Ear training question
- Thread starter Kat the metalhead
- Start date
My ear is very much developed from experience really. What you can try to do is start with a melody you hear in you head(vocal melody of a song you know it any random melody) and try to play it on your guitar. It's tedious at first but a really good what to train your ear. Melodies are also easier than chords so that's a good jump off point.
I've been working on my ear a bit more lately and found that the best practice I've gotten is listening to a song that I 100% know how it goes from start to finish. I can sing the parts out in my head due to listening to them so much. For me a band that I can sing along to for a lot of their songs is Gojira. From Mars to Sirius to Magma I can sing out quite a few songs from start to finish and I don't have to think very hard about what comes next. I know how it sounds, I know what tuning the song is in, and I know how the song progresses. This makes it a lot easier to figure out how to learn the song/riff by ear since you have the song memorized from listening to it over and over. Then I went through and watched a live concert and played along with them and tried my best to figure out what they were playing by pausing somewhat frequently. Some parts are trickier and with those take more time. Stranded vs Heaviest Matter of the Universe are two different songs. Stranded is more groovy power chord based while Heaviest Matter involves a lot of tremolo picking, pick slides, and other techniques that when trying to decipher with a newer ear has been tough. I've also found that knowing how to play a song or two from the band before hand can help with learning their other songs by ear since you can recognize some of the different techniques and tricks they use. Anyway my recommendation is to find a song that you know by heart that is a bit groovier and maybe more power chord based like say Stranded. It's power chords galore. From there take say a 5 second snippet of the song and see if you can figure out what is being played and play it back. Then do the next snippet. Do this 3-4 times and see if you can play the whole 20-25 seconds of the song you just figured out. Sorry I know I rambled on a bit, I'm just trying to best explain the way I've been working on it the last few weeks. It's especially tedious in the beginning but once your ears start getting better at figuring these things out you'll be speeding through songs in no time. I hope this helps!
I've said it a couple times before and I'm sure I'll keep saying it in the future- one of the smartest things I ever did was make a list of the melodies that I like the most and are most strongly burned into my head and then spent some time figuring them out. For me it was something that got easier very quickly, like it went from feeling almost impossible to being comfortable in about a week. Another thing that helped was playing probably millions of in-tune notes. I realize that one isn't very helpful advice, but that's what happened.
I think I talk about this in one of the lessons. Pick out some melodies that really KNOW. It can be anything, but "classic stuff" tends to work better; Star Wars Theme, Somewhere Over The Rainbow, etc. Rock melodies tend to be bland and linear.
Try to play them cold. Then spend some time working them out. This will help get your ear connected to your fingers.
Also - spend time identifying intervals; a 5th, a 4th, a Major 3rd, a minor 3rd, a b5, etc. There are apps that generate random intervals. You guess and then it gives you the correct answer.
You probably have a bit of ear training under your belt right now. If I played a D chord, you could probably identify the next chord if I played a G. It's just a matter of expanding on that and being able to identify more difficult changes - like D to Bb.
Hope that helps.
Cheers!
pg
Try to play them cold. Then spend some time working them out. This will help get your ear connected to your fingers.
Also - spend time identifying intervals; a 5th, a 4th, a Major 3rd, a minor 3rd, a b5, etc. There are apps that generate random intervals. You guess and then it gives you the correct answer.
You probably have a bit of ear training under your belt right now. If I played a D chord, you could probably identify the next chord if I played a G. It's just a matter of expanding on that and being able to identify more difficult changes - like D to Bb.
Hope that helps.
Cheers!
pg
