How to Train Your Ear – The Best Ear Training Methods

Before a music student can start an ear training course, they have to figure out which method to use. This can present some difficulties, though. Some of the most popular ear training methods, such as the interval method, aren’t actually based on what science tells us about how our brains recognize music.

So how can music students know that they’ve found the best ear training method? It all comes down to finding a method with science-based ear training practice techniques, and which offers a step-by-step approach for more effective learning.

What is ear training in music?

Simply put, ear training helps you train your ear to recognize music (notes, chords, rhythms, etc.) by ear alone - without the help of any musical instruments. As an example, before you train your ear you might enjoy listening to jazz music, but you wouldn’t be able to identify chord progressions, melodies, or other features. After you train your ear, you should not only be able to recognize what you’re hearing, but you’d also be able to add your own riffs or harmonies if you wanted.

Why is ear training so important?

If you aren’t sure whether or not you should train your ear, here’s the short answer: it’s absolutely essential for anyone who’s studying music. It isn’t just a standalone skill that a budding musician can opt out of if they aren’t interested. Instead, studying to train your ear is something that you’ll have to master if you ever want to become a well-rounded musician. Once you train your ear, you’ll not only be able to recognize and reproduce any music you hear, but it’ll also allow you to improvise or compose your own melodies, harmonies, and more on the fly.

Ear training topics

While you’ll cover many different topics as you train your ear, these are the most relevant and common.

Relative pitch ear training

Of all the aspects of ear training, committing to train your ear to recognize music through relative pitch is the most important. Relative pitch is the ability to recognize, imagine or reproduce specific notes or chords, relative to a tonality (or a reference note). Contrary to perfect pitch skills (that can be developed only in early childhood), relative pitch skills can be developed by everyone, no matter their age or current level. Not all relative pitch ear training methods will give good results as you train your ear, though; there are some methods that work better than others, and some that don’t work at all.

Chord ear training

Most ear training methods promise to train your ear for chord progressions, but they may fall short of the mark by only providing training for single chord recognition. A better option to train your ear is to focus on chord progressions, rather than single chords; this opens up more real-world applications for chord training. If you train your ear to recognize and reproduce chord progressions, you’ll be able to learn new music much more quickly; you’ll also find that improvisation or composition comes more intuitively, since you won’t have to constantly stop and puzzle out which chord comes next.

Rhythm ear training

We’ve all heard the phrase “can’t carry a tune in a bucket”, but what about carrying a beat? It’s just as essential as hitting the right notes, and that’s precisely what rhythm ear training will train your ear to do.

Melody ear training

Also called “note ear training”, this type of ear training teaches you to recognize melodies by ear (without the help of any musical instruments), along with improving your overall sense of pitch. It may not sound all that special on its own, but melody ear training (along with chord ear training) is crucial for many other musical skills such as harmonizing, improvising, music composition, and even simple activities like singing along to the radio.

How to practice ear training

If you’ve decided to train your ear for improved musical skills, you’ll have a much better chance of success if you consider the following suggestions.

Choose exercises that suit your current skill level

Most beginner and intermediate students end up inadvertently spinning their wheels with expert-level ear training exercises, which don’t do much besides cause confusion and frustration. However, if you train your ear with exercises that build on your current skills while also challenging you to learn new ones, you’ll see much better results.

Use exercises that are tonal and contextual

Unless you’ve never attempted to train your ear for music before, you’ve probably come across the interval method. If you look at its track record with music students of any level, you’ll see that it isn’t exactly the ultimate ear training method. It fails to train your ear to recognize notes, chords, or music in general because it doesn’t allow you to train your ear in the context of music. This is because interval-based exercises are always practiced in isolation. This causes big issues when you’re studying to train your ear, because intervals sound extremely different in isolation than when they’re included in a musical context (a tonality or musical key); this means you can’t actually recognize them in real music.

A better alternative is to find an ear training method with exercises that train your ear to recognize musical patterns in their tonal context. These exercises are essential to develop relative pitch skills. Instead of making your brain work harder to identify musical patterns using the interval method, tonal and contextual exercises help you train your ear to recognize and “speak the language” of music.

Don’t use a trial & error approach

If you’re a beginner musician, you might end up trying to train your ear by adopting a trial-and-error approach. This approach consists of trying to identify notes or chords by playing them at random on your instrument, until you find the ones that match those played in the song (or musical piece). It’s important to understand that this approach doesn’t allow you to truly train your ear, because you’ll be relying too heavily on your instrument; you won’t be able to train and develop all the cognitive processes needed to recognize notes and chords by ear alone. Thus, this approach doesn’t allow you to develop your inner sense of pitch and musicality, which means you’ll be missing out on the main benefit of practicing ear training.

