At Ear Training HQ, you’ll learn everything you need to know in order to develop great ears, that can clearly hear and  instantly recognise which notes are being played whenever you hear music.

We provide a number of materials to help you achieve these goals. The Progressive Ear Training Course is a complete, step-by-step ear training course that will take you through the entire process.

However, if this is your first visit, we recommend you watch the Ear Training Essentials video series. It will introduce you to our method, and give you some important information to help you get started.

Click here to watch the Ear Training Essentials video series.

In this video series, you’ll learn all the basics that you need to know in order to get started with effective ear training.

Part 1: What is Ear Training?

The first part is an introduction to ear training. If you already know what ear training is, and what you can expect to get out of it, this information may be old news, but the video is short and sweet, so we figure it’s worth watching to make sure we’re all on the same page.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Part 2: Scale Degrees

We use scale degrees to label music a lot here at Ear Training HQ. In this video you’ll learn everything about what they are, and why they’re so useful for ear training.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Part 3: Internalising Relationships

Internalising relationships forms the bulk of ear training. In this video you’ll learn about the process that takes place whenever you internalise any new concept, and you’ll learn how to apply that to musical relationships. This is the video that will allow you to put all the information you’ve learned up until now into practice.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Limited Time: Special Offer

As you’ve just heard, Ear Training HQ members get it pretty easy when it comes to ear training. Our materials and support are second to none, so when you join, you’ll be able to train your ears as easily and effectively as possible.

For a limited time, you can join Ear Training HQ for a full 2 weeks for only $2. You can try it out for yourself and decide whether it’s for you. There’s no commitment either, so you’ve got nothing to lose!

To find out more about this special offer, click the button below.

Ear Training is without a doubt, one of the most misunderstood areas of musical education.

The vast majority of musicians learn to “play by eye” – they learn which notes to play by reading musical notation, or tablature or chord charts. This approach to learning to play music has a lot of great benefits, and it’s important to learn how to read music, but many of the most rewarding aspects of playing music are left out when this is the only approach to music you know.

This is where ear training comes in. When you know how to play your instrument, and you can read music, dedicated ear training is often the single best way for you to take your playing to a new level.

If you spend some time on ear training, you can quickly change the way that you play music. You’ll be able to rely on your ear to play music, as well as just relying on notation or tab etc

This can open a whole new musical world up to you – you can memorise songs more easily, improvise musically without thinking about chords or scales, transcribe music that you hear without an instrument to check notes, and a lot more.

But so many musicians never take this step. And why?

Is it because it’s too hard? This seems to be a common belief, but it simply isn’t true. Any musician can train their ears and develop great aural skills.

The reason, I believe, is because most musicians try to train their ears in a piecemeal way. They try this exercise and that exercise, and they dabble in this and that. Trying a bunch of different exercises isn’t bad, it’s great to try different things, but with ear training, you need to develop a number of different skills.

You need to learn how to identify individual notes, melodies and chords. It’s simply impossible to learn how to recognise all of these things by learning to identify individual intervals, or using the starts of songs (a common, but largely unhelpful exercise) to help you out.

The secret to success with ear training is a complete approach. You need to find an approach that will teach you all of these different aural skills, and make sure you learn each one at the right time. You can think of your aural skills as being like a house. You start with a foundation, and build on top of it.

You can’t build the first story of a house without a foundation, and you can’t build a second story without the first. So you need to make sure you spend your time in the right areas, focusing on the right things. If you skip the basics, there’s no point in working on the more advanced material, because you don’t have the foundation to add them to.

Many musicians try a bit of ear training, but soon get frustrated and give up. This is usually because they’re working on the ‘first story’ or ‘second story’, but they don’t have a solid foundation yet.

If you start with the most basic skills, and make sure you tick off each skill in the correct order, your progress will accelerate like you wouldn’t believe.

If this is the case though, why doesn’t everyone approach ear training in this way? The simple answer is because not enough musicians and music teachers know what the correct progression is. So many music teachers still ‘play by eye’ that they don’t know how to teach people how to play by ear correctly. The result is the lack of information about ear training that we have today.

