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Hello students!
Here you will find many links, tips, and exercises to help you improve your ear training and sight singing skills outside of class. Please visit the links on this page and find what works best for you!!

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Teoria is a great resource for all things music! Feel free to spend some time exploring the website and seeing all of the awesome exercises they have. For just ear training, go to the website > music theory and ear training exercises > and on the left side of the screen, there are many too choose from.

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Web site dedicated to the study of Music Theory. Articles, reference, interactive exercises.

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Music Theory.net is very similar to Teoria. Under the exercises tab, you can practice intervals and so much more!

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Introductory and intermediate music theory lessons, exercises, ear trainers, and calculators.

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This is a great article on ear training!

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This website walks you through chapters of harnessing your sigh singing skills!

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Got that first note right? Keep going and see if can get the entire riff right!

Hope you enjoyed figuring out this song! For more practice like this, check out my course Make Your Ears Awesome. It will help you learn 51 riffs and melodies. Enroll in the sample course and get the first couple of songs for free.

Exercise 2. Learn your own solos

You've heard more music in your life than Beethoven or Mozart have. Combined. A weird, but wonderful fact of life since the invention of recorded music, mp3s, iPods and smartphones.

What's interesting is that those thousands of hours of listening to music have filled your brain with a staggering amount of musical ideas. The challenge of playing your instrument by ear, is to be able to get all those ideas out. One great way breaking down this barrier between your head and your hands is to learn your own solos. Here's what you do.

Put on a backing track or song you like and start a recording on your phone. Keep listening until some musical idea starts to form in your head. This might take a while, so just relax and try to be patient. When that idea starts to come up start singing or humming it. A phrase of ten seconds or so is perfect to start with.

Stop the recording and figure out how to play your own musical idea. It's a good idea to avoid open strings, because this step is all about connecting the logic of the fretboard to the sound in your head (and open strings interfere in that process). Play it a few times to get it in your muscle memory and then play along to the recording you just made.

This is a great way to become better at playing the ideas in your head. As you do this exercise, you might find it fun to make the recordings longer and longer.

Another way to make this more challenging is this. Record a short phrase as you've done above. Now, instead of figuring out how to play it, first visualise how you would play it on your instrument. Which frets or keys would you need to press? I've described this in more detail in my article on Playing Guitar by Ear. Check it out here.

Exercise 3: Free improvisation

In many of the exercises below, we'll explore quite some theory. And while all this theory can be very beneficial, there is a danger to it. We guitarists can become overly focused on positions and scale patterns and so on.

This is a complaint I hear regularly. People do their homework, but then after a while they find themselves stuck in 'theory-based playing'. Scale patterns become 'correct note maps', instead of just another way to play a scale.

The solution to this ailment is to tune into your musical imagination. (For a more detailed explanation of how to do this, check out this guide on improvising on guitar.) Of course, falling back on your theoretical knowledge feels safe and comfortable. And for many of us, it's a habit. So it can be hard to let your musical imagination take over and call the shots instead. This is what why free improvisation is a great way to improve playing by ear. There are two ways you can practice this.

The first is to put on some random music (a playlist for example) and start playing along with it. Just play a note and if it sounds bad, play a different note. Simple as that. The beauty of this is that you can't fall back on any theoretical knowledge you might have. All you really have is your ears. I'd also recommend that as soon as you feel like you've got a handle on the song (for example, you realise that the whole thing is in G minor), you move on to the next song. That moment where you're not sure what is theoretically correct to play is what makes this exercise great. (Note: of course it's not bad to realize what key you're in, it's good! It's just not the point of this exercise.)

The second way of practicing this is by freely improvising with other musicians. When I was in music school, I was involved in a couple of free improvisation projects. They had a profound impact on my musicianship. By not being able to rely on any theoretical knowledge (which by that point was quite a lot), I had no other choice but to trust my intuition. It became a habit to let my inner ear guide me.

