Play Guitar by Ear, Episode 5

By Darrin Koltow

Fundamental skills

Welcome back to the Playing by Ear Lesson saga. In this episode we're going to continue learning about two fundamental skills for playing melodies by ear: identifying and singing intervals.

An interval is the difference in pitch between two notes. For example, the difference in pitch between a C note and the E note that's closest in pitch to that C is an ascending major third. If you were to *descend* to the E below that C, you'd have a descending minor sixth. If this is confusing to you, you might want to pick up some articles on basic music theory. A great place to learn theory is MusicTheory.net. Also, dig the excellent theory book The Jazz Theory Book by Mark Levine. And here's an article on GuitarNoise.com about intervals: http://www.guitarnoise.com/guitar/19990303.html

For playing melodies by ear you want to have the following skills in working with intervals: One) Hear an interval and say, for example, "Ah! That's a flat 9," and B) to sing the correct interval when someone says to you, "Sing a minor seventh up from this note (which he/she then plays for you) or I'll tell everyone about your Barry Manilow CD collection." In other words, you want to identify any interval when you hear it played, and you want to do the opposite also: sing the interval when you see its name.

How do you get these skills? Let's break up these tasks: first, how do you train yourself to be able to identify any two pitches played one after the other?

Ear trainers

One way is with free ear training software. Here's one such ear trainer: www.good-ear.com. This ear trainer gets you to recognize chords, chord progressions, and intervals. There are many exercises for intervals, but the way they are labeled and categorized may be misleading: one exercise is labeled "simple intervals" and another is labeled "chromatic" intervals. However, no interval is more complex or chromatic than another. Each interval has its own unique feeling, which you can identify with some training, just as you can tell the visual difference between one person's face and another's.

Also, whether an interval is "chromatic" or not depends on the key center it shows up in. *Every* type of interval is accessible through the major scale, so no interval is chromatic all by itself. Okay, I'm off my soapbox. The important thing to remember is that you can get some excellent training in recognizing intervals by ear with good-ear.com.

But if you don't care for this ear trainer, search for others by entering "ear trainer" in the Google.com search engine.

This one is pretty good: At http://www.miles.be you'll find a free, "functional" ear trainer. I have tried it, and agree with the praise others have given it. It's useful, engaging, and easy to use. I was answering questions within a minute of installing it.

Here's how the author of the app describes how to use it:

The user selects a key. The app establishes that key by playing a cadence. Here's where the quiz and training part comes in: once the key is established, the app plays a random note. Based on the key center, you identify the note. If this sounds difficult to you, please, please, please get this free app, and keep working on your melodies, until you see how easy it is to identify intervals.

The app's author, Alain Benbassat, says, "with a week or two of practice, [the program] will improve your musical ear a lot (at least it worked for me!)"

After this article was originally published, Alain provided some additional info:

"I borrowed the term 'functional' from the term 'functional harmony,' where you analyze a tune by examining the chords and see how the relate to the key center. Each chord has a particular function in that key. (eg. FMaj7 in the key of C has a subdominant function.) In Functional Ear Trainer, you have to learn to recognize the function of each *note* in a particular key. The note D in the key of C sounds different (read: has another function) than that same note D in the key of Bb. Each note tries to resolve to the nearest root (up or down) of the key you are in. The goal of Functional Ear Trainer is to hear a note within a harmonic context and try to hear where the note wants to resolve to: to the upper root or lower root. The help pages contain extra information about this ear training method."

Singing

Now we do the opposite of identifying intervals by ear: we sing an interval when we read its name. For example, if you see notation indicating an ascending perfect fourth, you would then sing an interval that begins millions of songs, including "We Wish you a Merry Christmas."

Is singing something you *have* to do? Haven't many guitarists and other musicians successfully learned to play by ear simply by listening without singing? Yes. You don't *have* to sing. You can consider this section of the Playing by Ear sage optional, then. You could be satisfied with simply being able to listen to an interval and be able to name it. That would be sufficient to let you play by ear.

