the logo for icon collective is yellow on a white background .

5 Easy Ear Training Techniques for Musicians


What is ear training? Learn how practicing ear training at home can make you a better music producer. Sarah Karney offers five ear training exercises to level up your music production skills.

What is Ear Training?

Ear training is one such building block that is crucial to becoming a well-rounded musician – even if it’s not exactly the most stimulating part of making music. Putting in the work is well worth the effort. This is especially true for music producers who want to be adept at working with multiple instruments and genres.

Why Is Ear Training Important?

It is much easier to compose and improvise music when you regularly exercise your ability to identify pitches, scales, and chords. Strengthening your aural skills will drastically cut down the trial-and-error part of music production. It will also allow you to fall into that desired creative flow state without interruption.

Ear training relies on a range of tried-and-tested exercises. They are designed to strengthen your ability to hear and recognize various musical elements more clearly. For example, classically trained musicians use ear training to identify the pitch of a note without needing a reference tone. This ability is known as ‘perfect pitch,’ which is a unique musical skill.

Don’t worry — driving towards the goal of perfect pitch isn’t necessary to reap the benefits of ear training. Instead, we’re going to focus on improving your ability to interpret relative pitch, which is the distance between notes.

Whether you’re a musician or just a music fan, you rely on relative pitch to process music. Relative pitch is the ability to hear the difference between notes when compared to a reference note. Moreover, understanding relative pitch helps you identify intervals and chords. This skill is essential when composing or playing by ear. Furthermore, understanding the language of music more fluently enables you to creatively choose how to harmonize melodies and progressions to create a musical flow.

To emphasize, ear training is beneficial for music producers trying to strengthen their skills for a number of reasons. Also, spending just 15 minutes a day can help you hone your production abilities more quickly.

What Should I Study During Ear Training Sessions?

Here are five general areas you can study in your spare time to test and strengthen your relative pitch skills.

1. Identifying Pitch

The game is simple: hear a note, know a note. Pitch ear training is the first area of study you must conquer before progressing to more advanced types of training. Practice this type of training by repeatedly playing a note on an instrument and saying the name of the pitch aloud until it becomes embedded in your memory.

2. Identifying Scales

Scales are an arrangement of notes in ascending or descending order based on pitch. Scales are keys, which are groups of pitches or scales that form the basis of a music composition. Furthermore, the eight pitches of a scale are the backbone of the music your creating. Musicians use the specific notes that make up a scale to build chords and melodies.

3. Identifying Intervals

Once you understand pitch and scale, it’s time to begin interval training. Intervals are the distance in pitch between two notes. They may seem insignificant or hard to grasp tangibly at first, but can actually have an enormous impact on the way music — or even just two notes played in sequence — end up sounding.

Ear training with intervals can help you learn to recognize and play melodic sounding tones you like. Interval ear training is also part of the foundation needed to understand and construct melodies and harmonies. This skill also enables you to recall the spaces between notes so you can remember how they sound for future production sessions. Mastering this ability will also help you tune live instruments should you need to.

When practicing, start by learning the intervals within an octave. For example, an octave has the following intervals: unison, semitone, tone, minor third, major third, perfect fourth, augmented fourth, perfect fifth, minor sixth, major sixth, minor seventh, major seventh, and perfect octave.

Learning how to recognize these intervals when played forward and backward is crucial. This foundation will also help you expand your training with intervals that cross over multiple octaves.

4. Identifying Chords

A chord is formed anytime two or more notes play at the same time. There are various types of chords, and not all chords sound good together, which is why chord ear training can come in handy.

Most Western musicians start by learning the four triads: major, minor, augmented, and diminished chords. Once you’ve mastered these basic triads, you can incorporate them into your interval training. This approach will further your understanding of how harmonies can be arranged.

5. Identifying Chord Progression

Once you’ve got the basics of chords down, it’s time to study chord progression. You may not realize it, but most popular music use the same common chord sequences again and again. A song that sounds ‘off,’ even purposefully, is often because an artist delineated from common chord progressions.

