Oct 28

4 key areas where ear training will make you into a better musician

When I started playing music, I kept hearing that ear training was important. But I have to admit, it was never entirely clear why that was. I’d practice recognising chords and intervals for example, but I didn’t really understand how that would help me to play better music. What I found out is that ear training is about much more than recognising intervals in an app. When done right, it can help you in many areas of your musical journey. Let’s check them out!

With YouTube, sheet music, and guitar tab sites, it’s become super easy to find out how to play almost any song you like. Especially for beginners, this is super convenient. However, once you get beyond that beginner stage, relying on these resources can lead you to neglect a super important skill: learning songs by ear.

Learning songs by ear means you figure out the melodies and chords of a track using nothing but your ears and your instrument. I know it seems daunting to many, but it simply requires practice. And once you get better at it, you’ll have such a useful skill in your ‘toolbelt’. Imagine: instead of googling the chords to a song you can simply figure out the chords as you play along to the song.

There are many advantages to this. For one, many (online) resources have mistakes in them. And for a lot of music, there isn’t any sheet music available. What if you want to learn some obscure b-side from your favourite band? Or want to jam on a theme from a movie or video game? The ability to work out the music by ear is the way to go.

When you’re first starting out, it’ll take quite some time to figure out chords and melodies by ear. But as you get more experienced, you’ll find that your intuitive sense of what your hands need to do to get a certain sound out of your instrument will develop. And that will speed up the process significantly, to the point where having to google something seems like way too much work. What’s great about this, is that it’s a self reinforcing effect. The more songs you learn by ear, the easier it gets, and the more you want to do it!

Wondering how you’d approach figuring out an entire song by ear? Check out this video:

When many guitarists start with improvisation they learn a scale on the fretboard (often the ‘blues box’) to get going. This approach does get you up and running quickly and start jamming with friends or backing tracks. It often makes improvising seem less overwhelming. But after a while, many players find their playing to sound robotic or like they’re just running up and down a scale. This usually has the same cause: these players are just ‘pressing buttons’ on the fretboard, instead of playing from their musical imagination. The missing ingredient is, once again, ear training. With a pair of trained ears, you can transform a scale into a musical story. It allows you to imagine a melody in your mind and translate that into what your hands need to do. In short, ear training allows your musical imagination to come into play and inject your soloing with your innate musicality and creativity.

Ear training helps with improvisation, but it also helps with musical composition. Because in a way, composing is ‘slow improvising’, and improvising is ‘real-time composing’. So, what ear training does is put your musical imagination in the driver’s seat when you’re writing music

Of course, sometimes when we write music, it’s fun to be inspired by randomness as well. For example, you might use an alternate tuning or try an instrument you don’t know well and ‘randomly’ place your fingers to see what sound you get. But usually this is only the starting point in the composition process. At some point, you want to be more deliberate and engage your musical intuition. You want to imagine what should come next, and then be able to reproduce that on your instrument. And that’s what ear training helps you do.

Music theory and ear training are often treated as separate subjects. But they should go hand in hand. Put simply, theory is about what something is called, and ear training is about what it sounds like. Like two sides of the same coin, they’re both about the exact same thing.

Now, many people find music theory to be a little dry when they first learn it. But others find it absolutely fascinating and can’t wait to learn more. The difference? For the latter group, theory is giving a label to a sound they’re already familiar with. It helps them make sense of experiences they’ve already had. Compare it to this. Learning theory without having that sound in your mind is like studying the map of a city you’ve never visited before. It might not be entirely useless, but it’s much, much easier and more interesting to do once you’ve spent a few days in town. By combining theory with a bit of ear training, it makes everything you learn more relevant and more useful.