What is ear training?

Ear training is a funny thing - most people seem to think it is about training our actual ears to do all the work.

Most people are confused by this and therefore think that ear training is a very mysterious thing - how can my ears figure out a song?

But it’s not really about the ears at all!

Of course your ears are doing the listening - but what’s really happening is our brain is thinking more about what we hear.

Your ears don’t all of a sudden hear more than they heard before, or hear sounds with more specificity.

So the good news is - your ears will continue doing the same thing they’ve always done - and that is to take in frequencies and carry the information to the brain.

In order to ‘play by ear’, we’re actually learning to play by brain!

We are taking the information that our ears send us and deciphering that information in different ways.

Read on below or watch the video version [12 minutes]

What about solfege?

One of the parts of ear-training is to decipher where notes are in relation to each other - this is called ‘relative pitch’ and is super important to playing by ear.

This is where most ear-training programs will focus - it is why the great technique ‘solfege’ is used (think The Sound of Music ‘Doe a Deer’ song, lyrics and all).

This trains our ear to recognise intervals - which is handy because there are 12 of them.

And we not only need to know how to identify intervals going up, but also going down!

What a relief that Solfege helps with that specific part of training the ear!

However…

There is much more required in playing by ear - which you would have gathered if you’ve already learned solfege, but still can’t figure out a song!

How does ear-training help me to play by ear?

Playing by ear isn’t just about intervals of separate notes going up or down, that only deals with the pitches in the melody - and that’s not a whole song!

We also need to be able to:

recognise pitches that are played together - the chords!
recognise rhythms - so that we can play melodies and riffs faithfully without needing notation.
recognise patterns - without it we’d need to figure out hundreds, maybe thousands of notes within a song instead of simply identifying patterns and remembering them.
recognise chord progressions - cutting down the workload of chord-by-chord analysis and making the process even faster!

So if you have learned solfege in the past, or if you’ve heard about it and thought that was the complete path to playing by ear …

I’m here to tell you that though it is important, solfege and learning to sing & identify intervals is only the beginning.

How do I strengthen my ear?

In order to strengthen your ability to hear & identify all those elements, you need to train.

As with any sort of training, this is about repetitive exercises that get gradually more difficult over time.

Another important aspect of your ear training is to step outside of the repetitive exercises and use your listening skills in a real-life situation - ie, figuring out a song (or parts of it).

Again this correlates with any physical training of the muscles, we can’t simply repeat stuff all the time or our muscles will become too accustomed to those exercises and our progress will stagnate.

We need to get out of our comfort zone and go do a real-life activity that will challenge our body in different ways - it’s the same with our ears.

Is ear-training hard?

If you were to tackle everything in one go then yes it would be difficult. However, that’s not how we train.

We don’t walk into the gym and start lifting the heaviest weight! We start with the weight that is almost too easy that we wonder why we’re bothering with it…

You get used to the movement, get your technique right - and then you start gradually upping the weights you lift.

Think of ear-training in the same way. You start with something simple and gradually get more difficult - while making sure to do real-life practical exercises every so often (like learning songs by ear, or parts of songs).