So if you are looking to develop your aural skills and learn to play by ear, make sure that you find a complete ear training approach, that can take you step by step through the process.

Funnily enough, at Ear Training HQ, we’ve developed a complete approach that does just that. If you’d like to find out more about it, click here.

Happy New Year Everybody!

In early December I asked you all to help me out by answering a couple of questions about ear training.

We had an incredible response, with over 40 people leaving comments on the post or emailing me to let me know what they wanted to get out of ear training, and what types of content they’d like to see.

I’d like to start out by saying a huge thanks to everyone who did this, and as promised, we gave away three free memberships to people chosen at random. (The winners have all been notified via email).

I’d also like to let you know about some of the conclusions I’ve drawn from your answers.

There are two main conclusions, that I already felt quite strongly about, but now I can say they’re definitely true.

1. The approach that we’ve taken at Ear Training HQ provides musicians with the type of ear training that they’re looking for.

Below are some answers to the first question: (Why do you want to improve your ears, and what’s the one thing you’d most like to get out of it?)

“Although I have learned a few instruments in my life, I am still stymied by not being able to find a way to get the music in my head onto paper. Developing a better ear would allow me to express the music in my head.”
“To be able to hear (or create) chord progressions and melodies and play them without having to analyze anything.”
“I’d really like to be able to write out the notes I hear in my head with more ease.”

“I would like to be able to play both well-loved melodies and my own musical creations on my saxophone without looking at the dots! In my playing, I would like to be able to sneak in little snippets of other melodies – like Happy Birthday, or whatever is appropriate to the occasion, and then return to my original melody.”

In order to do any of these things, you need just one skill: the ability to recognise which notes are being played when you hear music. And as you probably know already, that’s the one skill that we focus on at Ear Training HQ.

It’s great to know that everyone else wants the same functional ear training that we’ve been developing.

2. The way that some of the material is delivered is a little too narrow.

As I was developing the course, I really tried to make sure that it was accessible for everyone. I tried to avoid using notation, and I tried to explain concepts simply, so that even musicians who haven’t learned to read or studied any theory could train their ears. (It seems crazy to think that you should learn to read before you learn to use your ears.)

Your answers have made me realise that more choice is always a good thing.

Over the first few months of 2012 I’ll be adding a huge amount of additional content to the Progressive Ear Training Course. The purpose of this isn’t to make it longer, or to flesh it out unnecessarily.. The purpose is simply to make sure that no matter how you’d prefer to train your ears, you’ll find the material that you need.

This will include more written descriptions of exercises and concepts, so you can find what you need quickly and easily. As part of this, I’ll write out what’s happening in the audio exercises, so you can read them and play them for yourself to get your head around what’s going on. I’ll also be adding more sight-singing exercises to go along with the audio exercises. This additional approach will really work well alongside the current sets of exercises.

I’ll also be adding more bonus material, such as exercises that you can do on your instrument to get used to thinking with your ears when you play.

To summarize, I’m really excited about where Ear Training HQ is headed in 2012. If it’s not already the best place for musicians to go when they want to learn to play by ear (and I think it’s definitely very close) it certainly will be very soon.

Hi everyone,

Hope you’re well, and enjoying the lead up to Christmas.

It may be coming up to the holidays, but there’s no rest for the wicked, so we’re still keeping busy here at Ear Training HQ.

I’ve just started planning a whole bunch of new lessons and exercises that I’m going to add to the Progressive Ear Training Course over the next few months.

There are sight singing exercises, extra audio exercises as well as a bunch of new bonus material that will help you to put everything together.

But before I launch into it, I want to get some additional feedback from you guys. You’re the people who use our materials, so obviously your opinions are the most important.

So what I’d like you to do, is answer the following two questions in the comments below:

1. Why do you want to improve your ears, and what’s the one thing you’d most like to get out of it?

2. What would you like to see in the course? This can be anything, from lessons and exercises, to the way that they’re delivered.

