Introduction to Ear Training

Introduction to Ear Training

By David Hodge

Photo Credit: Ray Larsen

Tune Up

Introduction

One of the most important skills a guitarist—or any musician—needs doesn’t involve the use of either one’s hands or an instrument. It’s listening. Being able to hear and understand music can help in many ways, from figuring out songs and riffs directly from recordings to enhancing your soloing and improvising chops. Many beginning guitarists think that good ear skills are beyond their reach, but in fact just about anyone can easily develop them with a little practice. And listening can be practiced almost anytime and anywhere—you don’t have to have a guitar at hand, and you can work on your ear training while listening to your radio or CD player or even while singing in the shower. To get you started, I’ve broken down the act of hearing and recognizing chords into two simple components. Included with each component are a few audio examples. Basic Chord Types As a guitarist, you play chords all the time, but do you listen to them? Different chords have different tonal qualities that distinguish them from each other. Major chords sound bright and “happy,” while minor chords sound “sad” or somber. Play an E-major chord followed by an E minor, and listen to the difference. Notice that you’ve changed only one note—the G# (the first fret of the G string) of the E-major chord becomes an open G note when you play an E minor. But what a difference that one note makes. Now try an A major and an A minor, and follow that up with D major and D minor. Again, you’re only changing one note each time. You might hear that the difference is very noticeable on the D-major chord, and we’ll come back to that in a moment. For now, listen to Audio Example 1 and try to pick out which chords are major and which ones are minor. Don’t worry about whether it’s a C or a B (or whatever); just concentrate on telling the difference between the major and the minor sound. It may seem simple—but if you can get this difference down, you’ve gotten your ear training off to a good start.

Audio Example 1

Of course, there are many chords besides the major and minor ones. Seventh chords (technically called dominant sevenths) and major-seventh chords turn up quite frequently, so let’s examine the sounds of those chords next. Audio Example 2 demonstrates the differences between the major chord, the major seventh and the dominant seventh. You can hear how the major seventh sounds a little unsettled, but not unpleasantly so—it’s a bit sad and a bit happy at the same time. Some people find it jazzy. The dominant seventh sounds more unsettled, like you’re waiting to arrive at another chord in order to resolve the tension of the dominant.

Audio Example 2

Being familiar with the sound of augmented and diminished chords, as well as other embellished chords such as the sixth, ninth, eleventh, etc., will help you improve your ear. But for now, learning to recognize these four—major, minor, and these two sevenths—will give you a strong foundation on which to develop your ear training further. Chord Voicings Now that you’re working on these four types of chords, it’s time to talk about chord voicing. Play the following chords in the first position: E major, then A-major, then D-major. Listen to the way the notes ring, and pay particular attention to the highest note you hear; in each case, the highest note is a different part of that particular chord’s makeup. For E major, the highest note (the open E string) is the root note, while the same open E note is the fifth of the A-major chord. In the D-major chord, the third of the chord (F#) is the highest note. Play the D chord again and then slide it up the neck so that you’re playing the seventh fret of the E string, the eighth fret of the B and the seventh fret of the G string—while continuing to play the open D string. This is a G-major chord, but you can hear it’s very different from a first-position G-major. You are playing a different voicing of the G-major chord, one that has qualities similar to those of a first-position D-major chord. Let’s examine this more closely in Audio Example 3. First, you’ll hear a D-major chord in first position. Then you’ll hear it played in an “A shape” (X X 0 7 7 5), which has an A (fifth fret of the first string) as the highest note. Finally, you’ll hear the D-major chord played in an “E shape” (X X 0 11 10 10), where the root (the D at the tenth fret of the first string) is the highest note. Being able to distinguish between these voicings will help you pick out various barre chords or whether or not a song is being played with a capo. (If you listen to the Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun,” for example, you can hear that the opening chord has a D shape by listening to its highest note.) To simplify things here, concentrate only on playing and listening to the top three strings.