I absolutely suck at ear training.

[brianrost]

I also have a poor ear which becomes super obvious when I'm doing transcriptions or jamming on tunes I don't know. Despite that, I've been gigging steadily for four decades so my ears have improved to some extent over that time.

1. I can tell when the chord has changed

2. I can differentiate between major and minor chords, although diminished and augmented chords still trip me up, mainly because I haven't played enough music that makes use of them. The upper extensions (9ths, 13ths) elude me, but for bass lines sticking to triads and 7th chords always works

3. I can immediately pick out most common chord progressions and variations of them, like blues, "rhythm changes" and any number of basic rock progressions.

4. I can pick out common repetitive bass lines. Complex lines whether it's Phil Lesh, prog, fusion or jazz I can't pick up without some amount of transcription.

When I do normal ear training exercises, I also score poorly. On the other hand, when I get into a transcription frenzy after a few days I start hearing things more easily. I can sing things I've heard but I can't always identify the intervals and chords without sitting down and transcribing what I sung. Where I tend to get lost but have slowly started to get better at is chord substitutions, like secondary dominants, parallel minors, tritone substitutions (don't get all excited if you have no idea what those are).

Ever wonder why classical musicians do so much ear training if they are always going to read off a score? I personally think doing transcription is a more important form of ear training than doing ear training exercises. It's certainly of more use in the short term

Whether it's transcribing tunes needed for an upcoming gig or picking out songs or sections of songs where I hear something cool and want to figure out what it is, I pick out the notes and put them on paper. Then I analyze the notes to learn what is happening. The more of this I do, the more I start hearing these "new" combinations of notes being used and now it's in my toolbox to pull out if and when it's needed.

The biggest lesson of transcription for me: most bass lines are much simpler than you think at first listen.

 

[Big Heavy Bass]

I struggled with ear training early on and it wasn't until I changed the way I listened that my ear began to really develop. What brought on the change was reading a book called "Lies My Music Teacher Told Me"...in that book the author stresses hearing things in relation to scale degrees and tonal centers not intervals. This goes against some ear training that teaches you to hear intervals, telling students "a perfect 4th is Here Comes the Bride"..while this is true, not all perfect fourths sound the same. It's better to hear "Here Comes the Bride" as the 5th scale degree moving to the 1st.

If the OP was a student of mine I would have them buy an ear training app called "Tone", the app can be programed to play randomly any number of pitches, I would then have the student listen to a drone note (available on youtube) of "C."..then have the app randomly play "C" and "F#"..as the student becomes more proficient identifying the pitches I would keep adding pitches. Helping the student listen for various degrees of dissonance and consonance.

The other important exercise using the "Tone" app would be to hear and identify the interval of two pitches playing at the same time with the bottom note always the same...examples would be a "C" and an octave "C" and a "C" and an "F#".

Both these exercises would reinforce the concept of hearing by tonal centers. I've had much much better success with students using this method then the "interval" system.

 

[MonetBass]

After one of my interval tests back in college, as we were leaving one of the girls stopped and asked, "How do you do that so easily?" I then asked her, "Did you ever sit and figure out songs on piano or another instrument [piano, guitar and bass in my case] that you heard on the radio? Or played along to your favorite music?" She said no, and I responded, "Well, I did that for years, and now I can hear intervals pretty quickly.". I would suggest you do the same, paying attention to the intervals as you play them. Figuring out the key at the start helps as well. The keyboard makes interval recognition from a visual standpoint easier, at least for me.

 

[mambo4]

Interval recognition training is probably the worst way to get theory in your ear.
I went through interval recognition quizzes in my college theory class, and it was only daily drills that got past it.
I can think of 2 superior alternatives to interval drills:

#1 singing solfege

Singing helps a lot too. It's kind of corny but "Do Re Mi" from The Sound of Music is a wonderful ear training tool.

you need to sing everything, not to be a singer but to make the relation to your ear.

Singing solfedge is probably the best way to get intervals in your ear.

I used the Chrodbot app on my phone to generate a looping C major chord and practiced singing these while driving. The key is to reduce the number of notes you are trying to tackle, stick to variations of a single note combination, every day for a week. train yourself to sing just those 2 or 3 notes in various combinations:

Week 1: perfect fifth: Do So, So Do
Week 2: Add Mi for a major arpeggio: Do Mi So Mi Do, Mi Do Mi So Mi, So Do So Mi So
Week 3: Add Re
Week 4: Add La to build major pentatonic
...

#2 Learning the sound of common chord progressions

recognizing chord pressions is much easier than intervals in a vaccum
You can easily google common chord progressions and get examples of songs that use them
Most blues tunes follow I, IV, V
Listen to Stand by Me and then Every breath You Take (verse) : I vi IV V
Look up the Axis of Awesome's "Four chords" video
Look up the rhythm changes

 

[MultiScaleMale]

Ear training on bass has two factors going against it - the intervals are close and there isn't a lot of difference between a major 3rd and a minor 3rd down low. Second, we usually aren't playing chords. You'll do better on keys if you're trying to figure out a song if it is more than a simple I IV V type of song. Plus, it doesn't hurt to be able to play some keys.

 

[Big Heavy Bass]

I would also very highly recommend an app called "ChorProg". It has hundreds of exercises of a recorded piano playing various chord progressions and you select the chord number, for example I-IV-V...it's really awesome way to train your ear to hear chord progressions. Unfortunately the app is really buggy but it's well worth the hassle.

 

[jdh3000]

One thing that can help is listening to a 3 chord song, and just write down the chords in numbers. For example; If the song is in C, that's 1, F is 4, and G is 5. You most likely know this and forgive my over simplification... but just listen for those 3 chords and hear the difference, and listen intently for the progression to resolve to 1.

Check yourself with your instrument to see that you wrote the changes down.
Now listen to another song and listen for that resolving to 1.
It can be any song, ignore all but the 1.

Then start listening for the 1 and the 4. Do this in every song you listen to.

When you feel like you can confidently pick out 1 snd 4, work in 5. Don't worry about any others. See if you can pick out those 3 in any progreasion.
The next step is to try picking out another chord. I would choose one, like the 3 minor or the 6 minor.
I don't know what genre of music you like but broaden it to listen to all different styles, that will build up your ear to hear these changes. For instance old 50s and 60s songs get a lot of millage from going to to 6m and 3m.
The point is to break you away from having your instrument in hand to recognize changes. If you can identify chords in relation to one another, you can hear scale tones in relation to one another.

You can do this any time you listen to the radio. Just start at any point you are comfortable with. If you already feel like you can pick out 1 4 5 without problem, then start working on the next step. You'll develope relative pitch this way.

Later you can start building more towards perfect pitch if you want, but development of relative pitch is what you want to work on now.

 

[Jeff Hughes]

Is having perfect pitch akin to being able to solve a Rubix Cube really fast? I knew a drummer who bragged about his perfect pitch. Someone played a note and he said “Wait...that is an E flat” and walked over to my bass and plucked an E flat. He was right. What I don’t know is how useful that would be in most cases.

I mean I guess you can learn songs really quickly, and that might be valuable to a session player or a gigging musician who is always playing with a BL who makes songs up on the spot or never uses any kind of repeated set or song list.

Or am I missing the point here in that the OP is saying he or she cannot figure out songs by ear?

 

[Eddie LeBlanc]

I'm getting better at my ear training

 

[MVE]

“Perfect pitch” is a myth. No one comes out of the womb knowing the diff between C# and Dd (yes, diatonically there is a difference. Those of us used to tempered instruments just don’t know it anymore.) or knowing the names of the pitches. Or knowing that A440 is the standard for orchestral tuning (many orchestras tune slightly higher).

All pitch knowledge is relative. To be sure, the prodigy grasps it much earlier in life than others - but it’s still relative. And it can be learned later in life such that identifying pitches by name and correctly hearing intervals seems, from the view of an outside observer, as if you have perfect pitch.

Perfect pitch is NOT a myth.
1 in about 10,000 people can identify notes without a relative note. And it is biological, people who can do it were born that way. Many aren’t even musicians.
My niece has perfect pitch. When she was 2 years old, she screamed at my mom, who was singing the ABC song, “Grandma, you’re singing it WRONG!!!” Lol

 

[ComeHomeShane]

I literally wrote a masters thesis about this... but in short, learn to sing an easy tune in a key that is comfortable for your range. Get really good at it, so good that you would perform that easy song with confidence. Then learn to play it on bass in all 12 keys; starting on a different note chromatically up or down. Start really easy, i.e. Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Learning ear training in a vacuum is pointless. Just with Mary's Lamb you will 'hear', sing, and play Major 2nds, minor 3rds, and Major 3rds! Moving the song to every key forces you to 'hear' the interval correctly. You build both your inner ear, and your bass proficiency. No stupid app$ required.

 

[LeFunk Machine]

“Perfect pitch” is a myth. No one comes out of the womb knowing the diff between C# and Dd (yes, diatonically there is a difference. Those of us used to tempered instruments just don’t know it anymore.) or knowing the names of the pitches. Or knowing that A440 is the standard for orchestral tuning (many orchestras tune slightly higher).

All pitch knowledge is relative. To be sure, the prodigy grasps it much earlier in life than others - but it’s still relative. And it can be learned later in life such that identifying pitches by name and correctly hearing intervals seems, from the view of an outside observer, as if you have perfect pitch.

