Training Your Ear

The idea

Ear training is not a talent test. It is a small daily habit, and it is what turns theory into something you can use while writing. There are three skills, and they build on each other.

1. Sing what you play. Your voice is the bridge between your ear and your hands. If you can sing a note before you play it, you really hear it. You do not need a good voice. You need to match pitch, and that improves within days.

2. Hear distances (intervals). Recognize the interval between two notes. This is what the previous two lessons prepared, and it is what you need to work out riffs and melodies.

3. Hear position (scale degrees). Recognize where a note sits relative to the home note of the key. This is the more musical skill. In a real song you rarely think “that was a minor 6th”. You think “that is the 5th of the key, and it wants to go home”. Every degree has its own feeling of rest or pull:

Degree	Feeling against the tonic
1	Home. Complete rest.
3	Stable and sweet. Decides major or minor.
5	Stable and open.
2 and 6	Mild, floating. Happy to move either way.
4	Leans down to 3.
7	Leans strongly up to 1.

How progress works. Start with very few choices and add one at a time. Three intervals at 90% teach you more than twelve intervals at 40%. Five focused minutes every day beat an hour once a week.

On your instrument

The daily five minutes:

1. One minute, match pitch. Play any note in a comfortable range and sing it. Slide your voice up or down until the beating between voice and string disappears.
2. Two minutes, intervals. Use the trainer below.
3. Two minutes, degrees over a drone. Switch on a drone in the scale explorer below, then play one scale note at a time and sing it. Name the degree before you play it.

Start with only the three easiest intervals:

When you score 9 out of 10, move to the next set:

Then the 2nds, 6ths, 7ths and the tritone. The full set of twelve, with descending and harmonic modes, is here and on the Practice tools page:

Major or minor? This is the single most useful chord distinction. Add diminished and augmented once the first two are automatic:

For degree practice, turn on the drone and sing each degree against it:

Worked example

Working out a melody by ear, step by step, using “Happy Birthday”:

1. Find the home note. Sing the last note of the tune and find it on the guitar. Say it is G. That is degree 1, and the key is G major.
2. Find the first note. Sing “Hap-” and find it. It is D, a 4th below home, which is degree 5.
3. Follow the shape, not the notes. “Hap-py birth-day to you”: same, same, up a step, back down, up a 4th, down a half step. In degrees: 5 5 6 5 1 7.
4. Check by playing. If one note is wrong, you will hear exactly which one.

The whole tune takes two minutes this way, and you can now play it in any key because you know it as degrees.

Exercises

1. Do the daily five minutes for two weeks. Keep a note of your trainer scores once a week, not every day.
2. Sing before you play. Take the minor pentatonic box you know. Play the root, then sing the next note of the scale before playing it. Go up and down the whole box.
3. Work out three melodies by ear using the four steps above: a children’s song, a vocal line from a song you like, and one guitar riff. Write them as degrees.
4. Root hunt. Put on any song and hum the lowest note of each chord. That is the bass line, and hearing it is the first step to hearing chord progressions in Module 4.

Common mistakes

• Guessing fast. Before you click an answer, sing both notes. The singing is the training. The click is only the check.
• Adding intervals too early. If your score drops below 70%, remove the last interval you added.
• Only training with an app. The real test is working out real music. Do exercise 3 every week from now on.