Chord progressions are also what give songs their ‘mood.’ For example, John Williams’ compositions for Star Wars sound dark and strong whereas his compositions for Harry Potter are zippy and magical. In fact, chord progressions ultimately define a song as falling within a particular genre, or even from a specific area of the world.

Furthermore, ear training empowers you to recognize common chord changes and progressions by ear. Having knowledge of chord progressions can help you lay down notes more easily once you know the direction you want your song to take. It can also help you understand how to produce music for a range of genres and become a better improviser.

Conclusion

Now that you have an understanding of what areas you can study and how they can aid you in your production journey, it’s time to get to work. There are tons of other free ear training resources online that go even deeper into the theory behind each of these elements.

To get started, check out these free ear training exercises on TonedEar , ToneSaavy , and MusicTheory.net. Then come visit us at Icon Collective and put your newfound training to work!

Join the ICON Collective Newsletter:

MORE ARTICLES FROM THE ICON BLOG

By Florian Radke 06 Dec, 2023
Mastering is the final stage of the music production process, and it can make all the difference between an amateur sounding mix and a professional, radio-ready track. As the last creative step before distribution, mastering polishes a mix and prepares it for the listener's experience across various playback systems. While mixing involves balancing and processing individual tracks, mastering takes a holistic approach. Mastering engineers use specialized tools and global adjustments to enhance the overall sound quality, consistency, and perceived loudness of a song. Their expertise and fresh ears provide an objective perspective on giving mixes the final touches they need. This guide breaks down the art of mastering into "4 C's" - clarity, consistency, color, and clipping/loudness. Understanding these concepts is key to elevating mixes and achieving professional masters. Whether you're a producer looking to DIY master your own tracks or better communicate with mastering engineers, the 4 C's provide a framework for success. I. Clarity Clarity refers to how clearly the listener can hear all the individual elements and details in a mix. It enables the message and emotion of the music to shine through. Mastering should enhance clarity by ensuring nothing obscures the core instruments and vocals. Equalization (EQ) is essential for boosting clarity during mastering. Strategic EQ can attenuate problem frequencies that clutter or mask other elements. For example, a dip at 400-600Hz could tame muddy bass buildup, while a boost at 2-4kHz could increase vocal presence. Subtle EQ moves of 1-2dB can make a notable difference. Multiband compression also helps increase clarity on specific frequency ranges. Compressing the low mids around 300-500Hz can tighten and control muddy resonances, cleaning up the low end. Gentle compression on highs above 10kHz can add sizzle and detail. The key is to compress transparently, avoiding pumping artifacts. Modern mastering tools like iZotope’s Ozone provide dedicated modules for honing clarity. The “Spectral Shaper” applies smoothing EQ to suppress resonances and masking. The “Vintage Tape” module smooths out peaks and enhances punch. Used subtly, these processing tools can work wonders for opening up a dense mix.  A case study in exemplary clarity is the mastering on Daft Punk’s 2013 album “Random Access Memories.” Despite the record’s density of instruments and arrangements, every element shines through in a clean, polished way. The mastering perfectly complements the pristine production quality.
By Florian Radke 01 Dec, 2023
Explore Rick Rubin's minimalist music production ethos, highlighting his work with Johnny Cash and Adele, and how his "less is more" approach revolutionizes music’s emotional impact.
LL Cool J
By Rory PQ 18 May, 2023
Hip hop is one of the world's most prominent musical genres and cultural influences. Explore significant events in hip hop history and its explosive evolution.

FIND YOUR SOUND, HONE YOUR CRAFT:


Are you ready to turn music into a career? ICON prepares students to become music producers, composers, performers, recording artists, professional DJs, and entrepreneurs in the entertainment industry. Click below to get information about our award-winning programs:

LEARN MORE
Share by: