The Ear Training Exercise That REALLY Matters! Why Don't They TEACH It?!

this video is brought to you by my supporters over on my patreon page check out the link in the description and check out our weekly guided ear training and practice routines today hi everybody levi clay here and i'm back again to talk to you about the subject of practice and while i have been plugging my weekly guided practice routines for the last four weeks of course link in the description this week i'm going to take a break from talking about my weekly guided practice routines and i'm going to move on to start talking about weekly guided ear training sessions because shock horror as you all know i work professionally as a transcriber that's a big part of how my career has taken form and some people think that i have a pretty impressive ear and i don't know if i go as far as some people are impressed but i will give you that but it's not flawless here by no stretch of the imagination is it a flawless ear and i you know one of the questions i get asked all the time is do i have perfect pitch and the answer to this is absolutely not no i don't have perfect pitch not even close to perfect pitch a very good relative pitch and i have the ability to hear something and almost immediately be able to play it on the instrument but that's because my connection between my ear and my hands is so well developed uh from doing it all day every day and yeah definitely a skill that i'm looking to help you guys with but something that can be worked on but doesn't come from perfect pitch and let me be clear not something that i was born with either so what i wanted to talk about today um was obviously those weekly guided practice sessions and the ear training sessions i'm doing every week for my guys over on patreon but also just this idea of what is required what i think is required as part of ear training because i think many of you guys out there have tried to develop your ear and i i know the route that is usually done for that in fact obviously i went to music school i have had what many would consider to be a formal education in music and i found the oral and transcribing aspects of my music school training to be almost useless dreadful i would go as far as saying because there are i think two ways that you can practice developing the ear one of them is suitable for testing and one of them is almost impossible to test well and we focus so much on this area that is very testable that i don't think it's massively applicable to really training the ear to be something that's impressive so i think there's two areas that you would need to work on right one is recognition okay recognition of intervals or chords or whatever it happens to be so somebody plays something and you have the skills to be able to identify what that thing is recognition and that's not quite the same as what i would call anticipation being able to hear something and then in relation to that thing here's something else being able to audit being able to imagine a sound that you haven't been presented with if i say to you major seven not even pitch just major seven can you hear what a major seven chord sounds like that's a very different skill to having somebody just play you a major seven chord and you to be able to immediately go that's a major seven chord now don't get me wrong that second skill being able to hear something and tell me what it is it's not that that's a bad skill to have it's an easy skill to learn it's an easy skill to teach and it's an easy skill to test which is why it's something that i think is taught so heavily in music schools but it's nowhere near as tricky as that anticipation skill the auditing being able to hear something that isn't there being able to imagine a chord that isn't there so i'm going to switch on over to a website now and give you a quick example of what i mean check it out so i'm just over here on tonedear.com and i'm using this just as an example of interval testing okay uh what we're going to do here this is what you would tend to see in any sort of music school test an interval is played to you and you need to be able to identify that interval i think many of you guys when you go and you look at ear training courses or you look at apps on the app store this is primarily the way the ear training is presented to you and it's given to you as a skill that if you work on this it will somehow make you a better musician it will improve your ear and there's an element of that but it's nowhere near as valuable as the audience side of things so let's test it out let's uh here first question the sixth that's a fourth major second fifth seventh that's uh a third that's an octave that's a fifth that's a fourth to sixth we could do this all day we could maybe start introducing other intervals right so let's put the second the minor third the tritone the minor six the minor seventh we'll we'll skip the compound intervals let's keep going uh that's r minor six that's a major second flat five that's minor third [Music] um uh that's uh mine seven yeah we'll stop there so um as you saw like when i was going through that it's not something that is impossible it's something that can be done and you can get faster this and ultimately you know i have reference songs for all of these when i hear these intervals there's essentially a trick that's going on there right i hear a major third and i hear the simpsons theme if i hear a minor third i hear iron man if i hear um a major seventh i hear the superman theme uh if i hear a major sixth i hear the second part of somewhere over the rainbow so on and so forth these are all things that can be worked on and should be encouraged but the trickier skill is the audiating right so i've been trying my best to split these weekly guided ear training sessions into these two areas right one is this the recognition and one is auditing so if i jump over to the piano i have to now ask you can you if i play a note if i play a c [Laughter] [Music] but then i have to ask you can you hear a fifth over the top of that if you hear this no listen and can you sing a fifth if the answer to that is no then who cares that you can hear a fifth and tell me what it is because as a transcriber as somebody that literally sits with music and listens to it and writes it down never never do i hear an interval and go ah that's a fourth and then find it on the instrument that's that's not a thing for me at least and of all of the