Ear training for musicians

What is ear training?

Ear training is the process of developing your ability to recognise and correctly identify musical sounds such as pitches, intervals, chords, scales, melodies and rhythms.

Personal Ear Trainer for Windows PC

The ear training package which I personally have extensively used is a program called Personal Ear Trainer from Jana Software. I highly recommend this particular program; it's relatively inexpensive, is simple to install and run, and offers sufficient control over its parameters to enable you to work on ear training at any level you like, from absolute beginner to highly advanced.

Why bother with ear training?

For any musician who is serious about wanting to improve their musicianship ear training really is a must. The ability to play by ear, to learn new material and to jam with other musicians, as well as your overall understanding of music, are all greatly improved by ear training.

A musician with a well developed ear will learn new material by ear quickly and will not become lost when someone else in the band suddenly modulates to a different key or starts throwing in chord substitutions.

Practising your particular instrument is certainly an important part of improving your musicianship, but if you're really serious about progressing then part of your regular practice schedule should be given to training yourself to recognise more and more complex musical sounds by ear alone.

Methods for ear training

One way of working on ear training is to work with another musician and each take turns in playing intervals, chords, scales, melodies, and rhythms, with the listener attempting to identify what has just been played in a blind test. This method has the disadvantage that it is really rather boring for the musician who is simply playing random intervals, chords, scales, melodies, and rhythms.

Another method of ear training is to record yourself playing various random intervals, chords, scales, melodies, and rhythms. When you have enough of them recorded you can then randomly play them back and attempt to identify what is being played.

In order for this to work though you need the test to be a test of your ability to identify musical sounds by ear alone, and not a test of memory. The test will not be truly random as when you do correctly identify what you have just played back on the tape there is a possibility that you are simply remembering what you played when you recorded it, and not truly identifying it by ear alone.

The ideal method of ear training

The ideal method of ear training involves using a software package, for obvious reasons; computers excel at generating random sequences within specified parameters, which is precisely what you need to be happening with any ear training method. Plus of course computers never get bored with performing repetitive tasks.

Try it now!

You can download a fully functional and free trial version of Personal Ear Trainer here.

To learn more about Personal Ear Trainer before you decide whether to download the free trial program follow this link.