Hello. My name is Matthew and I am a writer and guitarist from the United States.

I started delving seriously into music during college. I did start to play guitar in high school, but not to any serious point. I started to get serious training in the performance aspects of lead and rhythm guitar with Jimmy Kane. I also spent a great deal of time studying composition, music theory, and orchestration.

Most of my own ear training developed as part of learning to play guitar. The style of guitar I play has several techniques that require ear training to use. Constant repetition of training exercises also contributed to helping certain aspects of ear training sink in. There are also areas of ear training that seemed to develop quickly as I began composing songs.

I have primarily been trained by Jimmy Kane in playing guitar. He has taught me a great deal about the entire process of writing and playing music on the guitar. I have also received lessons from Luca Turilli of Rhapsody of Fire. This was particularly interesting because Rhapsody of Fire was one of my main influences to learn to play the guitar in the first place!

My articles will be influenced by my experience as a guitarist, and in some cases focus on areas of ear training that are unique to guitar. In addition, I would like to draw attention to areas of ear training that might differ from one type of musician to another.



No doubt all you guitar players out there are glad to hear we’ve another six-stringer on board! If you have any topics you particularly want to see covered, don’t be shy! Matthew’s diving straight in tomorrow, with an article on how to listen for broken chords, particularly played on guitar.

Over at Ultimate-Guitar.com, a neuroscience student is inviting people to try an informal experiment with him, to test a method of developing absolute pitch.

It’s an interesting approach. He’s using a recording of a pure tone of middle C (261.6Hz for you Frequency Fundamentals students!) to ‘meditate’ on. Click to read the rest…

Greetings Ear Trainers! My name is Nick and I am a musician and broadcast engineer.

My personal musical odyssey began at 14 when I started playing the guitar. It wasn’t long before a hobby became an obsession and I joined the first of a succession of bands. For me collaborating with other musicians and playing for an audience is what music is all about. Over the years I’ve played Indie, Soul, Country, Heavy Metal, Punk, Post Rock and everything in between.

I love the challenge of mastering new instruments. Along with guitar I play bass, mandolin and even dedicated some years to playing the drums which will be the focus of my first sequence of articles. At the moment my main musical outlet is playing bass in my band Dark Energy (www.darkenergyband.com)

I’ve been involved with radio since university and spent much of my career working for the BBC designing and building studio and production systems.
Though I’m a qualified broadcast engineer I haven’t had a formal musical education. I’m not the kind of person who is interested in theory for theory’s sake, but as a self taught working musician I’ve found time and time again that I hit a wall that can be overcome with theory and ear training.

In my articles I hope to provide tips and advice aimed at the self taught gigging, or recording musician. Ear training has helped me to transcribe and learn music faster, sing backing vocals at gigs with bad monitoring, and produce better sounding demos and I hope it can help you to do the same!