Identify weak points in your ear training skills, and make those your focus

If you don’t already know how to train your ear, you might decide to begin by practicing random ear training exercises; there are thousands that can be found online. But if you want to see real progress as you train your ear, you should focus on specific areas of weakness in your ear training skills. Think of it like bodybuilding - bodybuilders don’t go to the gym and do exercises at random. They do specific exercises that train and strengthen specific muscles in isolation, so they can focus on growing the weakest muscle groups and gain a more balanced body. This is how effective ear training methods are structured. They allow you to train your ear more efficiently by working on specific ear training sub-skills in isolation, such as melodic recognition, melodic retention, tonic recognition, tonic retention, short-term musical memory, chord progressions recognition, etc. By focusing on the weak points in your training, improvements come much easier and more quickly. You’ll also notice that when one skill (such as tonic recognition) is strengthened, other related skills (such as chord progression or melodic recognition) will improve as well. This is because they’re all parts of the same system, much like strengthening a specific muscle group allows you to improve the efficiency of your entire body.

Mentally connect melody and harmony

Scientific studies clearly show that our brains can’t separate melody and harmony when we process music – we hear notes, chords, and melodies within their harmonic contexts. Even if we hear a melody in isolation (without any accompaniment in the background), our brain perceives the tonality in which the melody is playing.

What does this mean for exercises that train your ear? It means that whatever ear training exercises you use shouldn’t force you to mentally separate melody and harmony; instead, they should harness your brain’s natural ability to hear the implied tonal context of each note or chord. Unfortunately, interval-based exercises do the opposite: They force you to isolate the notes from their implied harmonic context, therefore they are not recommended if you want to train your ear quickly and effectively.

Use Your Ear vs. other ear training methods

Here are seven ways in which the Use Your Ear method is different – and better – than other methods.

• It’s the only method to employ ear training techniques that are based on actual scientific studies. Other methods, like the interval method, ignore these findings and inadvertently work against them.
• Its lessons are based on the application of real-world experience, which has been gained by working one-on-one with hundreds of Use Your Ear students over the past several years.
• Use Your Ear helps you focus on all the relevant musical sub-skills that make up a great ear. This helps you train your ear more effectively than many other ear training methods that neglect them.
• It helps you train your ear more efficiently with innovative exercises that are specifically designed to target certain skills or sub-skills. These sub-skills include things like tonic retention and recognition skills, melodic retention and recognition skills, chord progression recognition skills ,etc. Just like an effective workout program targets different muscle groups in isolation, the Use Your Ear method targets different skills in isolation.
• Use Your Ear is the only available method to train your ear that follows a rigorous step-by-step process based both on scientific findings and years of testing on hundreds of students. Where the interval method essentially forces learners to jump straight into the deep end with impossibly advanced atonal exercises, the Use Your Ear method allows students to develop their ear training skills, following the logical progression in which they naturally develop.
• The Use Your Ear method is constantly growing, and will always be improved based on results and feedback from the thousands of students that are enthusiastically following it.
• Use Your Ear gives dedicated, personalized attention to every one of their students. This is quite rare among ear training services; each student can trust that they’ll get more from the ear training service than an access link sent from a “do not reply” email address.

What is the best ear training method for you?

There are a million ways to train your ear for music, and the truth is that most of them simply aren’t that effective. If you’re searching for the ultimate ear training method that will work for you, no matter your age, current level, experience in music, music theory knowledge, etc., you should look for the ones that train your ear with courses that respect your brain’s natural cognitive process to recognize musical pitch. This is exactly how we’ve built the Use Your Ear method, which is currently the only science-based approach to ear training, developed after years of testing with hundreds of real students.

Ear training tips

If you’re looking for a starting point as you train your ear, these ear training tips should help you head in the right direction.

Use a method with a tonal approach

It’s essential to be in alignment with how your brain already perceives musical pitch (according to multiple scientific findings), which is why it’s absolutely crucial to train your ear with a tonal approach (as opposed to an atonal approach - like the interval method, for example).

Sign up for Use Your Ear’s free ear training workshop

Whether or not you intend to go all-in as you train your ear, you’ll definitely gain some valuable insights from this free workshop. The benefits include:

• Discovering a science-based model to train your ear, which teaches you how to harness your natural intuition just like your musical heroes do.
• Previewing Use Your Ear’s step-by-step method, which will give you insights on how this method has worked for thousands of other musicians – and how it could work for you as you train your ear.
• Practicing multiple ear training exercises, which will teach you the right way to train your ear to recognize melodies and chords (without the help of any musical instruments).
• Learning about ineffective exercises that won’t help you train your ear, but instead waste your time and cause unnecessary frustration.
• Getting two exclusive gifts, which will help you continue to train your ear using the concepts you learned in the workshop.

Conclusion

What is ear training, if not the cultivation of your brain’s natural ability to recognize musical pitches, chords, notes, patterns, etc? If previous attempts to train your ear haven’t been as successful as you’d hoped, don’t give up on yourself yet – you may have simply been using the wrong method (as it happened to many other musicians)! Armed with a knowledge of what a good ear training method is supposed to do, you’ll be better equipped to find the option that brings you the best possible results.