Guitar teacher and EasyEarTraining.com forum regular Bradley Mavin got in touch with us lately to share a great teaching exercise he’s found useful for developing his student’s ears – and his own! Being the generous soul he is, he’s given us a downloadable pack of tracks to put up here on the site. Read on for more information and to download the MP3s for yourself.

Guest author: Bradley Mavin

A DIY Approach: Develop your own ear training exercises

When I started playing guitar I had friends that were gifted with great ears. One friend did not know how he had this gift, but he could tell me the pitches of a buzzer on a shop door. He could write down the correct voicing of any chord played and perform a song in the correct key he heard on the radio over a week ago.

Another friend couldn’t tell me the names of the notes on the fretboard, but he could hear an E7#9 and label it (correctly) as a Jimi Hendrix chord. He could work out by ear and remember forty songs in one day!

They both amazed me with their hearing ability. I used to struggle with working out simple tunes and had trouble trying to tune my own guitar. I used to sit for hours trying to develop my ear. Sometimes I thought that it wasn’t for me and would never hear what I needed to be a great musician.

No one had the time to sit with me every day and play notes, intervals or chords. In those days we didn’t have the Internet, computer software, iPhones or the luxury of burning CDs.

What I did have was a tape recorder and a lot of patience.

I would record myself playing random notes with a guitar and leave a few seconds before I would play another note. I would fill up a 45-minute side with notes, intervals and different types of chords. The next week I would go back and try to work them out by ear. I started simple and only played the open strings or notes that were only in the first four frets. If it was too difficult I would stick to recording a smaller number of notes til I could reliably find the right one, then gradually increase the range of notes included.

I tried to hurry the process but realized that didn’t help. I would just have to take it slow. It was frustrating playing notes into a tape recorder. I thought it was wasting my time and I wanted a quicker way. I didn’t realize at the time, but I was actually ‘meditating’ with those notes.

My ear was actually learning the sounds through repetition.

Modern ear training

Now living in a world full of technology it is easier to make up ear training tests yourself. We have the luxury of creating playlists full of MP3s with the ‘shuffle’ feature as our best friend. This is the easier way that I needed back when I was recording examples onto tapes.

Today I want to share a note-finding exercise with you. As a guitarist I have found this exercise to be the most important part of my daily routine. Click to read the rest…

As I touched on in the first post on this subject, there are a wide variety of ideas about how absolute pitch works. Why do some people ‘just have it’? If you’re not born with it, how can you develop it? Why do some people hear real differences in a C and a D, and others not?

In this post I want to discuss some of the ideas around how absolute pitch works, and highlight what I thought was particularly promising in the forum post on absolute pitch training I mentioned before.

Conflicting theories

If you look at training courses for absolute (or “perfect”) pitch, you’ll find a lot of conflicting explanations of what makes the ear hear different pitches differently. Anything from the relative strength of the harmonics, to timbral clues (like the start and end of notes), to an inexplicable ‘character’ that you must try to hear through very deep listening.

My educational background is scientific and I’m a big fan of Occam’s Razor – so it’s probably no surprise that I tend to subscribe to the more basic explanation, one grounded in fundamental science: Click to read the rest…

My last post featured a forum thread about training absolute pitch by meditating on single tones. Thinking some more about learning absolute pitch and this particular ‘experiment’, I realised there were three reasons it appealed to me:

1. The do-it-yourself mentality.
2. The desire to work with and learn from other people.
3. The ‘purity’ of the training.

These are all fundamental parts of a good sustainable ear training routine, and the 21st century brings new meaning to each of them. I’m going to talk about the first two in more detail below, and cover the third in a separate post on Monday.

Do it yourself

This site was started to explore the notion that Click to read the rest…