But! If you want to be a superhuman musical monster with ears that can hear a gnat making a rude noise three blocks away from you in downtown, rush-hour traffic, you'll want to have the additional skill of reading an interval notated in some way. That notation may be standard notation ("sheet music"), tablature, ABC notation, or simply written out in English ("A minor second"). You'll read that notated interval and then sing it. How do you train yourself to do this?

You have lots of options. One is called sight-singing.

Solfege (sight-singing)

Remember that movie the Sound of Music? Come on, confess: you know you watched it and *liked* it, even if you're a guy. Anyway, in that movie was a little ditty called Do-Re-Mi. Remember that tune? "Doe, a deer, a female deer, ray, a drop of golden sun..."

That's an introduction to solfege — and a good way to learn the solfege syllables. Each note in a major scale is given a name. That makes it easier for your inner ear to "pre-hear" each of the intervals in music. By contrast, singing "nah, nah, nah," for each different note makes it tougher for your ear to distinguish among the intervals.

Using solfege, you can look at a piece of music and *hear* it in your head, just as reading this sentence takes on a meaning for you, and just as reading the word "dog" brings up the image of that little hairball across the street that likes to fertilize your front lawn.

Hear it, sing it

Once you use your solfege training to hear the tune in your head, you can sing it. People who aren't trained in music have come to believe this is a difficult or even impossible skill to obtain. That simply is not true. In the influential book The Psychology of Musicians, author Percy C. Buck writes, "The ability to 'hear' printed music is [easily acquired] by anyone with a little patience and determination."

Take a class in sight singing and you'll see how rewarding it is. One of these rewards will be your increased skill in identifying melodies by ear.

A good introduction to solfege is Gunharth Randolf's Introduction to Solfege at http://www.ibreathemusic.com/learn/article/44. Guni knows what he's writing about; he studied at the awesome Berklee College of Music.

If you were to take no other action to learn to play melodies by ear — and if you never played an instrument in your life, learning how to sight sing will give you this ability.

An example in interval singing

An example of how to sing an interval might be helpful here. Let's say I'm quizzing myself on singing intervals. I have a stack of flash cards that I've shuffled so they're in random order: I don't know what interval name will appear when I choose one of the cards. I pick a card and it reads, "a descending minor seventh below Eb."

I'm pretty familiar, as you are, with the major scale. So I ask myself, "How can I create a minor seventh with the major scale?" I notice that if I move from the root of a major scale *down* — not up — to the second degree of the scale, that's a descending minor seventh.

So, if I want to sing a minor seventh below Eb, I first establish in my mind that Eb is the root of a scale. How do I do this? Sing an Eb, a Bb, and then Eb again. That cadence will make Eb *feel* like the root to you. You can also establish Eb as the root by singing a major scale up or down, starting from the Eb.

Once you establish Eb as the root, sing it a couple of times to yourself to memorize the pitch. Then, sing the Eb one octave below it. That's the interval of an octave, which is easy to sing. Once you've sung the lower Eb, sing the next highest note in the scale: F. Memorize this pitch. Then, sing your memorized Eb, and follow it with the F.

That's singing a descending minor seventh.

If I were to attempt to follow this procedure by just reading it, I'd probably get lost. So, here's a sound file that walks you through this example in a way that's clearer:

http://www.MaximumMusician.com/PairFiles/min7.mp3

And here's a recap of the steps I took to sing that min7:

Goal: to sing a descending minor seventh from Eb.
Find Eb and play it.
Sing it.
Establish the Eb as the root. Sing a major arpeggio or a scale.
Memorize the Eb.
Sing an octave below Eb.
Sing a major second up from the lower Eb: an F note.
Sing the memorized Eb again, and sing it together with the F.
Check your singing with the guitar or piano.

Summary of identifying intervals

Identifying intervals by ear is a skill that will, just by itself, allow you to play melodies by ear. This is true because a melody can be seen as a long string of intervals. You can learn to identify intervals easily by spending just 10 minutes a day with the applet at good-ear.com, or using another simple exercise.

That's the end of this episode of Play Guitar by Ear lesson. Remember to practice learning new melodies constantly. And, once you can play a melody smoothly, in time with a metronome, it's time to shake things up by playing that melody using a different pattern.

Click here to go to the next lesson in this series.

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