How To Hear Notes Before You Play Them
By Dylan Andrews
Aural skills are crucial to songwriting, transcribing, composing, and especially improvising as guitar players.
It's most important when improvising because time is against you.
You only have one chance to get it right.
But if you don’t know how your guitar will sound before you play, each note is a gamble.
The good news is that training your ear to do this is easier than you think.
Let's say you analyzed every melody ever written.
If you chose any given note within that melody, the chance of the following note being just one pitch higher or lower is 60%.
This means that if you can hear the following note higher or lower from where you play, you will be 60% of the way there!
To train your ear to do this, follow these four simple steps.
Step 1: Tune your guitar.
Do not skip this step!
You will incorrectly train your ear if your guitar is out of tune. This wouldn’t just keep you from improving your aural skills; it would worsen them.
Step 2: Play and sing the scale fragment below, ascending and descending.
As you play, make sure you sing each scale degree. This starts on the 7th interval, so as you play the scale, sing: 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1.
Step 3: Play any note from the scale above and sing the following note higher.
After you sing it, play the correct note on the guitar to ensure you're right. If it’s incorrect, sing the correct pitch and try again.
Step 4: Repeat steps 1-3 but sing the next pitch below instead of above.
These steps will train your ear quickly, but this still only covers 60%.
40% of the time, the next note that is played is not the next pitch higher or lower in the scale.
To train the other 40%, follow the step above.
But instead of singing the next note of the scale, sing two notes up or down.
Then three.
Then four, and so on.
Continue to practice this consistently, and you will be on your way to having excellent aural skills.
To get more help with your ear training, I invite you to join my online ear training course. This is an online ear training course that will teach you the most powerful ear training exercises so you can learn fast and have more fun playing the guitar.