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…

If you’ve been following the series so far, you’ll have learned how music can affect babies even before birth, the benefits of lullabies for young children and how early exposure to music can help in a child’s development.

We’ve developed a set of special music tracks to help introduce young ears to different musical sounds and to soothe you and your child into a peaceful, relaxing calm.

We’re making these tracks available for free! You can choose to listen to them online using the player provided, or download them for your computer (or MP3 player) by right-clicking the track title and choosing “Save As”. Click the image below to listen now:

Try these free ear training MP3s to relax both parent and child

The tracks were specially composed by series author Sabrina Peña Young to be suitable for young ears and peaceful times.

Remember:

• Keep the volume at a moderate level so as not to stress your child’s ears.
• Try to be aware of your baby’s reactions to the different music.
• Sing along in a slow quiet voice to soothe your child.
• Rock your baby in time with the music to encourage rhythmic awareness.
• With slightly older children, encourage them to play or dance along.

If you enjoy the music, please share it with your friends.

We’d love to hear what you think of these new tracks – you can leave a comment below or come discuss them in our forums!

Guitar tone is one of the most complex things most guitarists will have to deal with. There are plenty of guitarists that want to look at a guitar and make a blanket assumption about the sound (or ‘tone’) it produces.

The truth is that the amp and settings are always more important than the guitar itself for creating sound! Today we’re going to discuss the ways in which the guitar itself does affect the tone, and use ear training MP3s to demonstrate the sounds.

Before we dive in – how big an impact do the amp and settings really have? The following example is the same guitar and the same equipment, just with the settings altered. You’ll hear that there’s a lot of tone variation possible without changing the equipment itself.

Warning: Some of the tracks on this page have loud distorted sections – do not turn your volume up too high, especially if listening on headphones!

The strong effect amplifier settings can have

Electric Guitars

When it comes down to the guitar itself, the most noticeable difference is going to be the type of pickups on the guitar. Most other aspects of the tone of a guitar can be adjusted or compensated for with the right equalizer adjustments (see the Frequency Fundamentals course for more information), and those are subjective tone differences.

Electric Guitar - Listen for the different types of pickup

The 60Hz hum created by single coil pickups, on the other hand, can be a desirable or undesirable component to the tone. Click to read the rest…