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Ear Training means learning to recognize aspects of music by hearing alone. With this skill, you can one day play along with a song simply by listening to it! Let's look at how we can get started.
Tonedear.com is an excellent (and free!) ear training tool. It should have everything you need to prepare yourself for learning real songs by ear.
Before we get started, remember to be patient with yourself. Training your ear is not something that happens overnight. It needs to be worked at over time, and for most of us there will be challenges along the way.
The first step is to tackle Intervals.
At first, stick to just the Major 3rd, Perfect 5th and Octave intervals. Over time, you can add in the other notes of the Major Scale, and then finally progress to the full range of intervals.
Using your Solfege, and learning to attach an emotion or idea to the sound of each interval can be really helpful here.
Also, do try listening to the intervals in descending format as well!
When you get to the point that you're getting the majority of the interval questions correct, you're ready to incorporate the next step, assuming you already know your Triads.
Don't stop doing your Interval training entirely! Just mix this one in, as well.
To start with, you want to leave the settings as is, without adding additional chord types or inversions.
This will introduce you to learning to hear the Major, Minor, Augmented, and Diminished triads!
Most people have trouble telling apart Dim and Aug at first.Â
When you're ready, you can incorporate the Suspended Triads as well, and eventually even the 7th chords covered on the Building A Chord page. (Maj7, Min7, and Dom7)
While the "Hear Individual Notes" function is very useful, do your best not to rely on it too much. The end goal is to be able to recognize the chord when played all at once!
If you get to the point that you're very accurate identifying the intervals, and you can tell apart at least the most commonly used chords in root form AND their inversions, those being:
Major Triad
Minor Triad
Sus2 Triad
Sus4 Triad
Diminished Triad
Augmented Triad
Dominant 7th Chord
Major 7th Chord
Minor 7th Chord
You're doing amazing. Getting to that point could be a long process! You will now be well equipped to use your knowledge to interpret songs by ear.
In fact, I recommend putting your ear to the test much sooner than that. Listen to songs you want to learn, try playing along to them on your guitar. See if you can work them out. Sometimes, you will need to go chord by chord, or note by note. It might seem tough, but there's only one way to get better at it, so don't give up!
You can do all the practice you want, but you need to actually spend time learning songs by ear, if that's a skill that's important to you.
Now that you understand how to go about training your ear, make it a regular part of your training routine. How much of your practice time you want to dedicate to it is up to you, but there's very few musicians that won't find it benefits them to do, so I recommend you put a little time into it at least once a week, as a bare minimum.
A few minutes a day goes a long way, if you're consistent.
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