How to train your ear to recognize notes?

At some point in time, most musicians will realize that knowing how to recognize notes by ear is an extremely important skill to have. If you’ve not come to that realization yet, then let today be the day!

There really is no downside to building this skill, it will improve your relationship with theory, improvisation, composition, and will expand your overall musicality and creativity.

Many people start with a fairly positive attitude towards ear training and then slowly lose motivation as the methods they’re using don’t seem to bring the desired results. You may have tried some interval ear training apps or websites yourself, perhaps even seeing some improvement within those specific exercises, but when you sit down with your instrument, in a real musical situation… NOTHING!

Don’t worry, your ears aren’t broken.

And we’re happy to tell you it has nothing to do with your musical ability. There is a bunch of scientific evidence that explains why traditional interval ear training fails to transfer over to real music, and today we will explore the Dos and Don’ts of ear training.

What is ear training?

Ear training is a matter of growing the skills necessary to instantly analyze and understand what we hear within music. The goal is to get to a point where everything happens instinctively - removing the need to stop and think, and just allowing musical ideas to flow freely.

The ability to recognize musical notes is invaluable to all musicians, here are just a few of the benefits of developing your musical ear:

• Recognize chord progressions intuitively
• Copy or repeat melodies in real time
• Instinctively feel the chords or notes to play next when composing new music
• Improvise musical ideas with complete freedom

Is it possible to learn to identify notes by ear?

There seems to be a lot of confusion around perfect pitch at the moment, leaving people to wonder; can you train your ear to recognize notes without it?

We’re here to tell you that recognizing notes by ear is not only for those gifted musical prodigies! It’s totally possible for anybody to develop a great musical ear, no matter their age, or current skill level.

The solution is to develop relative pitch, which is in many ways, a more reliable skill than perfect pitch and is completely accessible to everyone - even if you can’t sing in tune and think you’re tone-deaf, fear not! We’ve seen people start at that level, and with the proper guidance go on to develop an incredibly advanced musical ear.

Find out more about Relative Pitch vs Perfect Pitch.

Different approaches to recognize notes by ear - effective vs ineffective ones!

The trial & error approach

One thing needs to be made clear; just because you can teach yourself how to play something only by listening to it (meaning - without reading it from tabs or sheet music), does not mean you can play by ear, or recognize notes by ear.

What most people consider ‘recognizing notes by ear’ is actually just pitch-matching through a ‘trial and error’ approach. This is when you hear a note, search around on your instrument, hitting different notes until you find the one which sounds right. It is a slow and clumsy process that doesn’t grow any long-term skills. If you want to build your musical ear you need to stop relying on your instrument as a way to identify notes, and start actually using your ears…ALONE!

What about using intervals to recognize notes by ear?

Chances are, if you’ve ever practiced ear training, you’ve used interval-based exercises - you hear two random notes and your job is to figure out what the interval is, sound familiar?

People are often taught to approach this exercise by associating each interval with a memorable song or melody… it can be okay if you need to figure out one interval, but how about trying to dictate a melody with a sequence of 10 notes? Are you going to hum 10 memorable songs in your head, one after the other?

Whether you are following the “one song per interval” tip or you are practicing intervals in a different way, doesn’t matter that much. It's hard to imagine great musicians thinking of each interval in between the notes during their creative process - in fact it’s safe to say with 100% certainty that this is NOT how they do it.

Indeed, their process is much more intuitive, a bit like how we distinguish blue from red - you don’t even think about distinguishing them, it just happens automatically.

How can you recognize notes and chords in the same way? Well, it’s totally possible (as we are going to see later in this post) but this is not achieved through practicing interval-based exercises… at all!

Interval-based ear training is fundamentally unmusical, for example, the fact that there isn’t a clear tonal center in these exercises makes them totally unlike real music - if music is always based around a tonal center then why wouldn’t you practice that way too? The feature that distinguishes music from “random noise”, is the clear presence of a tonality (musical key). Without tonality, notes sounds disorganized and unmusical. This is another huge problem of interval-based exercises that we will discuss more in-depth later on.