One challenge of free improvisation though is that 'you can play anything' can be a paralyzing assignment. ANYTHING!? So to make this more manageable, we came up with a game. First, make a list of titles for non-existent pieces you could play. For example, what do you think these pieces would sound like?

Outer space is a great place for contemplation

Airport Goodbye

Google Maps sent me the wrong way, and now I'm lost

Dying in the Dessert

Jewellery Store Heist

Next, split up into two groups, where one group picks a title (I think we just put pieces of paper in a hat) and starts to play that non-existent piece, while the other group listens, looks at the list of titles and tries to figure out which one is being performed. This is a lot of fun.

I highly recommend you give free improvisation a try. There's something very liberating about not thinking about theory and just playing. It just might be the best way to train yourself to rely on your musical intuition.

Exercise 4. Figure Out Chord Progressions by Ear

Just like figuring out melodies by ear, I've found transcribing chord progressions to be immensely beneficial. For one, it trains you to listen to a recording in great detail. To find the right chords, we often need to listen to what all the instruments are playing, as they make up the harmony together.

Learning chords by ear also makes you listen so intently to the sound of certain harmonies, that they somehow become more ingrained in your system. You also become more familiar with these sounds because you're hearing all these chords and progressions as they are used in an actual song, instead of sterile test where the chords are played by a robotic sounding piano. You want to train your ears for the situation you'll be needing them the most: when you're listening to or playing real music.

To get started with learning chord progressions by ear, check out my step-by-step guide here. It's important to know though that figuring out chord progressions by ear is a bit more involved than learning melodies by ear, where you can just jump right in even if you're a complete beginner.

For one, it really helps if you have some experience figuring out melodies and riffs by ear (exercise 1 above). You don't need to be lightning fast at it, but if you're still struggling a lot, it makes sense to focus your practice on learning melodies by ear for a little while longer.

Other than that, you need to know how to play the chords you're trying to figure out. If you don't know how to play a C#7 chord, you won't be able to figure out a chord progression that uses that chord, right? So you could say: the more chords you know, the better.

But don't hold off on learning chord progressions by ear because of a lack of chord knowledge. You can get started with my course Make Your Ears Awesome: Chord Progressions, which helps you figure out 55 songs by ear that only use open chords. Try out the first one right now:

Listen closely to the bass. Notice that up until 0:18 it only plays two different notes. It starts at 0:04 with one note, then switches to the second at 0:11, before returning to the first note at 0:15. Find those two notes, and you've found the two chords in this song! The chords you can pick from are: E, A and D.

Note that I've added 'repeat' to the second bar. This means you need to fill in the same chord as in the previous bar.

If you enjoyed this, feel free to keep going with the rest of the course. The first couple of songs are free.

Before we move on, a quick note about your audio setup. Especially when it comes to figuring out the bass by ear, it matters how you listen to music. On a pair of laptop or phone speakers, it can be really hard to hear the bass at all, making things much more challenging. Using headphones helps, both because the sound tends to be better and because it helps you focus.

You don't need a super fancy pair of headphones. Even the relatively affordable Apple earbuds (i.e. the ones with wires) are a vast improvement over laptop speakers. Some things to consider: so-called 'closed back' headphones tend to have an extended low end, which can make the bass easier to hear. By contrast, open back headphones have a wider soundstage. This means it can be easier to pick out the different instruments on a track. In the end though, it's a matter of personal preference, so try different things and see what you like!

Chord Theory

I've listed this exercise as 'no theory required', because I don't want you to hold off on figuring out chords by ear because you don't know a lot of theory. And as we've seen above, you don't absolutely need theory. But that doesn't mean though that music theory won't help you figure out chords by ear. Here's a brief overview of the most important things that will help you.

