Upgrade Your Listening Skills with Functional Ear Training

You need to develop many essen­tial skills to move for­ward as a musician.

Skills like:

• good tech­nique on your instrument
• a great rhyth­mic feel
• knowl­edge of styl­is­tic interpretation
• impro­vis­ing
• read­ing music, chord charts, tab
• the know-how to arrange music
• an under­stand­ing of (basic) record­ing technology
• “work­ing” your equip­ment (synth, fx, pedals)
• pro­mot­ing your music
• peo­ple skills (band mem­bers, man­agers, at venues)

But your most prized pos­ses­sion as a musi­cian is:

Your ears!

However, there’s more to hear­ing than reg­is­ter­ing sound waves via your eardrums.

You need the abil­ity to ana­lyze and inter­pret the incom­ing sound. That’s what ear train­ing is for. It helps you develop the skill of under­stand­ing what your ears are hearing.

Functional Ear Training

One of the best ear train­ing meth­ods I’ve come across is func­tional ear train­ing. Instead of learn­ing to rec­og­nize the sound of indi­vid­ual inter­vals, with func­tional ear train­ing you focus on learn­ing the spe­cific sound of a note in the con­text of tonality.

What do I mean by spe­cific sound?

Let’s lis­ten to a C note fol­lowed by a C chord. Notice how sta­ble and rest­ing the C note sounds. The iden­ti­cal C note is then played together with a B chord.

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How come the same C note sounds so different?

Simply put, the C note func­tions dif­fer­ently in the key of B major than in the key of C major. With the dif­fer­ent func­tion goes a dif­fer­ent sound qual­ity as well. You just need to become aware of that sound qual­ity and learn to rec­og­nize it.

12 Chromatic Pitches — 7 Diatonic Notes

Since there are only 12 dif­fer­ent pitches in our west­ern musi­cal sys­tem there also are only 12 dif­fer­ent pitch qual­i­ties to learn. The sound of the major 3^rd qual­ity stays the same — regard­less of what key you are in. The same goes for the per­fect 5^th, the minor 7^th, etc...

And you don’t need to start with all 12 func­tions imme­di­ately. Learn the 7 dia­tonic notes of the major/minor scale sys­tem first, before adding the remain­ing 5 chro­matic pitches.

Here’s a short descrip­tion of what the 7 dia­tonic notes of the major scale sound like:

In all hon­esty, due to my heavy teach­ing sched­ule and my involve­ment in other projects I’ve some­what neglected my ear train­ing. Therefore I decided to re-tune my ears dur­ing my prac­tice chal­lenge for November 09.

I’ve been a good boy and spent 10 min­utes with the Functional Ear Trainer (down­load the free soft­ware) every day.

Here are my results and observ­ing thoughts after the first week:

Day 1

I’ve deac­ti­vated the ran­dom key func­tion, so I’m only get­ting the same I-IV-V-I cadence and the notes from the C major scale. Staying in the same key def­i­nitely makes life a bit eas­ier, at first.

Also, I reduced the tempo down to 100 bpm.

If you are com­pletely new to ear train­ing select the “One octave” func­tion to have the soft­ware stay in a closer range and don’t feel like you have to start with all 7 dia­tonic notes. Nothing wrong with really drilling in the func­tional sound of 2 or 3 notes.

Day 2

Unchanged set­tings just to double-check if my 100% score from day 1 was no fluke.

Day 3

I’ve increased the tempo to 120 bpm and changed the ini­tial cadence to a ii-V-I progression.

Day 4

No cadence now giv­ing me all the notes from the key — I’ve changed the set­ting to a plain I chord. This dra­mat­i­cally reduced the “forced” time of lis­ten­ing to a com­plete cadence and pushed the num­ber of ques­tions and answers in the 10 minute time frame up to 268.

Day 5

5 mis­takes

I under­es­ti­mated the effect of just get­ting the root note played instead of a full chord. 4 of the 5 mis­takes hap­pened in suc­ces­sion when I some­how lost the sense of tonal­ity and heard Fa as So and vice versa.

Day 6

Faster with less mis­takes at the same set­tings as on day 6. That’s how I like it.

Day 7

Slowed down a lit­tle and used the “Play again” but­ton any time I wasn’t sure. I really wanted to shoot for the 100% and am glad that I made it.

Tune Your Ears

After only 1 week I’m already much more con­fi­dent and notice pos­i­tive results in my lis­ten­ing awareness.

I highly rec­om­mend you get started with your own ear tune-up. Download the Functional Ear Trainer soft­ware and share your progress in the comments.

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Related posts:

1. Learn to Hear all 12 Chromatic Notes
2. Challenge of the Month — November 2009
3. Learn to Play Chord Melody — The Major Family
4. Challenge of the Month — December 2009
5. The Omstrument — Heaven or Hell?

Tagged with: cadence • diatonic • Ear training • intervals • Ludwig van Beethoven • Major scale • Pitch • solfege • tonality

Filed under: Challenge of the Month • Eartraining

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