And because it is coming up to Christmas, I figure it wouldn’t be right to ask for your help without anything in return. So on Monday next week, I’ll put the names of everyone who’s answered these questions in a hat, and give a free copy of the course to the first 3 people whose names come out. So you get to help design the course, and you’ll get it for free.

If you’re already a member, you can give the membership to any of your friends.

So thanks in advance for your help, and good luck with the draw for a free ETHQ membership!

Scott

Relative pitch and perfect pitch (or absolute pitch as it’s also known) are the two different ways in which any person can recognize which notes are being played when they hear music. In this article I’ll explain what they are, and discuss the benefits of each.

Relative Pitch

Relative pitch, as its name suggests, involves recognizing each note relative to the other notes in a piece of music. With relative pitch, you’ll be able to identify the relationships between any two (or more) notes. In order to identify the notes themselves, you’ll need a reference point. If you know what one note is (or the key centre of a piece of music) you can use your knowledge of the relationships between the notes to work out the rest.

Perfect Pitch

Perfect pitch will allow a musician to identify the pitch of any note without any reference point. A musician with perfect pitch can identify the pitch of any note as they hear it, even if they haven’t heard any other note to compare it to.

Do I Want to Develop Relative Pitch or Perfect Pitch?

If you were to develop either relative pitch or perfect pitch, you would achieve one of the most important goals of ear training: you would be able to identify which notes are being played in any music that you heard. If you can identify the notes that you’re hearing, you can play them, or write them down as you wish.

Considering this, it may seem that it’s best to strive for perfect pitch. After all, it will allow you to identify music without needing a reference point. In an ideal world this would be the case. The problem with perfect pitch however, isn’t in it’s ability to improve your playing. The problem with perfect pitch is that it’s extremely difficult to develop. Most musicians with perfect pitch develop it as small children, and I don’t know of anyone who has developed it later in life. I believe that it’s possible to develop some level of perfect pitch as an adult, but I’m skeptical about whether it can be developed to a point where it can be useful. Music is made up of a lot of notes, so you need to develop a very fast sense of perfect pitch in order for it to be useful with music.

This is why relative pitch is the focus of most ear training. Relative pitch gives you most of the benefits of perfect pitch (you can usually get a reference point easily enough in most situations) and it’s entirely possible to develop in a realistic amount of time. With effective guidance, most musicians can start to develop useful relative pitch in a matter of months, which will stay with them for life.

Click Here to Check Out Ear Training Essentials to Find Out How You Can Start Developing Relative Pitch Today

The internet has impacted almost every facet of our lives in the 21st century, and as you’re no doubt aware, the emergence of online ear training is one of them. In this article I’m going to discuss some of the pitfalls of “online” ear training and the benefits, and help you make the most out of the real opportunity the internet has given us musicians.

Does Online Ear Training Suck?

A lot of people have issues with the use of computers when it comes to music, and to be honest, I’m actually one of them. You see there are many different types of ear training software and games that I feel, take musicians away from music and put them in front of a white screen for far too long. I feel that a lot of this software doesn’t make you a better musician, you’re just effectively playing games. While these may be entertaining, they often result in virtually zero improvement in your ability to hear music more clearly, engage with it at a deeper level, and generally increase your musicality. This isn’t the point of ear training online.

A lot of musicians think that they can spend a few minutes every day on these ear training games and learn to recognise music. And this is why I sometimes feel that online ear training has hurt ear training as a whole. The internet has made more people think of ear training as a type of game that doesn’t have much to do with playing their instrument. These ear training “games” aren’t enough on their own. They can be a part of your ear training, but alone, you’ll find it very difficult to recognise music. Personally I think that musicians need a varied and complete approach to ear training. Any good ear training course, whether it’s delivered to you on a CD or you download it from the internet, should get you doing a variety of different exercises, so you can learn to identify individual sounds, learn how to connect all those sounds together, and finally translate them onto your instrument. The simple ear training that people often see online cannot do this.

