How Not To Train Your Ear
By Dylan Andrews
Today, I will go through 3 common ways guitar players train their ear incorrectly.
My goal is to help you avoid wasting time with these common ear training mistakes so you can learn faster and have more fun playing guitar.
This first mistake guitar players make when practicing ear training is...
#1 Listening to notes in isolation
Most ear training exercises you find will tell you to train your ear to hear notes or intervals in isolation.
And it can be easy to start training your ear to do this.
This is why most musicians practice ear training this way.
The problem is music is never playing in isolation.
There is always another instrument, chords, or other melodies being played.
When you hear notes being played in isolation, it will have a specific sound and feel.
But when you hear it in music with different chords and rhythms being played, it will have a completely different sound.
For example, let's take a Perfect 4th in the key of C (this would be notes C to F).
When you play this on its own, it will have a certain sound.
But when you play these same notes over an Am chord and then an F chord, the feeling of the notes will change.
Therefore, training your ear to hear notes in isolation is just a waste of time.
You need to train your ear for actual music.
#2 Memorizing the sounds of intervals based on songs
This is very similar to listening to notes in isolation.
A common way of memorizing scale degrees is to relate them to songs.
For example,
A perfect 5th interval is often related to Star Wars.
And when you play a perfect 5th in isolation, it does sound like Star Wars.
But that is only if you play the notes in isolation and with the same rhythm.
Try this out for yourself.
Play a perfect 5th on the guitar in the key of C (this would be a C note and then a G note.)
Does it sound like Star Wars to you?
Most would say yes.
Now play it with a different rhythm over an A minor chord.
Sound different?
Relating the perfect 5th interval is Star Wars is pointless.
How often is a 5th interval played in isolation, with the same rhythm as Star War in a song?
Almost never.
It will no longer sound like Star Wars when you hear a perfect 5th being played in other situations with different chords and rhythms.
Training your ear to hear notes and intervals in isolation will not get you to the level you want.
Make sure you don’t practice ear training this way.
#3 Memorizing the sound of a particular chord or note
This is a big mistake guitar players make when practicing ear training. Trying to memorize the way a G chord sounds, then how an A note sounds, and so on would take a massive amount of time.
Doing this is referred to perfect pitch.
Perfect Pitch is the ability to listen to a piece of music and identify the exact notes and chords in a piece of music.
Unless you already have this natural ability, do not train your ear this way.
There are 12 notes, multiple octaves, and thousands of chords in music.
Do you really want to try to memorize them all?
A way better way to practice ear training is by using relative pitch.
Relative Pitch training your ear to identify chords and notes based on their relation to the root.
There are only 7 notes and chords in a major and minor key, and each one has a particular feeling and function no matter the key is.
So instead of trying to memorize the sound of thousands of chords, relative pitch requires you to only memorize seven.
For example, let's say we are in the key of C.
In the key of C, there are chords:
C Dm Em F G Am and B diminished. Instead of referring to these as notes, we can look at them as numbers:
1 2m 3m 4 5 6m 7 diminished.
No matter what key you are in, a 2m, 5, 6m, and every other chord will always sound the same.
Relative Pitch is a much faster and more effective way to practice ear training.
If you have trained your ear in these ways, it’s okay. Now you know, and you can start using more effective ear training exercises.
To get more help with your ear training, I invite you to join my online ear training course. This is the ultimate ear training for guitar course that doesn’t suck, isn’t boring and works every time.