: 5 5 6 5
- Translate into solfege syllables, looking them up if needed.
5 5 6 5 : So So La So
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Sing (or audiate) So So La So. (“sew sew lah sew”)
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Sing in a few more keys, whatever is comfortable and reflect upon the newly ingrained glory of the sound and function of the first four tones in Happy Birthday.
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Recognize when you hear the pattern in another tune, or, remember to start on So the next time you are forced to play Happy Birthday. Play with the cell in your musical mind, and add it to your repertoire of things to practice in the shower.
BONUS: Recognize the difference in context of a song comprising Do Do Re Do versus So So La So.
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Another thing that brought Bergonzi permutations to life for me is that once I made the jump from fretboard gymnastics to ear gymnastics, I realized that while the permutations are presented in a certain order building on the most easily graspable, all of the permutations are immediately usable when enharmonic considerations are taken into account.
For example, and this relates somewhat to @Tahoebrian5’s thread “Cracking the THEORY Code,” given a permutation that one might otherwise eschew because it doesn’t pop out of over a particular chord, one may find that in another context, the musical structure learned is very usable. And that’s where for those of us with a modicum of ability to match notes (developable), singing is tremendously useful, being so closely related to our pure musical memory.
Take this one for example…
2 3 5 1
…which for someone considering chord tones on down beats might be considered weaker than other fragments due to putting a 5 on the downbeat, versus, say, the 3 when outlining changes a la some approaches.
If you look at the shape of the phrase at different points rhythmically and functionally, the power of having lots of permutations at one’s disposal becomes more readily evident. For example…
2 | 3 5 1
…puts a 3 on a downbeat when overlapping a barline, resolving from 5 to 1 ending a phrase.
“Sister” uses diatonically are many and varied. Easier to go practice singing some than to blind folks with more numbers on a bulletin board. 
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For what it’s worth, I find the importance of ‘chord tone on downbeat’ to vary quite a lot with context.
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I concur, which is why I prefer to get away from the recipes and into actually internalizing phrases and owning them, towards making musical sense. Singing Bergonzi exercises takes me there a heck of a lot faster than playing them on guitar or piano. To sing them accurately, I really have to be able to hear them. There is quite a rush when the notes are confidently on pitch and popping out in my awareness.
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Are we talking fixed do here?
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I’m referring to moveable-do applied in many different ways, but it’s dealer’s choice really. I sing in whatever range is most relaxed when practicing.
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I do movable do unless the key centers are really unclear or are changing too quickly.
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Are you standardizing on a fixed-do tone when not using moveable-do? I ask because when I sing through Giant Steps with B as ‘Do’, it’s only fixed with regard to my choice in the moment. Useful for seeing the relationships transferable to all keys. (That, as opposed to say, picking C or Bb and sticking with it for perfect pitch note naming purposes.)
Truthfully I haven’t done much solfege for atonal music or music that changes keys very rapidly. In those cases I’d probably just sing without any solfege system.
For Giant steps, I might actually use movable do and keep changing between B, G, and Eb, but it obviously would be slow goings.
on GS I also might use movable do to practice individual cells but wouldn’t use it if trying to sing through the whole tune.
If I were super into atonal music or 12 tone row kind of stuff I’d get more into fixed do, but 99% of the music I play is key based, or modulates slowly enough that movable do is still practical.
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Yeah, this is what I do, too.
My wife is a solfege ninja (seriously, she’s done in-depth work and has some high-level Orff certification) but I think most of it is move-able do. I’ll ask her later…
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Ha! That’s fantastic. External evidence that we’re not all nuts to pursue it.
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John, did your spouse share any thoughts? @JakeEstner, for chromatic line examples out of Liebman’s A Chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony and Melody, for example, I’d definitely use solfege, and solfege starting on a few different “Do’s.” I figure the ability to sight sing and audiate confidently are the real test of one’s facility with the skill. I think it’s important to start with simpler tonal stuff though, where having the sequence in mind prior to applying the syllable set seems essential to getting savvy with decoding tunes by ear. Basically i apply it everywhere these days. Cheers.
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Hey @RockStarJazzCat, I’m not familiar with that Liebman book, but if the lines have key centers then yeah I think movable do is great. I mean even if they are super complex. The only times I’d feel it might be a point of diminishing returns is if there really isn’t a key center, or the keys are changing practically every measure - then i’d say fixed do makes more sense.
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I’m more likely to remember a sequence of syllables chunked than I am a highly chromatic passage in the abstract. So, it sounds like with regard to atonal stuff, we may be talking about different contexts, as you were pointing out on the tablature thread.
The process of incorporating solfege is self reinforcing in that once the syllables are assimilated, one’s ear starts to pick up the aural fragments back into solfege. So using them as singable note names, regardless of a truly fixed-Do system, fixed-Do through the length of a piece, or any number of applications of moveable Do.
I posit that the system is useful enough that advanced players get used to using multiple systems very quickly, as using one doesn’t diminish the utility of the other. We get used to hearing the same syllables used in wildly different contexts, and therein lies the longer term utility in aural matching, if you will.
I’d be curious @JakeEstner, what context you find yourself applying solfege, or related, most frequently!
And for what it’s worth David Liebman covers tonal chromaticism, polytonal chromaticism, and atonal stuff. The lines I’m thinking of are found in the “line compendium” at the back. I’m not sure if Advance Music is still active in the publishing world, but the book is worth checking out.
Hmm well the key difference, that I’m not sure of is - is the Liebman stuff meant for a tonal context, that is, there’s some key center even if the lines are super ‘out’? Or is it meant for like 12 tone row or free jazz kind of stuff?
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Both and all of the above. Granted, even atonal lines tend to have weight towards one key center or another. But main point being, solfege gets used for many different purposes. If one assimilates a line with a few Do reference points, one can probably nail them in all contexts, because the ear is hearing detail clearly enough to identify every note.
@JakeEstner, pulled out the Liebman this morning. Some thoughts. First of all, it’s great for covering all the possibilities of intervals between chromatic pitches in a musical ordering. Second, break the chromatic line down into tiny chunks, and the fragments are not unlike what we’re talking about with the Bergonzi. They’ll help in any context. Third, choice of starting “Do” is really arbitrary. Until assimilated, hard to know what context a line might work well in. Fourth, I recommend starting them all on “La” or “Do” so that one may relate them to each other from a constant starting syllable point.
The first of the 100 in the line compendium starts, Do-Fa-Ra-Mi. I note that it is a permutation of the notes in the tetrachord found in harmonic minor. I find it interesting in that the second note descends by major 3rd to return up to the scalar major 3rd (relatively speaking) by minor 3rd. Interesting, at least to me. I’m sure others would find interesting things of their own.
Really tunes one’s pitch awareness right up. I like to compare against plain-jane Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So. I know I’m getting it when I’m no longer questioning whether I’m on the right note or not. That the landing points feel solid, completely relaxed, and in tune with my internal reference points. They pop, if you will.
So bringing it back around to the Bergonzi. If sung and later played musically, the patterns recur all over the place.
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Having brought up tetrachords, probably useful to list them…
Diatonic Tetrachords
do re mi fa - major
do re me fa - minor
do ra me fa - phrygian
do re mi fi - lydian
“Exotic” Tetrachords
do ra mi fa - phrygian-major
do re me fi - lydian-minor
do ra mi fi - phrygian-lydian-major
do ra me fi - phrygian-lydian-minor
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