At the same time though, there are some tremendous advantages for you as a musician when it comes to getting your ears trained through an online program, which is why we deliver our course online .

So what are the benefits of Ear Training Online?

As I mentioned in the last paragraph, some of the ear training options online try to make us rely too much on computers to train our ears, and keep us away from the methods and tools that we really need use to get familiar with music.

That being said,  there’s a big difference between getting access to your ear training materials online, and being a computer addicted ear training game junkie! The benefits of getting your ear training online are pretty simple really:

So as you can see, there are a lot of benefits to online ear training, versus studying from a book, or even a CD.

At Ear Training HQ we feel as though we’ve really got the balance right between combining the benefits of new technology to enhance your ear training experience, without getting distracted and moving too far away from the core of effective musical instruction. If you’d like to see what we’re all about, check out our free ear training introductory lesson here:

Click Here to Check Out Ear Training Essentials, the Introrduction to our Online Ear Training Course

Singing is an essential skill for any musician. Your voice acts as a direct output for the pitches that you can hear internally. If you can hear a pitch clearly, whether it be from music you are listening to or from a melody in your head, you will be able to sing it accurately. When you can’t make out a pitch clearly, you will find it much more difficult to sing it.

This makes singing extremely useful for ear training. If you want to train your ears to identify the notes when you hear music, the first step is to be able to hear them clearly. When you’re listening to music that you’d like to train your ear to recognise, try singing the melody. If you can do it, your ears are able to make out each note clearly, which means you’ve already passed this first hurdle of ear training and I suggest you jump straight into some serious ear training drills. (Might I suggest The Progressive Ear Training Course…)

But what if you find it difficult to sing in tune? The remedy is simple: sing! The more you do it, the better you’ll get.

Play melodies slowly on your instrument and then sing them. If you play an instrument that leaves your mouth free, sing while you play. Sing when you’re listening to the radio, sing along to the soundtrack of movies (try to keep it down though so you don’t upset the people nearby), sing in the shower.

If you think you’re tone deaf, I’ve got news for you: you’re not! You just may need to slow things down for a little while. I suggest playing one note at a time on your instrument and singing along with it, then adding a second and third, then speeding it all up. It might take a little while, but soon you’ll be able to sing along to any music you hear.

The more you sing, the easier it will become to match the pitches that you hear, so try to do it as much as you can. Don’t worry about the sound of your voice, focus on getting the right pitch, and everything will come together. The best part is that once  you add some ear training exercises to your singing, every time you sing something, you’ll be reinforcing the sounds in the exercises, so you’ll get even more benefit from it.

I hope that by now you’re singing to yourself as you read this article. If not, get to it!

The western system for musical notation is, without a doubt, the most well developed of its kind. No other culture has come close to creating a system like it.

It is extremely accurate, and it is able to give a musician every minor detail that they need in order to bring a piece of music to life. It has allowed composers to push boundaries, as they can accurately portray their intentions to their performers. Without this notation system, many styles of music simply couldn’t exist as they do today. This relates particularly to large scale works. Large ensembles rely heavily on the ability of all the musicians to accurately and quickly learn their part from the page.

However, while our notation system has allowed the development of a lot of great music, there is also a significant problem that has come along with it: Many musicians rely on it.

Music exists only as sound. The music written on a page tells us how to play a piece, but the dots and lines themselves are not music at all. Considering this, it makes sense that musicians should primarily put their energy into learning to understand music as sound. Listen, copy and experiment. Without written music, this is the only way to learn to play music.

However, with western notation, we can easily skip straight past this process. Many musicians learn to read, and never even bother to actually learn how music works. As a result, these musicians are tied to written music. They cannot experience the freedom that comes from really knowing what they’re doing.

I think it’s like making a speech. Imagine making a speech in a language you can’t speak. You can write it out, word for word, so you can pronounce the words, but you don’t know what any of them mean. You’re limited to reciting the speech exactly as it’s written, most likely with poor pronunciation and a number of grammatical erroes.

