It’s important to find time for ear training – regular practice is essential to develop and maintain your skills. Setting aside time for focused training is vital, but there are a lot of other ways to keep your training progressing…

Whatever area of ear training you’re focused on, you’ll find there are recommended exercises and training techniques for you to concentrate on and repeat, in order to develop new hearing skills. In this kind of concentrated practice, you’re often going through a process of:

1. Familiarisation and training
2. Testing yourself
3. Checking your answers, to reinforce correct instincts and squash the bad ones.

This type of training is key at the beginning, as you need a strong basis to work from when approaching a new area. For example, if you want to train audio EQ, it’s important to start by learning the standard frequency bands and getting a sense of their sounds. Likewise, somebody just starting off with interval training should spend some time learning the names of the intervals, memorising their order, and getting to know their characteristic sounds.

(Click here for more about ear training and how we learn)

Click to read the rest…

You sit slightly confused in your “Sight Singing and Ear Training” class. The music teacher insists that by the end of the class you will be able to transcribe Mozart after three listenings, sing complicated atonal melodies at sight, and figure out any harmonic jazz progression through osmosis. You eye the door, looking for an easy escape. You can see why other musicians nicknamed this class “Sight Screaming and Ear Trauma.“

Before you bolt for the door and opt for a less musical vocation like professional wedding florist, realize that like learning the alphabet before you learn how to read and write, you need to learn a few music basics before you can accomplish the hurdles of ear training.

Click to read the rest…