First, it helps a lot to know how to play the most important chord types in all keys. As we've seen, you need to know how to play the chord you might run into. Ideally, you would know how to play the following chord types in all keys:

Knowing these chord types will be plenty for at least 9 out of 10 songs. Side note: this is exactly what you'll learn in my course Guitar Chord Bootcamp. Check out the details here.

Secondly, it's useful to know how chords are constructed, because every single note you pick out will give you valuable information about what chord you're dealing with. (See the detective approach.)

Third, learning about diatonic harmony will help you understand which chords 'fit together', allowing you to make educated guesses about what you're hearing. (See the architect approach.)

If you don't know about chord construction and diatonic harmony, please don't rush out to learn about these topics though. It makes more sense to first gain some experience figuring out chords using just your ears and an instrument. After that, be sure to check out exercise 8: analysing chords and progressions, which is a great way to get a handle on the theory.

Exercise 5: Figure out and analyse riffs and melodies

Think of this one as the advanced version of exercise 1. In addition to figuring out how to play a melody or riff, you also analyse it theoretically. So why is is this useful? Well, in addition to training your ability to hear in detail (skill #1) and play by ear (skill #2), you're also linking the sound of musical elements to musical 'labels' (skill #3). Here are some questions you might ask:

What scale does the song use?

Which scale degree does it start on?

Are there any notes that stand out? Why?

Which chord note are they on?

So what would that look like? Let's take a riff that's so famous that football stadiums full of people sing it: Seven Nation Army. This is not the place to explain theory or how exactly to figure this stuff out, but here are a few things we might notice:

The riff starts on an E, the root note.

The riff uses these scale degrees: Root, minor third, root, minor seventh, minor sixth, perfect fifth.

The riff uses the E minor aeolian scale (also known as natural minor)

The riff ends on a B, which is the perfect fifth. This gives the ending of the riff a certain tension, making it want to go back to the root note.

This is a great way of getting into theory, because you're working with actual music, instead of dry, theoretical concepts. You're starting with sound.

Let's try another example, this one taken from my course Music Theory From Scratch. We'll analyse the main riff from this track by The Shins.

This might be tricky if you've never done it before, but just take it one note at a time! One thing that's useful to know: the seventh fret on the A string is an E...

Exercise 6: Singing and Solfège

As we saw in chapter 6, 'active recall' is the holy grail of effective learning. When we make our brain do the hard work of recalling information stored in our memory, we make the most progress. This is why singing exercises are so incredibly effective. They're tough. They require a lot of concentration. But they work.

If you prefer not to sing, or if you're afraid your landlord will leave an eviction notice on your door after overhearing you practice, humming or whistling quietly is also perfectly fine. As long as you make some sort of noise with your mouth.

The goal of these singing exercises is to get better at recognising musical elements (3). When you're able to sing these elements or produce them with your mouth in any way, it becomes much easier to recognise them. So, what elements should you be able to recognise? As a start, the most important ones are:

Scale Singing Exercises

To start, we're going to sing the major scale in a couple different ways. You've heard the major scale before. It's what people sing when they go "Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do". Here's how to play it on guitar:

Guitarists: you might notice that I haven't added a fret number so you know where on the neck to play this. That's on purpose. You can play this in any fret and it will still be the major scale, cool right? If you hate not having instructions though, just start with the lowest note in the eight fret and you'll be playing the C major scale.
Scale Singing Exercise #1
The first exercise is to sing the scale up and down. Start by playing along on your guitar or piano to make sure you're getting all the notes right. What's even better though, is to find a recording that you can sing along to. (Or just quickly make a recording on your phone. It's just for practice, not to win a grammy award.) A recording helps you keep focused on the singing and it forces you to follow along.

To stay aware of where you are in the scale (which is important for the next step), sing the scale in numbers:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In our guitar diagram, the numbers would look like this:

For guitar and bass players, it's very beneficial to also imagine what this would like like on the fretboard and which finger you'd use. So while you're singing the scale in numbers, close your eyes and visualise the pattern above. With each note you sing, touch your thumb with the finger you'd normally fret that note with.

