Music Theory / Ear Training: Learn to Play Songs by Ear.

h4 Practice Free with TrainEar.com:
http://www.trainear.com/

-p Apparently there's some kind of misconception from some saying guessing and checking on actual songs is better. Training interval identification in a coordinated way lets you get this ability infinitely faster. Associating intervals will be slower than guess and check only in the beginning. If you want long term improvement ear training is the way to go. Picking out a song by ear by guessing repeatedly is not the same thing as playing a melody out with little or no mistakes in real-time.

-p Finally, whistling or singing to replicate a note correctly is not perfect pitch.


@@@{
"Group": "HowTo",

"JumpPoints": [
{ "Description": "Standardizations Rant", "Time": "04:21" },
{ "Description": "List of Intervals and their note Distances", "Time": "5:20" },
{ "Description": "Using TrainEar.com", "Time": "5:32" }
],

"Subtitles": [
{"Locale": "EN", "Name": "English", "Link": "http://youtube.jimmyr.com/subs/K3kC_l..." },
{"Locale": "ES", "Name": "Spanish", "Link": "http://youtube.jimmyr.com/subs/K3kC_l..." }
],

"Related": [
{ "Id": "vhakdFxWHCg", "Description": "Get free sheet music online" },
{ "Id": "kRgBaQfe0_s", "Description": "Use audacity to sing multipart songs yourself" },
{ "Id": "tXbImBRO5_I", "Description": "Correct Audacity Beta Latency" }
],

"Links": [
{ "url": "http://www.trainear.com/", "Description": "My Free Ear Training Tool" }
],

"Tags": "Ear training music theory play by ear solfege sight reading sight singing jazz course auralia earmaster school ear master school ear master mac macgamut practica musica musiclab melody earope personal ear trainer dolce perfect pitch supercourse Aebersold Jazz ebook finale sibelius 2009 2008 2010 modal fruity loops cubase relative pitch relativepitch perfectpitch FL Studio XXL producer express piano guitar scales chords lessons professional transcribe! audacity garage band Ableton Live cakewalk sonar acidpro acid pro adobe audition adobe soundbooth goldwave Sound Forge Pro Tools dsp filter engine 8 bit encore guitar pro guitarpro guitar hero guitarhero notation trumpet tuba saxophone french horn clarinet oboe sax flute euphonium band scores music score trombone midi keyboard compatible midi to mp3 midi to wav mp3 to midi transcoder converter David Lucas Burge scam Graham English scam pitch train absolute pitch ear test herken alut pitch coach inpitch"
}

---

Closed Caption:

