How are your ears?
We have all heard that improving your ears is one of the most important skills for any musician. Many of you may have taken courses, read books or bought software in order to improve you ears. Have you ever stuck to it? Maybe you have and maybe you haven’t? I am on a mission to find out as much as I can about ear training.
I want to discover
- The MED (minimum effective dose) needed to improve my ears. How can I get great results with little effort?
- Can I develop perfect pitch?
- How will this improve my guitar playing?
- How else will it improve my musical abilities.
So why am I taking on this research?
Well, beside it just being a useful musical skill (I believe), I have recently been teaching some students how to figure out music by ear. Some things I have noticed that they are succeeding in like figuring out chords in a song, while other areas (like figuring out melodies) they are really struggling with. I don’t like seeing my students struggle with things. I want to show them how to do this but soon came to realise that I don’t really know how I learnt to figure out melodies or chords. When I was young I spent hours trying to figure out things on the piano and I believe that helped me develop my ears. I was very self motivated but that is not something I can really teach my students. So in a nutshell I want to give my students a simple path to ear training success.
I am a huge Tim Ferriss fan and recently bought his new book The 4 hour Chef. The book deconstructs learning process for many skills and finds the simplest methods in order to gain success. Now I intend to try this on particular area of guitar playing. Starting with Ear Training. I will detail my progress here so follow me along on this journey and leave me any comments that might help me. Stay tuned for the next post.