Incorporating guitar ear training into your practice is essential to fully appreciate the nuances of listening to and playing your instrument. A well-trained ear enhances your sense of pitch and rhythm, enables you to learn new songs without having to rely on sheet music or tabs, and allows you to play with greater accuracy and expression. With a good ear, you'll anticipate chord changes and navigate melodies effortlessly, making your improvisations more fluid and coherent. Additionally, ear training allows you to quickly recognize when your guitar is out of tune and collaborate more effectively with other musicians.
Here, we discuss the methods you should use to train your ears, with six useful tips and accompanying videos.
The Language of Ear Training
Guitar practice is crucial for skills training, muscle memory, creativity, and expression, but there’s another instrument that’s essential to your guitar-playing development—your ears! When correctly applied, you'll find that guitar ear training is one of the most rewarding exercises you can do to deepen your understanding of your instrument, and music in general.
There are countless reasons why guitar ear training should become a necessary part of your practice routine. Imagine how amazing it would be to figure out how to play a song by ear without needing to refer to guitar tabs or chord charts. Picture rehearsing with friends and effortlessly complementing their playing with your own riffs, melodies, and solos. Or think about writing a song knowing that you can instantly play the chord change that you’re hearing in your head.
Music and language are closely related forms of human expression. Indeed, the process of learning music is similar to acquiring a new language. Both involve recognizing and understanding patterns, relying on our memory and recall abilities, and pursuing creativity and improvisation through the art of listening, imitation, and practice.
Ultimately, ear training is an indispensable tool in your arsenal for unlocking your guitar-playing potential. To get started, here are six essential ear training tips:
Tip 1: Play What You Hear
When you first pick up a guitar, it's natural to want to dive straight into learning how to play along to your favorite tunes. If you've ever done that, congratulations – you're already developing a crucial ear training skill. While it might feel daunting initially, playing along to recordings is an excellent way to enhance your ability to recognize pitches, intervals, and chords.
Beyond the immediate enjoyment and satisfaction of learning a beloved song, playing along to them offers numerous subconscious benefits. You'll not only improve your ear for recognizing chords, progressions, and melodies, but you'll absorb various techniques and styles that help expand your guitar-playing repertoire.
By playing what you hear, not only will your technique improve, but you’ll slowly learn to understand song structures, transitions, and dynamics. Playing entire songs or even sets of songs will also help you to build your physical stamina and endurance - incredibly useful for playing in live situations or gigs.
You may have heard of something called ‘muscle memory’—the process by which the brain collaborates with your body to perform tasks automatically. This also applies to ‘musical memory.’ Playing what you hear strengthens the connection between your head and your hands, enhancing your ability to intuitively remember melodies, harmonies, and rhythms so you can improvise with confidence and spontaneity.
Although it will naturally take a while for you to figure out a melody or song by ear, with sufficient practice you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can progress. In the following YouTube video, leading guitar teacher Justin Sandercoe explains the importance of playing what you hear alongside some effective ear training exercise:
Tip 2: Study Interval Recognition
Let's begin by defining interval recognition. In essence, it's the ability to discern the pitch distance between two musical notes. Each interval possesses a distinct sound that musicians learn to identify by ear, and mastering this skill not only aids in understanding and reproducing melodies, harmonies, and chords, but also makes learning new music easier and enhances your improvisational abilities.
Classified by their size and quality, intervals are measured in semitones (steps) on the musical scale and can either be ascending (moving up in pitch) or descending (moving down in pitch). Common intervals include major and minor seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths, and octaves. Delving deeper, the interval between C and E is called a major third, while the interval between G and D is a perfect fifth.
Fundamental in music theory and a crucial part of ear training, recognizing intervals by ear offers several benefits for guitarists. First, it helps you develop a more accurate sense of pitch, making it easier to play and sing in tune. It also enhances your ability to remember and reproduce melodies and harmonies, simplifying the process of learning and recalling music.
With a deeper understanding of interval recognition, you'll enhance your grasp of chord construction and be able to navigate the fretboard more effectively. Interval recognition also has a practical side; it simplifies transcribing music by ear and sharpens your sight-reading abilities, enabling you to quickly identify and play intervals and patterns in written music.
Look no further than this comprehensive video guide by the Joe Luegers Music Academy on interval recognition and its crucial role in ear training:
Tip 3: Improvise
Improvisation is an excellent way to boost your ear training and overall musicianship for many reasons. The most immediate benefit is that, instead of merely replicating notes from a recording, you're crafting your own interpretations. When improvising, you can choose to create from scratch or listen attentively and respond to a backing track – two activities that instantly sharpen your ability to recognize and respond to chord changes, rhythms, and dynamics.
