singing and playing

[crzyfngers]

we recently started working with another guitar player who also sings. he has some pitch problems. i noticed sometimes he's playing the wrong chord. i'm trying to explain to my harp player how that is directly related to his pitch problem but he doesn't get it. he doesn't play harp and sing at the same time. can somebody help me lay this out for him in plain english.

[buddaman71]

good luck. my experience is that, yes singing and pitch recognition can improve with practice, but there's a certain amount of natural ability involved that most people either have or they don't.

[stevel]

Record it and play it for him - do just guitar playing and see if he notices the wrong chord.

This is a tough one and I just got into a similar situation - was going to start a thread about it to get advice - but I would say you can say "Hey I noticed you're playing X chord there, and I'm pretty sure it's Y chord" and see how they react.

They may have just learned it the wrong way.

But if you know it's really a different chord (you're absolutely sure, like with a lot of experience, have sheet music, etc.) and they can't hear it, you have to hope they're going to be receptive to your correcting them all the time.

Some people realize they're wrong and will correct it, some people will refuse to accept that they're wrong. In the latter case, you can just let them continue to play the wrong chord, and you change to theirs, your play the right chord, or you look for someone else to play with.

Now singing is a tougher one, because not everyone is good at it of course, but if he doesn't realize he's singing the wrong notes, then that's a problem that's going to be a lot of work to overcome. I think the advice above still holds - he may need to be shown he's wrong, and has to be willing to be corrected, and work to correct it.

Steve

[guitarz1972]

Yikes. I think your guy needs to do some at-home practicing on his own. Playing the wrong chords more than very occasionally is a sign he's not completely familiar with the material and he's got his own bit of work to do outside of rehearsing with everybody else.

Give him a pass for maybe not having really good pitch. As the OP might indicate, if he does hit the right chords that probably helps him a lot; I think a number of guitar player-singers function that way. Unless he's classically-trained, he probably can't be expected to ever have great pitch without putting in a lot of work on each song in terms of fine-tuning his notes. Be sure you guys record your practice sessions and performances so he'll be able to hear where particular pitch-problems might occur; those can sometimes be some very fine notes to pinpoint.

He could consider some singing lessons perhaps, but he definitely needs to get the playing-the-right-chords-all-the-time part down first and that might help solve a lot of the problem.

[crzyfngers]

He could consider some singing lessons perhaps, but he definitely needs to get the playing-the-right-chords-all-the-time part down first and that might help solve a lot of the problem.
that's what i was thinking. the wrong chord will lead you astray if you're playing alone.