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Ear training is a way to condition your ears to be able to recognize musical sounds. A well-trained ear knows what it is listening to. Someone with a well-trained ear can recognize the types of chords and scales that are being used on a song while they are listening to it !!
Plus, having a trained ear makes figuring out songs a whole lot easier. You'll find yourself being able to figure out most of a song just by playing along with it once !
Start by being able to identify a single note at a time. There are several ways you can exercise this ability, and you'll find yourself picking it up very quickly, so don't skip this step.
If you have a friend (a very patient friend), you can take turns playing notes at random and letting the other person match the note. It's best to slide up to the note at first, rather than taking random stabs at it. For instance, your friend plays a note at random (without even looking at the guitar), and while the note is playing, you try and slide up a single string to match that note. If it sounds too low or too high, go to a different string and try again. This will quickly become second nature to you, and it's well worth a small investment of your time.
If you don't have a cooperative friend, you can try to generate your own random notes with another instrument, such as a keyboard, flute, harmonica, or whatever you might have available. How about using your computer for this? If you go to any good freeware download site, they're sure to have some programs for ear training and these can be very helpful. See the bottom of this page for some further suggestions on this.
Another alternative which is a little more difficult is to whistle a note at random and try to slide up to it on the guitar. This may sound easy, but the problem most people have is that when they get close to the note on the guitar, they tend to alter the note they're whistling to match the guitar instead of the other way around. However, once you become good at finding single notes, you'll find that whistling really helps you identify notes. For instance, if you are trying to figure out a melody line and one of notes sounds off, you can whistle the melody to identify that note and find it easily.
You'll find yourself developing this ability in just a few days practice. It's not hard at all. It's just one of those things that most people don't even think about trying.
The next logical step is to try and figure out a simple melody by ear. Take any simple melody, like "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and try to whistle it, one note at a time, while you find the notes on the guitar, one at a time. Try this with other simple melodies.
Television commercials are a good source of simple melodies. While you're watching T.V., try to figure out some of those silly jingles they keep bombarding us with. Stick to single notes, for now.
Once you have good success with that, move on to more complex melodies. Try "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" or the national anthem.
If you run into trouble, take your time and use the whistling technique to help isolate individual notes. It's common for the ear to get confused with certain pitches which are closely related to the pitch you're looking for. Keep your focus. Listen harder.
When you find yourself comfortable with single note melody lines, it's time to start with intervals, triads, and full chords. By intervals, I mean two notes at a time. Triads are three notes at a time, and chords can be up to six notes (for a six string guitar).
As you might guess, the more notes you have to deal with, the more confusing it can get for your ear. Let's start with two notes at a time, also called intervals or double-stops.
The first interval you should be familiar with is an octave. Coincidentally, it's the easiest to learn because it's the same note. Let me explain: The notes repeat themselves in a regular pattern. If we start at A, we can go A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C... and so on. It repeats over and over. So, if we play an A and the next higher (or lower) A, we have an octave.
This is extremely useful and you should know all the octaves available on the guitar. The reason is that if you're playing something that uses an A, you can use other A's along with it to make the guitar sound bigger, fuller, fatter. This works great with chords, but also with solos. For instance, if you're playing a riff around an A, you could take the whole riff to a different octave of A and give the solo more interest.
You could also use the Wes Montgomery trick of taking a melody line and playing it in octaves instead of single notes. It sounds great. It's the same idea as having a guitar and bass playing the same riff together. The octaves are more spread out, but it is still octaves and the sound comes out HUGE. A lot of power trios rely heavily on this sort of thing.
Enough talk! Let's look at what all the A's look like on the guitar:
I know, it looks like a mess but there's a regular pattern at work here. Look at the next diagram:
Make more sense? You should be able to take any note at random and already know where all the next octaves of that note are. Take a look at the same picture with the lines changed to show this concept:
Here we see three groups coming out from the A in the middle of the guitar. The blue line goes to the next lower octave. The red line goes to the next higher octave, which is the same note that the green line points to. They are both the next higher octave of A. The two notes circled in purple are the same note, in the same octave, as the A in the center. These are in unison. In other words, all three should sound the same.
Just to be thorough, let's look at this in yet another way:
See the pattern? The notes circled in the same color are in unison. If the notes of the same color don't sound exactly the same, your guitar must be out of tune.
Important: You can take any note on the fretboard and find all of its octaves at the same relative positions (plus or minus one fret, due to the change in tuning from the 3rd to the 2nd string). This is valid across the entire fretboard!
Play around with this idea. You should be able to take any note at random and know where all of its octaves and unisons are. Besides learning where all your octaves are, you'll be inadvertently learning what the octaves sound like, and that will make all the difference. Why? Because being familiar enough with this concept to know where to find it AND to know what it sounds like ahead of time, makes you master of it.
For more on ear training, go to my page on Power Chords. That page is dedicated to the understanding of the fourth and fifth intervals, which are about half way between octaves. It's the next logical step in your ear training.
Earlier I mentioned some freeware programs to help your ear training practice. I'll give you more details on those programs now:
The first one is called Absolute Pitch Trainer. It lets you choose which individual notes or intervals or chords or scales you want to be tested on. It has a practice mode and a test mode which keeps track of your percentage of correct answers. It is, far and away, the best freeware program I've found for practising ear training. I highly recommend it. It can be downloaded from C/Net (use the search box to locate the program or try "ear training" and see what else comes up on the list).
The next one is called Ear Test which lets you choose a few notes and tests you to see if you can distinguish which is which. It's operation is similar to one section of Absolute Pitch Trainer. The free version is limited to five notes at a time, but this is good for our purposes.
The next one is called Flash 5 Music Trainers by Ricci Adams. It has seven different modes of operation where you can test and improve your ears. An excellent resource.