Introduction to Ear Training

Have you completed Open Your Ears Part I? If you haven’t done so, I want you to go ahead and complete that lesson before continuing with this lesson.

Now, many people with the gift of perfect pitch hear music in a manner akin to viewing visual colors with their eyes. They hear music notes in a “spectrum” where each different note represents a different color to them.

Let’s perform a quick drill to see if you can notice the differences between notes. I want you to pick up your guitar and play the 4th string chromatically from the open string to the 12th fret.

As you play through each of the 12 notes, try to listen deeply to each note. Do you notice something different about each individual note? If you do notice a nuance of difference that you can’t seem to place your hands on, you are on the right track.

Now, I want you to play through the 12 notes again. This time around, I am going to give you a hint. The F# note sounds bold and vibrant which makes it stand out from the other notes. As your ears develop, you will start to figure out things better and I will talk more about this in later lessons.

Ear Training Exercise 3

Let’s continue the journey towards “better” ears. Do you recall the exercise from the Open Your Eyes Part I where you play an open string and sing out the note to match the pitch? In this exercise, I’m going to make some modifications to the previous exercise.

Without looking at the fretboard, strike any open string at random and try naming the string that was struck (i.e. E,B,G,D,A,E ). If you want to, you can get your friend or sibling to help you out with this exercise.

It’s really quite simple, isn’t it? This exercise may be straightforward but it’s very effective. Once you can consistently recognize the different open strings, you had subtly develop your musical ear even without noticing it.

Ear Training Exercise 4

For this exercise, we would make use of music intervals to get your ears accustomed to relative pitch. I want you to play any Major 3rds / Minor 3rds harmonically (2 notes at the same time) on the guitar. Listen to the notes and try to differentiate the pitches of the 2 notes. Then, sing out the 2 notes starting from the lower note to the higher note.

Do this exercise all across the entire fretboard using different strings and I want you to practice these until you can recognize any 2 intervals correctly by singing them out.

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