 

[kevindahl]

Are you able to learn songs by ear correctly without tab or notation? Then I would not be too worried.

It's funny I sucked at interval recognition in college as well. Melody was okay not much better. Harmony was easier(type of chord and progression). Rhythm recall was extremely easy for me. I had a classmate who could write down any melody notes but had no clue about the rhythmic patterns.

Interval and pitch recognition starts at a very young age and it's very challenging for older adults to improve. I am not saying it's impossible but it is difficult.

I think about how I listened to music as a child. I always listened to the instruments and production first. The melody was always the last element I was interested in. To this day I could not even recall the lyrics to an entire song that I have listened to a 1000 times. My 13 year old daughter can recite 100's.

Have fun and don't stress over it. There are only a few Jacob Collier's in the world anyways.

 

[JTbass44]

Regarding Rick Beato, has anyone tried his Ear Training Course? I watch his videos regularly and have considered trying his course. Any feedback from others who have tried it would be appreciated.
Beato Ear Training

 

[dkelley]

Generally speaking, this is why some people play drums.

But that being said, I've worked with some really good guitarists who couldn't carry a tune to save their lives.

Academic knowledge and working hard, combined with listening to the best of your own ability, is plenty for a lot of rock music.

 

[basso_profundo]

Another decades ago failed music major checking in here. Intervals did me in way back when - both hearing and singing up to a major 13th up and down, which was a requirement of the degree. This book was the singing side and drove me insane:

https://www.amazon.com/Modus-Novus-Lars-Edlund/dp/084644156X

However, my ear is much stronger now than it was then, and I think it's because I started singing lead vocals within the last few years. Having to carry a lead tune in front of a crowd with your voice forces you to hear the notes before you sing and then to pitch correct if you're off. When you go to sing the first line in the song, you have to nail it.

Although one of my first times signing lead at a paying gig, I sang the whole thing 4th off because I was so used to doing harmonies. Whups!

Anyway, that university now has non-classical performance music degree (B of Music v B of Arts in Music) options that would have been much more appropriate for me...oh well, turns out that half a music degree turned out to carry me pretty far in the world of software engineering!

 

[dkelley]

“Perfect pitch” is a myth. No one comes out of the womb knowing the diff between C# and Dd (yes, diatonically there is a difference. Those of us used to tempered instruments just don’t know it anymore.) or knowing the names of the pitches. Or knowing that A440 is the standard for orchestral tuning (many orchestras tune slightly higher).

All pitch knowledge is relative. To be sure, the prodigy grasps it much earlier in life than others - but it’s still relative. And it can be learned later in life such that identifying pitches by name and correctly hearing intervals seems, from the view of an outside observer, as if you have perfect pitch.

That's incorrect.

I have extremely good relative pitch. to the point where it seems like I have perfect pitch to many people. And I can typically remember a few critical notes in the range I spent most of my life working in.... but if I'm tired or distracted or other music is playing, I CAN get it wrong. Also I can go off (in memory, not relative to hearing anything) by as much as a quarter tone without realizing it.... but again that is only when not having heard proper tuning for some time and having to pick things out of the blue.

However, I've worked with 3 people how had perfect pitch. It is absolutely 100% legitimate.

Perfect pitch does NOT mean you know music theory or the traditional european scales and tonality out of the womb LoL.

It means that once you hear a pitch, you can recall it perfectly every time.

It drives people crazy actually, and you'll find most people with truly perfect pitch can't handle listening to anything other than specific classical music or similar where people always (unless playing on Baroque instruments) tune to 440Hz A.

One woman was a pianist I knew very well and did some concerts with. She couldn't listen to a lot of rock music in her right mind because so so much of classic rock music was not tuned to A 440. Often in mixing or mastering pitch would be changed, and often bands simply didn't tune to a piano first or whatever.... or it's their sound.

Once you learn the music theory of what you're exposed to growing up, you never forget a note with perfect pitch.

It's real. I don't quite have it, but I'm very close, and have a better ear than most people I work with. But coming up against someone with perfect pitch, the real thing, is just a real "ear" opener.

 

[Mushroo]

OMG Modus Novus and Modus Vetus. That brings back some PTSD stress memories for me! Those books are life-changingly difficult!

 

[lermgalieu]

I suck at it too. As others have said, singing helps internalize this stuff. Hitting buttons on an app, without singing, is like listening to a lecture without taking notes.

 

[Old_Noob]

Another decades ago failed music major checking in here. Intervals did me in way back when - both hearing and singing up to a major 13th up and down, which was a requirement of the degree. This book was the singing side and drove me insane:

https://www.amazon.com/Modus-Novus-Lars-Edlund/dp/084644156X

generally not in favor of book burnings, but in this case I’d make an exception