(1=index, 2=middle, 3=ring, 4=pinky)

By doing this, you're supercharging your practice by working on several memories at once: your aural (sound), visual (scale pattern), tactile (feeling in your fingers) and theoretical (number in the scale, a.k.a. 'scale degree').

Once you get reasonably comfortable with this, it's time to put your instrument or recording away and sing the scale without any help. In the beginning you might notice this requires a lot of concentration, but with practice, it will become more and more ingrained and automatic.

The next exercise is similar to the last, but a little more involved. Instead of the singing the scale up and down, your mission is to sing the following pattern:
Scale Singing Exercise #2
1 1 2 1 1 2 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 3 2 1 Etc.

For an example of how this works, check out this video:

Everything from the last exercises applies here too:

Sing the numbers

Guitarists and bass players: imagine the fretboard pattern while you sing and tap your fretting fingers and your thumb accordingly

Sing along to a recording first, then practice without help.

For the next exercise, your goal is to sing this pattern:
Scale Singing Exercise #3
1 2 1 3 1 4 1 5 1 6 1 7 1 8

Practice with a recording or your instrument first, then try to do it without help!

If you're getting pretty comfortable with exercise #3, check out this next one. It's the same as exercise #3, but the other way round.
Scale Singing Exercise #4
1 8 1 7 1 6 1 5 1 4 1 3 1 2 1

Interval Singing Exercises

In the last two scale singing exercises, you might have noticed you were essentially singing intervals. An interval is the distance from one note to another. And you were practicing singing the distance from the first note in the scale, the root note, to every other note. The next step is to start mixing these up. So play a random note and give yourself the assignment to sing, for example, the fifth note in the scale. 1-5-1.

To make this a little easier at first, you can start by singing up the major scale until you arrive at the fifth note in the scale. So you'd sing: 1-2-3-4-5-1, 1-5-1

Once you reach this level, it's also time to learn more about intervals. On guitar or piano, we can think of distances as the number of frets or the number of keys between one note and the next. But in music, we have given every distance its own name. Here's an overview of the distances in the major scale. (Note: one guitar fret is the same as one piano key or one half step).

When you're doing this exercise, it's useful to keep in mind that when you sing 1-5-1, you're singing a perfect fifth interval. Or when you sing 1-6-1, you're singing a major sixth interval.

More scale and interval exercises

Once you've gotten a handle on the major scale, your next move is to repeat all the steps above for the natural minor scale. The natural minor scale is constructed differently than the major scale:

Doing all these exercises with both the major and natural minor scale will teach you the sound of 10 out of 12 intervals. Pretty good score, right?

The two intervals we've missed are the minor second and the augmented fourth, also known as the diminished fifth or tritone. To practice these as well, do the exercises above with the so called 'chromatic scale'. This basically means: all twelve notes. (Note: forget about singing the scale degree numbers though for the chromatic scale!)

That's it! If you master these exercises, you'll notice that the recognition exercises (exercise #9 below) will be much, much easier.

Chords

That leaves us with just one more topic: chords. You can practice this by singing the individual notes a chord is made up out of. This what we call an arpeggio. You can think of it as an 'incomplete scale', because you're skipping a few of the notes in the scale. For example, to sing a major chord arpeggio you'd sing the root, major third and perfect fifth. Here's an overview of a few common chord types:

Major: root, major third, perfect fifth

Minor: root, minor third, perfect fifth

Major seventh: root, major third, perfect fifth, major seven

Minor seventh: root, minor third, perfect fifth, minor seven

Dominant seventh: root, major third, perfect fifth, minor seven

Minor major seventh: root, minor third, perfect fifth, major seven

Again, practice this first by singing along to a recording, but then practice singing it all by yourself. You can even do this when you're in the shower or waiting for the bus.