This is what it can be like when you can only read music. You are unable to embellish the melody, or change the chords, because you don’t know enough about the language. You can’t make it your own.

Compare this to making a speech in your natural language. You can write out the important points, and fill in the gaps as you go. This is because you’re comfortable with the language, and you know what you’re talking about. You can change the speech each time you make it, to suit your audience better, or merely depending on how you feel. You own it.

This is what playing music is like when you really understand it. You can interpret everything you play, because you know the language. This allows you to be expressive, and it makes it easy for you to put yourself into your music.

It seems to have become the norm for students to focus solely on reading. Why bother with anything else, when you can get by with this one skill. I think this is unfortunate, because so many kids (and adults) could get so much more out of music if there was more balance in the way that music is taught.

For a lot of musicians, ear training is a tricky area. They try one approach for a while, and they don’t get the results they want, and then they give up. Maybe they come back later on to give it another go and repeat the cycle.

Sometimes I feel that the reason so many musicians do this, is because they don’t know what they want to get out of ear training (and sometimes music in general). Personally, I lose motivation to work on something the moment I don’t see the point of it, and I think most people are the same.

So when you decide to spend some time working on your ears, don’t just start working on the first ear training exercise that comes to mind. Start out with a little bit of planning. Sit down, and spend some time considering what you want to get out of it. Work out what your goals are with ear training, and more importantly: how do they relate back to the music that you play.

Do you want to be able to play music easily by memory?

Do you want to improvise freely, without having to think about the chord progression or scales etc?

Do you want to be able to write down the musical ideas you come up with in your head, without having to work them out on an instrument?

Do you want to understand how music works on a deeper level?

Do you want to improve your sight singing?

These were the sorts of goals that I was seeking when I was spending a lot of time developing my own ears. Yours may be similar, or perhaps you have very different goals.

Once you’ve figured out your general goals, try to break each one down into pieces. Work out the missing link: why can’t you do these things already.

For a lot of musicians, the missing link is the same: when they hear music, they can’t identify which notes are being played. You might read that and tell me it’s obvious, and maybe it is. But how often do you tell yourself: “I can’t improvise freely, because I can’t recognise the notes that I hear in my head.” Make this statement, or something like it your mantra. Get up in the morning and repeat it, or write it on your wall. If you remind yourself constantly, you’re not likely to forget it, so you’ll probably keep striving to achieve it.

Now that you’re doggedly forcing yourself to remember what you want to achieve and why, you’ve got two options:

1. Sit down in your practice room, and try something. Try to work out what you think will help, and do it. Do it until you feel that it won’t help anymore. Then try something else. Good old fashioned trial-and-error. You’re in for some frustration, and you may have long periods where your approach doesn’t work, but as long as you stick to it, you’ll eventually reach your goal. You may have to repeat your new mantra a lot, but you’ll get there.

 

2. Sit down somewhere else – probably a music institution, a library or a computer – and start researching. Look up books, courses and software. Talk to musicians with more experience than yourself. Find someone who already has the skills that you’re striving to develop, and get a lesson with them. Learn from the trial-and-error of others. This way, you’re much more likely to get yourself on the right track. When you feel that you know what you’re next step should be, don’t waste another minute. Get into the practice room and get to work. And keep working until you feel that what you’re doing isn’t helping any more. When your current approach stops working (it may be in a few hours, days, weeks or months) stop practicing, and get back to researching. There’s always someone who’s done it before.

In all areas of my practice (and throughout the other things I do), I use a little bit of both. I always start with research, and when I start to develop my understanding of what I’m working on, I start experimenting for myself.

Ear training, and playing music in general, is a technical pursuit, and there are a lot of intricacies to it as well. If you were locked in a room with your instrument, and left there for 100 years, you’d eventually become a virtuoso (as long as you didn’t go crazy first), but you’d waste a lot of time solving problems that other people have already solved. I prefer to do things the easy way, so I learn from their mistakes.

