Hi PianoGroove Family!
As we all know, listening to music is essential for learning music. This usually comes naturally, as we love the music we are learning, we tend to listen to it a lot, and in most cases are familiar with a type of music even before we start learning it on an instrument.
Although listening music is pretty straight forward (just put a record on and enjoy!), I’d like to open up the topic and go into detail of how many different ways we actually can listen to music, and what we can gain from it that will help our musical progress as an instrumentalist.
When it comes to listening to music, I like to think of it as a spectrum,
where the other end is:
Background music; keeping the music on for example during daily tasks, and not consistently focusing on it.
and the other end:
Transcribing; where we listen extremely carefully, and notate and/or learn the music note to note.
Between these extremes you can have numerous other levels of concentrating to the music.
Here I have added few important steps to the spectrum:
Background Music:
Just keep the music on pretty much at all times! 
No need to pay attention that much, just enjoy the good feeling music creates while doing your daily chores, walks, bus rides, cooking etc.
You’d be amazed how much our brain absorbs this way! This is a crucial way to listen to music, as we learn a bunch about the essential things in music; rhythm feel, rhythmic language, musical phrasing etc. Things that are hard to analyse or explain, these things we learn by just hearing the music. You can compare it to an infant’s way of learning their mother’s tongue; there’s no analysing or grammar involved, just hearing people talk, and eventually they will start talking! This step also brings us naturally to the next step on the spectrum:
“Singalong”
Here we still just listen casually, but maybe you have listened the same track or a solo for a long time, and now (surprise surprise), you start remembering parts of it, and eventually the whole thing! This doesn’t mean you have to learn to sing all parts of the song, but you know the tune so well that you could sing it and know it by heart. The same way as you have always listened to songs you really love, we all know this feeling 
Active Listening
Now we get to the focused section of our spectrum. Sit down, put the song on, maybe close your eyes, and just focus on what’s happening. Listen to the same song/album over and over, and think:
- How does the rhythm section feel?
- How are the musicians playing together?
- How do the soloists differ from each other?
- What’s the form of the song/arrangement
- Does it feel laid back, on the beat or perhaps ahead of the beat?
just to name a few.
Listening Actively On Specific Element
This is kind of the same as the previous step, but now you take one element of the recording, and really focus on that.
- Drums: Listen to what the drummer is doing, listen the cymbal beat, how often there’s an accent on the end of 4, how does the drummer comp different sections and solos?
- Pianist: How is the piano comping? Does the pianist leave space or fill the space? How does the pianist complement the soloist? Does the comping change during the performance? How is the solo? What kind of elements (voicings, rhythms, melodies etc.) does the pianist use in comping as well as in the solo?
- Bass: Focus only on the bass lines. How does the bass “lock in” with the drums? What kind of choices does the bassist do; plays in two or four, does the bass play mostly chord tones or more free etc?
- Saxophone/leader, vocalist, soloist: How is the melody interpreted? How are the solos?
Transcription
The end of the spectrum, this is pretty self-explanatory. Transcribing is the closest form of listening. Here we thoroughly figure out what’s going on by writing things down, and analysing all the elements and things that happen.
On different techniques on transcribing you can check tutorial and live seminars on the PG website. I might do a blog post on transcription in the near future as well.
Here you go, I hope this gave you ideas and inspiration, just put the record and enjoy!!
All the best,
-Tuomo