So why are most ear training apps set up like this?

Recognize notes by ear apps - are they effective?

By now you should be beginning to understand some of the fundamental issues with interval-based ear training, not only from what you’ve read here, but also from personal experience.

We’ve looked at the faults in the methods used by these apps, but there are also issues with the overall learning experience and functionality of these ear training apps and websites.

• There’s no way to measure genuine improvement. The apps are designed to get you good at their specific exercises without considering whether these actually transfer over to real music - and according to the data and our experience with thousands of students, they don’t.
• You have no idea who is creating these apps. Chances are they are not experts in the field of ear training and are more than likely basing their programs on outdated ideas.
• Without the guidance of experienced ear training tutors you could be ingraining bad habits or missing out on crucial advice when you need it - it’s common to get stuck at a certain level and struggle to get past it alone.
• Appropriate level of challenge - you need to be pushed out of your comfort zone to progress. It’s a fine balance between too difficult (disheartening) and too easy (boring). Software is unable to judge this balance on an individual level and so often misses the mark, leaving people feeling discouraged and frustrated.

What's the best way to learn to recognize musical notes by ear?

So we’ve now got a good understanding of the ‘DON’Ts’, how about we look at the ‘DOs’?

• Not everyone is at the same level. You need to first establish your strengths and weaknesses, some people can sing the major scale while others lack pitch-matching skills, some people can recognize if a chord/scale is major or minor by ear, while others have difficulties with that. Ear training skills develop like a pyramid (as most other human abilities do), you must have the foundational skills in place in order to progress to the more advanced ones. Understanding where you are currently, is an essential starting point in setting up an ear training routine that will actually work and allow you to progress consistently.

• Lay out a step-by-step pathway. It’s easy to stagnate without a fixed plan of action toward your goal, you need to be constantly challenged - staying in your comfort zone may feel good, but it won’t get results. In the same way, trying to perform tasks that are way beyond your current abilities is going to only produce frustration and zero results, this will in turn crush your motivation. That’s why most people give up!

• Start training around a tonal center. Music revolves around a key or a ‘tonal center’ (in more complex music the key can change - but there is always one key established at any given time). If you practice exercises that don’t establish a clear tonal center (like those found in interval ear training apps) then you’re not practicing in a real musical situation - therefore your training won’t be useful outside of a practice scenario and what you learn isn’t going to be applicable to real music.

• Scientific research has shown us how we perceive pitch. Context dependant ear training (around a tonal center) allows us to internalize the sonic sensation that each note assumes within the key. What this means is we begin to feel the unique sensation (of tension, rest, happiness, sadness, etc.) each scale degree has in the tonality. With proper training, we can then recognize these sonic sensations in real music quickly and effortlessly. This is how we can recognize notes and chords intuitively, exactly like you can distinguish blue from red.

How to recognize all 12 notes?

What if we’re asking the wrong question here…Thinking atonally is the big problem with most ear training - and this is what we need to change first.

The chromatic scale (all 12 notes) is atonal (it doesn’t have a tonal center), this is why in music we select certain groups of notes that work harmoniously with each other and form keys.

Painters select a pallet with specific colors for a piece of art right? They don’t mix them all together otherwise everything would just be brown.

In the same way, if we play all the 12 notes the result is going to be unmusical and not pleasing to our ears.

As mentioned earlier, the key feature that distinguishes music from “random noise” is the presence of a key - a musical key only includes 7 notes. So there always are 5 notes (out of the 12 total available in western music) that are going to be out of key - meaning they will sound off and unpleasing to us.

For example, if we are playing in the C major key, the following notes will sound out of key (particularly unpleasing) to us: F#, G#, A#, D#, C#.