Your Ear Training Checklist

You can consider this your ear training checklist:

1. Set your ear training goals.
2. Work out the specific skills that need to be developed to achieve them.
3. Make up your mantra, and preferably write it down somewhere you’ll see it a lot.
4. Research how you can develop those skills/develop your own methods.
5. Get to work!
6. Step 4 begins to fail; return to step 3.

The reason that this approach works, is because you’ll keep analyzing the way that you work. When something doesn’t work, you’ll step back, look at it, and improve upon it. And on that note, I’ll admit that I have a very low tolerance for ineffective methods in step E. I often spend too much time analyzing, and not enough time working.

However, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. It’s allowed me to develop some innovative and very effective methods, that helped me to make much faster progress toward my goals (and it’s now helping the members of Ear Training HQ to do the same).

So sit down, with pen and paper at hand, and start on step 1 right now! And don’t forget, when you get to step D, Ear Training HQ is here to help you out.

Have you decided on what your ear training goals are already? Let us know in the comments!

When I say pre-hearing, I’m not talking about going to court (thankfully). I’m talking about hearing the music that you play, in your head, before you play it. To explain this a little more clearly, let’s compare two musicians.

1. Musician A – Looks at the notes on a piece of sheet music, or remembers the notes of the song he’s playing. He knows the fingerings and the names of the notes, but he has no idea what they sound like. He doesn’t hear the melody/chords in his head at all. The first time he clearly hears each note is as it’s coming out of his instrument.
2. Musician B – Looks at the notes on a piece of sheet music, and hears the melody/chords written there clearly in her head. Or alternatively, as she remembers the song, she can hear the notes in her head, as well as remember the fingerings. She’s pre-hearing every note/chord before she plays it.

So why is pre-hearing so important?

The answer is simple: When you pre-hear music, you know exactly what you want it to sound like. Whenever musicians B plays, she can hear it in her head, and she can copy that sound on her instrument. She has a blueprint, and all she has to do is follow it. This makes it easy for her to play it exactly how she wants to. She can change her articulation, phrasing and sound so that they match her mental blueprint. As a result, it’s easy for her to make personal, meaningful music.

Musician A has a much more difficult time. Every time he plays, he’s (at least a little) surprised by the melodies and chords coming out of his instrument, because he’s unable to pre-hear them. He will never sound as musical as his friend (musician B), because everything is rigid. He’s always guessing at how he should approach each phrase, because he doesn’t know what it’s supposed to sound like until he’s already played it. He’ll never be as expressive, or free when he plays as musician B.

So how can you learn to pre-hear the music that you play?

The first step is to make sure that you can sing every tune that you play. If you can sing it, you can pre-hear it. This is a great start, and it works perfectly if you only want to play a couple of songs really well. You can learn to sing the melody, and memorise the notes. You’ll pre-hear everything and soon you’ll be sounding excellent.

But once you start learning more tunes, a problem arrises: It starts to get difficult to memorise all the notes of a large number of songs. Even if you’re able to hear the melody clearly, you’ll be so focused on the notes that you’ll forget about pre-hearing the melody. You can remedy this with written music, but that still often requires too much of your attention to allow you to truly express yourself.

This is where ear training comes in. If you can identify each note as you hear it in your head, you don’t need to worry about memorising the notes. You’ll remember them the instant you pre-hear them. This will allow you to focus 100% of your attention on the little details. Your phrasing, articulation etc. These details are what will make you sound great. And when everyone in your band can pre-hear their parts, and identify the ntoes instantly, the music will come alive. You can all stop thinking about what you’re doing. You can concentrate on listening to each other. This will allow you to gel with one another, and create the music you want to.

In my opinion, this is one of the biggest factors that separates great musicians and average ones. Even though many great pop and rock bands may not have developed their ear, they’re pre-hearing everything, purely because they know the songs so well. But if you can put in a little bit of work so that you can play any song in a musical way, rather than just the 10 tunes you’ve been rehearsing for the last 6 months, I can’t think of why you wouldn’t.