Quote:
Originally Posted by delaorden9
I don't think that in music you have to train your ear....it is kind of a gift, I mean, either you got a good ear or you don't, and that would make a huge difference in your career or aspirations in music, if applied. Hope it makes some sense.  |
I strongly, strongly, strongly disagree.
There may be some people who can't train their ear, and some people (particularly those who started playing music as children) don't have to work at it very much.
But there's a reason why ear training is a key component of every single music-education program. It makes a huge difference, and you can improve on it substantially. I used to be totally clueless - I had been able to play guitar for years, but I couldn't pick out a tune by ear if my life depended on it.
Now I can.
Here's my recommendation for how to develop this skill:
Start by practicing simple melodies that you know by heart, picking them out on your guitar. Hunting and pecking is okay. This will be very difficult at first, and that's okay. Good sources for this are movie themes, christmas carols, and nursery rhymes.
Concurrent with this, start using the functional ear trainer, which is a free download from miles.be. Interval training didn't translate into practical results for me, but this program did: it teaches you to recognize the unique "color" of each scale degree relative to a key center. You can find an explanation for why this is more important than interval training on that site.
If you want more, after doing both of these for a while, you could pick up a book like "Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician" by Wyatt et al, which is a series of structured exercises, gradually increasing in difficulty.
This approach made a huge impact for me. YMMV.