transcriber friends that i've had that's never been something that i've particularly seen as something that we would consider to be something that you need to develop um certainly nowhere near as as much as you would need to develop the skill to be able to audit the skill to be able to hear a sound outside of the transcription thing as an improvising musician as somebody that plays over chord changes a big part of that a big part of playing a melody over one chord that's moving to another chord is being able to hear what that chord that you're going to sounds like before it happens is to be able to hear the melody that you're playing and to be able to imagine where you're going with that melody and to be able to really hear quite strongly what it's going to sound like when you get to that chord with the note that you're planning to land on with a note that you're visualizing or hearing if you like when you get there let's just do i'll do one more of these intervals just to test you again so if i if i go on c [Music] can we hear what a major third is going to sound like [Music] [Laughter] [Music] now i'll just jump straight in and go if we've got c as this is our route [Music] that's going to be our major third and i'm hearing a reference melody if you like is for me it's simpsons [Music] can't get down to an f sharp um but you know where i'm going i hear that melody that's how i'm how i'm doing that i think that's the way that people do this it's the way you develop that as a skill now the final um exercise i'm going to give you for this just as and this is actually a great modal practice i practice size that's not a word this is a great way to practice modes and hearing different modes if we can get to a stage where we can audio and hear a major scale so if i play this c [Music] oh sorry major scale [Music] if we can hear this [Music] can really hear that major scale you should be able to take any one of these notes [Music] and flatten it by a semitone and anticipate what that note is going to sound like so if i do that up to the fifth there [Music] if i lower that semitone [Laughter] can you hear that no it's a non-diatonic no it doesn't fit within the scale but can you hear that note the exercise i'm going to give you for this is practicing the difference between the major scale one two three four five six and seven or c d e f g a b and c and the mixolydian mode which is the major scale with a flat seven one two three four five six flat seven or c d e f g a b flat and c so if i play really slowly up this major scale i want you to anticipate each note as i play it if this is c the one but i want you to sing the next note before i play it not after i play it before i play it [Music] that's our major scale that's me anticipating those sounds let me be clear this isn't about your ability to sing i'm not a singer you can tell i'm not a singer that's not the point here i'm demonstrating what i'm hearing inside so you could do that same exercise and listen for the note you as long as you're hearing the note before it's played as long as you hear the note before you hear it then you're on the right path i want to now do that same thing but i want you to anticipate what this flattened 7 is going to sound like it's not the regular seven it's going to be lower that's our mixolydian sound [Music] and that flat seven i don't want to say should take you by surprise but you should be able to hear that note you should be able to really anticipate the sound of that note when you are when you hear people playing [Music] you're playing that flat seven in there you should be able to hear what that flat seven sounds like it's an important part of musical vocabulary and this is you can just go from here if you can anticipate the sound of mixolydian one two three four five six flat seven one [Music] well dorian is the same thing but with a flat three could i do the same thing and anticipate what a flat three is going to sound like [Music] a bit flat [Music] can you hear the difference between those three things i should be able to and we've come full circle we've gone back to the start now where if you know in music school they would play this for [Music] you and you'd say that's a major scale and then they'd play this [Music] and you say that's mixolydian they play this and you say that's dorian that's one thing but can you hear them can you have somebody play you a c major chord and can you sing over the top of that a major scale can you sing or can you hear a mixolydian scale over the top of this if i change the chord to a minor seven if i play this [Laughter] could you sing dorian over the top of this could you sing melodic minor over the top of this these are skills that i think are really important in developing your ability as as a musician and as however you want to think of yourself as a transcriber as a player our ear is our most valuable skill do not neglect it put some time into your ear check out my weekly guided ear training sessions i was going to say a huge thank you to my wonderful supporters over on patreon i couldn't you know i wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't for you you know i'm incredibly grateful for all of the wonderful support i've had from you guys over there over the last month um you know if you check us out on patreon now you're going to get access to five weekly guided practice sessions immediately you'll get access to three ear training sessions immediately and there's just more and more being added every single week so thank you so much guys if you want to check it out please do you're absolutely awesome and if that doesn't suit you can also head on over to amazon i've got several books available check one of them out i'm sure you will find something you enjoy thanks so much for checking this video out guys if you do have any questions please do let me know in that comment section below you've been awesome i've been just levi thanks one more time and i will see you next week for some more videos talking about practice latest

Channel: Levi Clay

Views: 93,475

Keywords: Levi Clay, Guitar, Lesson, Transcribing, Guitar Lesson, Tutorial, ear training, relative pitch, ear training for beginners, perfect pitch, ear training guitar, play by ear, ear training intervals, musical ear, rick beato, aural skills, ear training exercises, music theory, music school, ICMP, music secrets, best exercises

Id: 0QX_MsF5csA

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2022