Exercise 7: Melodic dictation

Figuring out songs by ear (both melodies and chords) is a great way to train your ears. In a few of the exercises above, you use your instrument to work out what you're hearing, in part through a process of trial and error. Melodic dictation is the process of figuring out a song by ear without your instrument, making it quite a bit more challenging.

This exercise is mostly about 'recognising musical elements (3). It's about hearing a melody and 'understanding' what it is. Hearing the underlying musical logic. It's a very useful skill to be able to jot down a melody you hear. The focus and concentration it requires also makes it effective practice. It's hard work, but worth it.

Don't practice this though until you've gotten pretty good at figuring out songs with your instrument. Without that experience melodic dictation will be needlessly difficult.

You also need to be familiar with how scales are constructed, particularly the major scale (ionian) and the natural minor scale (aeolian). Be sure to figure out and analyse plenty of melodies as we've seen in exercise 5.

For years, I found melodic dictation very hard. But as I found out, my approach was making things much harder than they needed to be. I used to think of a melody as basically being a series of note names: E, F#, B, A etc. To figure out these notes, I'd try to analyse the distance (the interval) between every two notes. So I'd listen to the first two notes and think 'that sounds like a major second'. Then I'd listen to the second and third note and ask myself 'is that a minor third interval?'. This approach is like trying to read a sentence by looking at every individual letter, instead of taking the sentence as a whole. You're ignoring the logic, structure and meaning of the language.

So, what's the better approach? How can we use the structure and logic of a melody to make things easier?

First, a melody uses a scale. Nine times out of ten, this is either the major scale or the natural minor scale. Knowing which scale a melody uses, gives us a framework. It limits our options. Instead of twelve possible notes, we now have seven. This already makes things a lot easier.

Second, we need to think of a melody in terms of scale degrees instead of note names. So, instead of thinking 'this is an F#, this is an A', we need to think 'this is the root note, this is the minor third'. This helps us to know 'where we are' in the scale. It helps us make sense of what we're hearing.

If you have little to no experience thinking in terms of scale degrees, I realise this might sound pretty vague. Be sure to do plenty of analysis exercises (#5) to become more comfortable with it. If you're feeling comfortable with scales and scales degrees though, here's quick and dirty guide to figuring out a melody by ear, without your instrument.

1. Does the melody use a minor or major scale? You can often tell quite quickly just through the general sound of the song. This is also where your experience figuring out songs by ear comes in.

2. Listen closely to the entire melody and try to figure out which note is the root. This is often the first or the last note. With some experience, you'll learn to recognize the tensionless, 'at home' sound of the root note.

3. Knowing this, you now have a good guide of which scale degrees you can expect. If the first note is not the root note, figure out which scale degree it is by comparing it to the root note.

4. Next go at it note by note. Each time, first listen to whether the melody is simply going to the next note in the scale (meaning it goes up or down a minor or major second) or if it's making a larger leap. If it's making a step in the scale, you'll know what scale degree it is. If it's a larger leap, listen to what interval you think the leap is. Verify that this is possible within the scale. For example, when you're figuring out a major melody and a minor third leap from the fifth is somewhat unlikely, because it would make us land on the minor seventh, where we'd expect a major seventh. Of course, it's also possible that a note is not part of the scale. This might sound like it makes things difficult, but those notes are often the easiest to identify. If a note is outside of the scale, our ears usually go 'wow, what the heck was that?'.

As you practice this more and more, you'll find that certain patterns will become super familiar to you. For example, for many people the sound of the major seventh scale degree going to the root is so recognisable that they don't even have to think about it. With practice, this will happen with more and more patterns in the scale.

Exercise 8: Analyze chords and progressions

In exercise 4, we discussed learning chord progressions by ear. To maximize the benefits of this exercise, it's a good idea to also analyze the chords. This teaches you to associate the sounds of certain harmonies to the music theory 'labels' that we use.

