With a fast and accurate sense of relative pitch, a musician can identify the notes that they hear in any piece of music, instantly and confidently. Any musician who has successfully developed this ability will tell you that it’s the most important and rewarding thing a musician can do. However, there seem to be more musicians who have tried and failed than there are those who have succeeded. For those musicians, their memories of ear training are more frustrating than anything else.
I think it’s a shame that so many musicians think about ear training in this way. Because it simply doesn’t have to be like this. No one fails with ear training because they are unable to develop their ears, they fail because they go about it in the wrong way.
I think the largest problem, is that many people start ear training in the wrong place. Many approaches tell us to start by learning to recognise individual intervals. This is terrible advice.
Why?
Learning to identify individual melodies has almost no structure or context to it. Two isolated notes have little in common with a piece of music. I’ve noticed many similarities between the way in which we learn to speak new languages and the way in which we train our ears to recognise music. When you start studying a new language, you will never start by learning random words and guessing how you put them together (a lingual equivalent to individual interval training). Classes begin with basic vocabulary and basic grammar. This creates a foundation which the student can build on. With the foundation, the student can’t fail, they still succeed eventually, it’s simply a matter of time. Without that foundation, the student is bound to fail. Ear training is no different. Without the foundation, you can’t get very far, but once you’ve built it, you can’t fail.
So what’s the foundation?
The foundation is tonality. Almost all music is tonal. Our ears search for tonality in music automatically, trying to find the strong tone in any collection of tones. As a result of this, the relationship between any one note and the tonic in a piece of music is very strong. Not only is it strong, but it’s largely constant. Many pieces of music don’t modulate frequently, so the relationship to the tonic will not change every bar or two. This means that if you can use the relationship between a note and the tonic to identify it, you are using a strong and stable relationship. This makes it very easy to recognise notes very quickly and very accurately.
How can I do this?
Outline a tonal centre. Play a perfect cadence, or a major scale will also do it. Once you have that tonal centre in your ear, play any single scale degree (any note from the major/minor scale that corresponds with the key centre) and listen to the way that it sounds in relation to the tonic chord. Feel free to restate the tonic chord as well while you play the ‘target scale degree’. While you play it, listen for the way that it resonates in relation to the tonic chord, and sing it as well.
You can change key and play around with the exercise as much as you like, but focus on just one scale degree until you start to feel familiar with it. If you spend 15 minutes a day on this exercise, it should take only a few days to develop some familiarity with your first scale degree.
When you do start to feel familiar with this scale degree, move on to another one. Repeat until you’ve completed it with all seven diatonic scale degrees. There are a lot of major pieces of music that have been created, and now you’re able to recognise the notes that make up the foundation of all of them.
The Foundation is Complete, Time to Build!
Now that you’ve got your foundation, you’re ready for the next step. Speeding up. This is also similar to learning a new language. There are many students who learn to read, write and speak well, but are unable to have a fluid conversation, for one reason. They’re unable to think fast enough to keep up. And when you’re talking with another person, it’s just like when you’re playing/listening to music - you need to be able to work fast.
So, in this next phase, all you have to do is speed everything up. Use the same exercise as before, but start combining the scale degrees into chords or short melodies of three or four notes. Think of every combination of notes as a different ‘sound’. So learn to hear each diatonic chord, and any combination of two, three or four scale degrees. This may sound like a lot of material, but as you work through it, it will become faster and faster, and you’ll soon be plugging small holes rather than filling in huge gaps.
Additionally, start practicing with real music. Put a recording on and try to work out short passages. Slow it down or stop frequently, and sing each part back so you can hear it at a tempo slow enough, and see how you go. If you can’t work something out, no worries, analyze the passage and add those chords/melodies to your practice. Alternatively, try the same process backwards - take a piece of written music that you don’t know and try to sight-sing it. This is an essential exercise that will help you to improve your speed and accuracy.
If you keep at these exercises, music will start to open up for your ears, because you’ll be able to recognise everything fast enough to keep up with any music. This is when the penny will drop. You’ll be able to play, write and transcribe music effortlessly by ear, and the way that you play will quickly transform. I guarantee you’ll feel liberated, and you’ll start to wonder how you ever played music before.
Scott Edwards is a professional saxophonist and music educator, and the founder of EarTrainingHQ.com. EarTrainingHQ.com provides musicians with a complete set of lessons and exercises that allows them to develop fast and accurate relative pitch.
Check out EarTrainingHQ.com.