by Disc Makers
November 6, 2009
In the last lesson we covered a few different strategies for starting to train your ears. This included singing with your instrument, singing over a drone, and singing intervals in all the keys. Now we’re going to take it a few steps further and work to really develop our ears ability to pick out notes and relationships. Remember that these exercises take time – developing your ears is a long process. I would practice the exercises from the first lesson and this lesson over the next several months and you’ll start to see development. It’s not a forced thing, more of a gradual opening of your ears. Read more…
by Disc Makers
November 2, 2009
An important part of every musician’s evolution is ear training. It’s a strange concept, but becoming an active and educated listener pays off in a huge way. First lets cover a few points about what ear training is and isn’t and then we’ll get to the exercises. Ear training is a broad term used to cover two aural developmental practices – perfect pitch and relative pitch. A common misconception we’ve got to dispel right away, perfect pitch is learnable, but your expectations need to be reasonable. Learned perfect pitch is a very subtle thing. It’s not that you suddenly can call out every note in every tune; rather it gives you a deeper perception of music. The best analogy is to think of describing different shades of color to people. Relative pitch is equally important (and more-so for certain types of playing) and is the art of hearing the relationships between tones even if you don’t know the exact note e.g. minor third, descending diatonic scale, etc. This is also learnable with practice. Read more…