Here's an example. I remember discovering 'There There' by Radiohead and really liking the chord progression in the outro. When I analysed it, I learned it started with a B minor chord and a D minor chord. I found out I really liked that sound of two minor chords that are a minor third apart (a.k.a. three frets apart - another example would be A minor and C minor). I then started to hear that sound in more and more songs, such as 'Light my Fire' by the Doors and 'Down is the New Up' by Radiohead.

A similar thing happened after I first learned what a twelve bar blues progression was. Once you know what a certain musical element, thing or phenomenon is called, you've made it part of your conscious mind and you start to hear it everywhere.

So what should you analyze exactly? Here are the two biggest things:

1. Chord quality

If you've done exercise #4, you already have experience figuring out what chord type you're dealing with, i.e. whether a chord is major, minor, dominant, diminished etc. When I started figuring out songs by ear, I did this through trial and error. I'd just play a chord and see if it sounded the same as the recording. This is a great way to start out, but at some you also want to understand why a chord is a certain chord type. To do so, we need to analyze the building blocks of the chord. We need to 'label' all the individual notes that make up the whole chord.

For example, you might hear the bass is playing an E while a trumpet is playing a G# and the violin plays a D. The bass, the lowest note, tells us that E is the root note. The trumpet's G# is a major third, making this chord major. The D in the violin adds a minor seventh, which means we'll call this chord a dominant chord. Chord name: E7. (To learn how chord names work, check out this guide.)

Of course, you can often find all these notes in one instrument like a guitar or piano, but be sure to check other instruments too. The harmony is made up of all the notes that are being played at the same time, regardless of instrument.

2. Roman numeral analysis

When talking about music, musicians will often call a series of chords a 'two-five-one progression' or a 'one-four-five progression'. You might have seen this before in writing as 'ii-V-I' or 'I-IV-V'. So what are musicians referring to with those numbers? What do these Roman numerals mean?

In exercise 5 and exercise 7, we saw that one important aspect of understanding a melody is to look at scale degrees. For example, a melody might start on the root, go to the minor third, to the perfect fourth and back to the root (as is the case with the first notes of Smoke on the Water, for example). In short, we use labels like perfect fifth and minor third to indicate the scale degree of a note.

Chord progressions are also based on a scale. In fact, we can build a chord on each scale degree. For the C major scale that would get us these chords:

We use the Roman numerals to indicate on which scale degree the chord was built. So in the scale of C, ii-V-I means Dm-G-C and I-IV-V means C-F-G. Here's an overview:

In short, these Roman numerals are a shorthand way of talking about how chord progressions are constructed. But how does this make your ears better? There are two ways.

Firstly, Roman numeral analysis teaches you about 'diatonic harmony'. If you play around with the chords in the chart above, you'll notice that they sound like they somehow belong together. That's because all these chords are constructed from notes in the C major scale. We call a chord progression that only uses notes from a single scale 'diatonic'. This is useful, because, most chord progressions are diatonic. Diatonic is normal. Nine times out of ten, a song will be diatonic. So when you know the sound of diatonic chord progressions, it becomes much easier to figure out chord progressions simply by listening to them. Also, all the moments where a chord is 'non-diatonic', meaning it uses a note from outside the scale, will jump out you immediately.

That brings us to the second way Roman numeral analysis helps your ears. It allows you to see, hear, recognize and understand all sorts of patterns in the chord progression you encounter. For example, in jazz ii-V-I progressions are used all the time. In blues music, I-IV-V are super common.

Let's take a look at a concrete example, with a lesson from Music Theory From Scratch. We'll analyse the chords in this tune by The Cure.

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Ear Training: The Ultimate Guide | StringKick

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Got that first note right? Keep going and see if can get the entire riff right! Hope you enjoyed figuring out this song! For more practice like this, check out my course Make Your Ears Awesome. It will help you learn 51 riffs and melodies.

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This video is great for your tonal memory and practicing adding the solfege into this excercise.

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Ear Training and Sight Singing (Level 3)