Ear Training Like a Pro

Today let’s talk about a practice skill that is often underutilized and overdramatized: ear training. Many musicians are intimidated when it comes to developing their sense of inner pitch, so they avoid including it in their daily practicing. But ear training does not have to be difficult or scary. Let’s talk about why it is helpful for your overall musicianship and how you can start training your inner ear today.

What is Ear Training?

Also known as aural skills, ear training is a listening aspect of musicianship where you learn how to identify music solely from hearing it. Basically, it’s how you train your brain to recognize notes, rhythms, and harmonies – the building blocks of music – and then put those all together to understand the music as a whole.

Benefits of Aural Skills

Understanding your music is the key to a successful performance (or practice or composition session or anything related to your own music). The more you train your ear, the easier it is to understand your music, which will make you a better musician.

Here are some other ways aural skills can benefit you:

Improved musicality
Better compositional skills
The ability to transpose
Recognize and transcribe chords and melodies
Greater ability to improvise

How to Train Your Ear

Here are 3 ways you can implement ear training into your daily practice routine:

1. Learn how to identify chords and intervals.

The basics of developing a good inner ear depend on how familiar you are with the building blocks of music.

Because melodies and themes are made up of intervals played one after the other, it’s important to be able to recognize those intervals. And because chords make up the foundation for the harmonies in your music, understanding what those chords sound like (and feel like) can greatly improve your sense of pitch. Here are a few ideas of how you can learn to identify chords and intervals:

Play an interval and memorize how it sounds. Practice identifying it.
Sing the intervals! It seems a little silly at first, but I promise it solidifies what you have learned and greatly improves your inner ear.
Learn about how various intervals create chords. (Would you be interested in a blog post about this?)
Play a chord and memorize how it sounds. Practice identifying it.

2. Study your music.

Since you are probably already learning music (presumably music that has some form of melodic sequence), it is easy to implement ear training by studying what you are currently practicing. Here are some ways to do that:

Identify the intervals between the notes in the melody.
Identify the chords in the harmonies.
Sing the melody without any help from your instrument.
“Practice” the music away from your instrument by reading through it with just your mind. Sing the melody/intervals.

3. Use an online application.

Sometimes ear training can be overwhelming to do without any outside guidance, so there are many apps you can use (online or on your phone) to help you improve your aural skills. Here are just a few of my favorite free ones:

Toned Ear helps you practice identifying intervals, chords, scales, and more.
Theta Music Trainer has games and courses you can take to train your ear. It requires a free account so you can keep track of your progress.
MusicTheory.net has exercises in note identification, staff construction, music theory lessons, and much more.

For more apps, check out this list here. And for even more tips on ear training (and improving your practice in general), download my free ebook:

P.S. If you would like me to write more about anything I mentioned in this post, let me know!