By improvising over different chord progressions, you become more familiar with how chords relate to each other and learn how to navigate through them melodically. This practice not only improves your rhythmic accuracy and ability to play guitar in time, but makes it much easier to internalize the various scales and modes.
Through improvisation, you'll gain the ability to recognize and anticipate intervals between notes, develop a better sense of pitch, and be better equipped to create your own improvised guitar melodies or refrains on the spot.
Improvisation doesn't have to be intimidating—the goal is to freely express your musical ideas without being constrained by sheet music or strict rules. By connecting your mind and hands in this manner, you'll subconsciously strengthen the link between your musical imagination and fingers. This creative freedom can be immensely rewarding and enjoyable, and with sufficient practice, there's no reason why you can't make rapid progress.
To help you on your journey, the following YouTube video by LickNRiff demonstrates a concise, improvisation-based guitar ear training exercise:
Tip 4: Learn Chord Progressions
Complementary to improvisation, learning chord progressions is a valuable skill that will enhance your ability to identify and recognize different chords and better grasp the structure and harmony of songs. It also makes it easier to learn new songs since so many popular tunes share common chord progressions.
In essence, chord progressions are sequences of chords arranged in a specific order to establish the harmonic foundation of a song and shape its mood and movement. By practicing chord progressions and attentively listening to each chord, you'll gain insight into how they're used in songs and how they work together to create harmonies.
As previously mentioned, one of the key advantages of learning by ear is the ability to reproduce songs or progressions without relying on sheet music or tabs. Therefore, learning guitar chord progressions as an ear training exercise will enhance your musical memory and stimulate creativity in your improvisational experiments.
Ultimately, mastering chord progressions enables you to play a broader range of songs and styles by ear, which is particularly valuable for jam sessions and live performances. By enhancing your ability to communicate and collaborate with other musicians, you’ll be better positioned to quickly grasp what they're playing and seamlessly join in.
But first you’ll need to practice! Check out this video by YourGuitarSage, demonstrating three tips for learning chord progressions by ear:
Tip 5: Sing Scales
It might not be immediately obvious, but singing scales is a great way to improve your pitch recognition and overall ear training. This practice allows you to internalize the process of identifying chord progressions and ingrain their sound deeply in your mind to help you play by ear and improvise.
By vocalizing notes, you reinforce your understanding of intervals and the relationships between notes in each scale. This can help with intonation - the level to which each note is tuned relative to a desired pitch or musical scale. For guitar players, this will aid your ability to grasp the accuracy of the pitch produced by each note along the entire neck of the guitar’s fretboard.
Singing scales is also a fantastic way to engage multiple senses simultaneously. You get to hear the sound of the scale (aural), see its position on the fretboard (visual), feel it under your fingers (tactile), and understand the theoretical scale degree – the number in the scale.
This multi-sensory approach not only aids in memorizing the scales, but also makes it easier to recall and apply these techniques. By incorporating scale singing into your guitar practice routines, you’ll develop a deeper sense of musical expression and phrasing, strengthening the connection between your voice and instrument.
This short but fun video by Redlight Blue explains how singing is such a complementary activity to guitar playing, and why it’s important for guitarists to make the most of their voice, irrespective of how good a vocalist they are.
Tip 6: Transcribe Guitar Solos
Another top ear training exercise is to choose a guitar solo from a song you love and transcribe it. Transcribing guitar solos not only improves your ear training, but exposes you to new techniques and musical ideas, making it a valuable exercise for any guitarist.
Transcription can be performed in two ways, by listening to a recorded guitar solo and writing down the notes, rhythms, and techniques being played, or by playing the solo multiple times by ear, focusing on different aspects of the recording each time while paying attention to the overall structure, the notes being played, and the rhythm.
When it comes to note writing, you'll need to use standard notation or tablature (tab) to capture what you hear. Tablature is often more accessible for guitarists as it directly represents the strings and frets to be played.
Remember that some of your favorite solos and riffs are likely performed by exceptionally skilled guitarists, which is precisely why transcribing solos can be such an educational, challenging, and rewarding task. However, it's wise to start with something manageable before moving on to more complex solos.
While transcribing guitar solos might seem daunting at first, persistence and practice will make it one of the most effective ways to enhance your musical ear and guitar skills. Check out this video by Lessonface for a brief guide to transcribing solos:
We hope this guide has highlighted the importance of guitar ear training and why it can be such a valuable tool at any stage of your journey to becoming a better guitar player and musician. The more you practice, the more you’ll improve, but once you develop the habit of learning riffs, melodies, and solos by ear, it will become a valuable lifelong skill.
