Welcome Back to Ear Training for Guitarists
In case you wandered onto this page by accident you are at Step Four of the Ear Training For The Mere Mortal Programme. If you are returning to continue your journey I will assume that you have either been working with the progressive customised exercises right from the beginning or you have some previous experience.
Ear Training Theory Snapshot
Here is a quick recap. You should now be ok with some of the basic language and labeling used in music theory as applied to ear training. This includes the naming of the major scale intervals as well as how minor intervals are named and what they are. If not visit or revisit the Navigation Bar Column on the left of this site and check out the Ear Training Steps section, the Guitar Music Theory Section and the General Music Theory Section. Remember to warm up on the previous step exercises!
Exercise One
Again my big thank you to Ricci Adams and the folks at www.musictheory.net. This next exercise is unaltered and straight from the musictheory.net website.
The last exercise had us trying to reference the C pitch as a tonal centre. We still had the question pitch repeating after each correct solution. Now we will work with out a net! We must try to answer the question pitch correctly and move on to next sound getting the solution answer by comparing it to the C pitch. Good luck!
That Was A Big One!
I am hoping that like me you can at least sometimes find these little exercises quite addictive. (I personally am not a “gamer” although many of my friends are. I’ve always been rubbish at computer and video games!)
In any case there are three things that will help you on this one single exercise which by the way is a big one and a difficult one.
First
Firstly don’t get bummed out. Don’t become discouraged if you can’t do it. Happily accept to fail miserably and come back some other time to try again. Go all the way back to the "Unison or Not” exercises and begin again from there. Go back to where ever it is too easy. Start from there and just blast through to the next level of difficulty. Keep retracing your steps. Try recording a few scores along the way. Remember you can’t watch a tree grow.
Second
The second thing is also very important. As much as you can, try to keep the aural memory of the C pitch in your head (ideally at any register). This anchors you mentally and aurally to the tonal centre of C major to refer back to. Use Solfege or Numerical major scale singing to practise this idea. You may need to practise the earlier exercises and revisit the major scale studies on this site to help you do this.
Third
The last thing is to take advantage of the technology. Use the speaker icons to toggle between the reference C pitch and the question pitch. Try to hear the interval in both directions. In other words be able to recognize the descending minor 3rd sound as the ascending major 6th sound. I will add the link to the rules of inversion once I’ve finished that page. That should help you to understand the psychoacoustic effect phenomena if you don’t already. The paragraph about Perfect Intervals may help too. I will also add some keyboard short cuts I’ve discovered soon in a handy format. For now Happy Playing and Ear Training!
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