I WAS DOING ALL RIGHT

An aspiring jazz trumpet player's blog about jazz improvisation and ear training.

October 28, 2004 Ear Training 5 Comments

Ear trainer - simple songs

Ear trainer - click to try!I put together a new tool to help people play simple songs by ear. The tool is basically a randomizer for song names and starting notes.

It's nothing fancy, but I think it's useful.

Try It!

This is WAY cool Rick. Great tool. I will definitely pump it up on my site next message...

Comment by Rick

Thanks, Eric!

I forgot to mention in my original post that I hope to grow the current list of "simple songs". If anybody has any suggestions, please don't hold back...

Hey Rick - quick question for you... how would you suggest someone get started with the ear training tool on your site? Maybe start with intervals? Major triads? Minor triads? If possible, approach your comments from the perspective of a cat not doing a lot of ear training.

Thanks Bro!

Comment by Rick

I recommend that you start with intervals, since they are the building blocks for all chords and melodies. You'll want to learn them one by one, so you can both identify and sing all intervals in ascending and descending order. I'd start out with ascending order and add descending later. I'm going to be building one more ear-training tool to help learn intervals, but it won't be ready for a while.

As you gain mastery with intervals, you'll probably notice that intervals are jumping out at you when you listen to music. This occurs more and more as your ear improves. Eventually, entire phrases will jump out and you'll be able to play them entirely by ear.

While building your interval skills, you should try some simple song playing (with my new randomizer!) and random melody playing (with my original ear training tool). For each of those, you'll find some guidelines below the tools.

My ear training tools are still somewhat a work in progress. Once I've got the last tool built, I'll put together some more material for getting started, daily practice, etc. Hopefully the above will help for now.

Tremendously. Thanks Rick.

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