Ear training is an exercise that is really important for a musician, including guitarists, vocalist, and any others. One of the positive effects of musicians who often do ear training is being able to identify notes, chords, rhythmic, etc. without having to hold an instrument.
Ear training is music theory by definition performed by musicians to recognize notes, melodies, chords, and other important parts of music. The output of this Ear Training is that you can connect musical notes and all aspects of music, just by listening. Yes, that’s right, listen!
When it comes to the importance of Ear Training, then the answer is to hone the ability to hear and understand music further, because that is the most important thing to master as a musician, both amateur and professional.
If you have mastered this, you can analyze and explain it comprehensively and completely. In addition, another impact is that you are also able to improvise when you are on stage performing music, whether as a singer, guitarist, drummer, piano player, trumpet player, bass player, and others.
Here below is how to do Ear Training.
- Rhythm Identification
Rhythm comes from the Greek language, rhythmos. Rhythm means a measure of symmetrical movement that is formed from sound and silence (rest). The sound and silence combine to form a sound pattern that repeats itself to create a rhythm. Rhythm has a regular tempo, but can have various types. In music visually, rhythm is symbolized by musical notes as shown below.
The most important thing in ear training is to identify the rhythm of a note and write it down in notation symbols and rest marks. Begin to identify a rhythm from a song, or a simple melody.
- Note Identification
After being able to distinguish the rhythm, the next step is to identify a tone. Practice Solfegio often to speed up the learning process. Then identify the notes in a simple song by singing the name of the tone (example of the song Ibu Kita Kartini from Indonesia: do do sol sol la la sol…..).
- Major, Minor & Diminished Identification
Ok, now that you can identify a note, it’s time to guess whether a chord is major minor or diminished. Try to feel the difference in C Major (C – E – G), C Minor (C – Eb – G) and C Diminished (C – Eb – Gb) and repeat until you can tell the difference.
- Chord Progression Identification
The last point that is no less important is to identify chord progressions (chord collections). Usually you can only mention Do, Re Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si only. For example, when you listen to the intro of the song Citra Skolastika – Pasti Bisa. You will mention that the progress is Re Minor. . . | Major Sol. . . | Do Major. . . | La Major. . . or II . . . | V . . . | I . . . | VI Major. . ., for those of you who ask, how come when La is written major? why don’t others like Re, Do and Sol not be called Major or Minor. In fact, La has a minor nature, but because it has an anomaly, the explanation is added that La Major. While Re, Sol and Do are normal where Re is Minor while Do and Sol are Major.
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