This is to make a specific point: In real music you only have 7 notes to recognize, because real music is always built within a key. So there is no reason to train yourself to recognize all the 12 notes, at least this is not where you should start.

If you want to develop your musicality (in a way that is going to be applicable to real music) you should start by internalizing the sonic sensation that each note has within a key (the major key is a good start) so you develop the ability to recognize the 7 notes included in the key quickly and intuitively.

Start with the major scale and play each degree over the tonic note, how does each one feel? Some are pulling more strongly toward the tonic (like the 7th degree), and some feel quite stable (1st degree) - these are the types of sensations you want to internalize.

Once this skill is developed, the rest of the notes outside of the key (non-diatonic) will be far easier to identify, but to reiterate; learning to recognize all 12 notes should not be a priority - recognizing scale degrees within their key should be!

How fast can you recognize notes?

This is a bit like asking “how long is a piece of string?”, it really depends on a number of factors, such as:

• The speed of the sequence of notes
• How harmonically complex the music is
• The techniques you’re using to recognize the notes (i.e. interval based thinking is unlikely to make you experience significant progress in recognizing notes by ear)
• Your ear training experience and skill level
• The perceptual mechanisms of note recognition you are adopting - if this is a new concept, check out our in-depth explanation.

That being said, with adequate training many of our students are comfortable recognizing an 8-note melody within the space of a few seconds (after only 1 listening), you can see examples of this in action here. This is actually a pretty good standard!

Tips for recognizing notes by ear that will definitely be effective

Start practicing ear training within a tonal center right away and avoid interval-based exercises or the trial and error approach (as we already explained in this post)! The best way to do this is by setting yourself up with a drone chord consisting of only the tonic note and the 5th degree of the key. This will ground you and give a solid foundation for absorbing the sensations of each scale degree.

Trying using your voice as much as possible. Even if you don’t plan on being a vocalist, being able to use your voice to sing through scales will strengthen your perception of musical pitch and your ability to imagine sound clearly - if you’re only ever using your instrument then you’re never truly using only your ear.

How to recognize piano notes by ear

Recognizing piano notes by ear should NOT be different than recognzing notes played by other instruments.

Regardless of what instrument you play, the ear training fundamentals laid out in this article will apply to all, and it’s important to remember that relying too heavily on your instrument, especially at the beginning of your ear training journey is not advised.

How to recognize guitar notes by ear

Similarly as above, recognizing notes by ear is an ability that is not related to any instruments. When you can recognize notes and chords by ear alone, you can recognize them no matter the instrument that is playing them. And you can also play those notes and chords on any instruments too.

Conclusion

We’ve covered the do’s and the don’ts, the hows and the whys, now it’s just a matter of when!

There’s no time like the present - the sooner you take the first step towards developing your musical ear, the faster you’ll get results. This skill is going to benefit so many aspects of your musicianship, it really is a no-brainer.

If you’re interested in getting a better idea of how to get started following a proven, science-based, step-by-step ear training method then check out our completely Free Use Your Ear Workshop, where we give an overview of our method with some valuable insights into getting the most out of your ears, included in the workshop are free exercises that you can start using right away - no strings attached!

If you’re ready to see some serious improvement then it may be time to sign up to our extremely popular relative pitch video course. The only science-based, step-by-step ear training course, that is going to take you by hand from zero to advanced ear training skills.

We’ve taken the most up-to-date scientific research, created innovative exercises, and organized them into a step-by-step program that has been thoroughly tested on thousands of real music students, the results are outstanding - feel free to hear what they have to say!

And if you’re one of those people that prefers the 1-on-1 atmosphere and instant feedback you get with a private tutor, then we also cater to that.

Our ear training instructors are experts in the Use Your Ear method and will be able to provide completely bespoke lessons tailored to your specific needs. Schedule your 1-on-1 lesson!

We’re excited to help you on your journey toward musical freedom - check out the Use Your Ear method!