It has several choices you can associate with that particular interval, and in fact you can just add...
you can add your own interval. Right here's the distance between notes and here's the speed, one being...
quarter note, 2 being an eighth note, 4 being a sixteenth note and so on.
so you can just put comma 3, comma 2, and setup your own song association.
You can also just play it from here
So if you've never heard the names of some of these songs you can just select it and play.
Most of these are really common so you should recognize at least the first ones on the list.
Ok I've reset the program, I'm going to explain what all this stuff is. It's actually just the statistics.
The blue bars indicate your current score. You start with 100% you have 100% score for all intervals. You haven't taken any questions.
So let me just play an interval so you can see how the statistics works. First lets get one right
and that's actually a minor third, so if I click it
It'll update the statistics and now it played a different question automatically. It played a different interval.
which is a minor seventh but lets get it wrong with a major seventh
and as we said before it'll show you the correct answer in the corner here which is a minor seventh.
Now if I click the minor seventh it'll update the statistics to show we've gotten it wrong.
As you can see now I have a 0% score for m7.
If I click m7 up here in the green buttons it'll actually show me what I confused it with.
so the more questions you get, the more detailed and good the statistics will be.
and since you can disable any interval, you can disable the ones you're good at and enable the ones that you're having trouble with. Just enable the hardest ones for you and just practice those.
Ok next I'm going to cover the other different features. First lets cover the slider bars. Actually you can increase or decrease the speed of the question using these things.
Just select harmonic to make it obvious... And the song is very very fast because the slider bar is up.
and if I lower it, and repeat... it'll be way drawn out. I can put it even lower if I put it here.
I can also increase the loudness or decrease the loudness with this slider.
Also I have options here. Harmonic is the two notes played at the same time.
I can play songs that are associated with ascending and songs that are associated with descending.
I forgot to mention in songs we have two columns. For example minor second and minor second here. The difference between the two collumns is...
all these are ascending and all these are descending. Like fur elise is a descending minor second, and you can go ahead and hear it here...
and all these are ascending. So again the first option we can play ascending on harmonic or descending on harmonic.
It may be easier just to associate ascending songs for descending instead. You just flip the interval in your head
and associate the other ascending songs instead of playing a whole different set of songs you have to memorize. So that's this option
Also remember, before it showed the feedback of which questions you got wrong or right, you can actually disable that by clicking here.
You can also delete all statistics, lets just delete them, and see it's all reset.
You can also save your progress this saves all your songs all your statistics all your options. Just copy it to clipboard clicking this button
and then save it to file or somewhere save and then when you want to import it just paste. All your statistics all your options will be set to exactly how you left them.
Alright so that's all there is to it. You click play to click the answer you repeat over and over until you have it perfect then you can start playing songs by ear just associating the distances between notes.
How long will it take, I don't know. Two weeks. A month? It really doesn't matter it won't take forever, it won't take a year, it's only 12 intervals so it's not a big deal.
It really just depends how fast you can associate the song to the interval and how much time you put into it.
Maybe 20min a day, 30min, an hour, maybe you might finish it in a week who knows.
Interval identification is the foundation for a lot of other stuff in ear training so if you master it it'll help you get down other concepts in ear training too.
For example lets say someone is playing guitar chords and you want to isolate the chords. They're playing three notes at the same time or more.
All you have to do is train chord identification. If you have interval identification it's a lot easier to train chord identification. Lets say you want to be a jazz man
You want to train jazz. Jazz is just improvisation which is basically intervals + scales. So all you have to do is train additionally scales to see what scale the song is being played in.
so you can start improvising it. Playing by ear is a very impressive skill to have and it'll help a lot in the future.
I wish I had started interval idenfitication and I hope you have the opportunity to do so.
In this video I'll be showing you how to play songs by ear.
Playing songs by ear just means playing any song without sheet music or guitar tabs.
No previous background in music is really needed to understand and even though I have a piano here it's just an example so you can see which notes are going up, and down.
This can help anyone who helps anyone who plays a musical instrument or any vocalist who wants to hit notes spot-on.
First you need to understand the main concept behind playing songs by ear, and as always it's best to work with a very simple example.
Lets use the first four notes of the song silent night
Lets try to understand the song the song is made up of four different notes with different distances in between.
We start at the first note
We move up two notes, and yes the black notes count.
Then we move down two notes.
Then finally we move down 3 notes
I can play these distances anywhere on the piano and it will sound like the same song.
If we change the distances just a little bit it will sound like a different song.
So now we can say that the distances between notes is what lets your brain recognize this song as Silent Night
So now we finally get to the point. If I wanted to play this song or any other song by ear I would have to identify the distances between notes.
That's the basic concept behind playing a song by ear.
So now the question becomes: what's the best way to identify the distances between two notes
and aren't there too many possible distances to memorize?
Ok, well let me answer the first question. How's it possible to identify the distances between notes? Well let me give you an example.
The best way to identify the distances between two notes is to simply associate a song to it.
For this particular interval I've associated the song green sleeves.
As long as the second note is 3 notes above the first note, it will always sound like green sleeves.
-And the more you associate the song to it the more you automatically start thinking of that song when you hear that interval.
For every not distance, or 'Interval', there's always a song you can associate.
For example, listen to this weird sounding one.
Now I want you to try and think of a song that has this interval in it.
You may think it'd have to be some kind of weird song or a scary movie song, but actually...
Come with me, and you'll be
In a world of pure imagination
That song is actually from the first willy wonka movie.
Now the interval sounds incredibly pleasant despite most people's first reaction.
Don't worry about the song associations, I'll help you with that. I promise.
So the last question we have to cover is just, how many intervals do I have to memorize?
The simple answer to that question is just 12.
If you memorize just 12 intervals you'll be able to play simple melodies by ear.
Why just 12, well let me show you an example.
Ok, it's the same interval I just played earlier but now lets try it an octave above.
The interval sounds almost exactly the same because we're still moving from a D to a C#.
even if the C# is an octave up. Let's play it at the same time.
It sounds the same, it has the same quality to it, just one note is an octave up
So there's just 12, if you master just 12, you can get any song by ear and that's all there is to it.
I've actually spent a lot of time making a free and easy to use program that lets you identify these intervals and associate them to a song very very easily
and best of all it's browser based meaning you don't have to download anything
but before we continue you have to understand that playing songs by ear is a concept of music theory
and music theory is standardized and any time anything is standardized they like to add tons of random vocabulary to make things more complicated than they really are.
For example instead of saying, "How many cats are in this picture"?
Once things become standardized they'd say, "What is the aggregate sum of felis catus within the boundaries of this rectangle!?"
And instead of saying it that way they just makeup stupid symbols to represent the already complicated way they were saying it before, to further confuse the poor students
and abstract the question even further
Ok so music theory is standardized, meaning it's going to have its own vocabulary. Instead of saying like we were before
"The second note is one note above the first note"
They would say it's a minor second.
If the distance is 2 notes
Then they would say it's major second, if it was 3 notes they'd say it's a minor third.
So they have their own list of associated values for each of the 12 intervals.
Now I don't want you to feel overwhelmed by this or feel you have to memorize this. You don't.
so don't worry about it. Just know it exists so if you ever want to study higher level concepts in music theory you won't have a difficult time.
Ok so this is my free ear trainer that you can find at trainear.com
It's browser based so you can just play it from your browser. You don't need to download anything.
You can if you want it's only 132k, it's a very small file.
and I tried to make it as perfect as possible so you can actually associate intervals to actual songs.
so with this you can start getting better and better and better until you can actually play the songs by ear.
Ok, let me show you how it works. If I click play it's actually going to give me
one of these answers choices, so it's actually going to give me one of 12 questions.
I don't want that. If you're a beginner, you don't want to test yourself on 12 questions at a time
So it's better if I uncheck different intervals so it only tests me on a few.
I've unchecked them all. Lets say perfect fifth and perfect fourth.
If you'll notice I'm using the standard notation, but underneath you'll see how many notes away the actual interval is.
so this is a distance of 7 between notes and it's called a perfect fifth.
so you can associate either way, it doesn't really matter.
After you've selected the intervals you want you can select different settings like ascending plays two notes, one going up
and then, this one plays one notes going down, then this one plays a harmonic, two notes at the same time.
This one randomizes between ascending and descending.
and this one plays ascending, then it plays a harmonic then it plays descending.
so lets just keep it simple. don't get overwhelmed by that explanation.
Lets just select ascending and click play
Now it plays a perfect sine wave. It's a sine wave instead of lets say piano just so you don't confuse the timbre of the instrument whenever the intervals are played.
You can just concentrate on the quality of the intervals.
Now, in this case that intervals sounded like here comes the bride.
So the cool part about this program is if I miss the interval
it'll actually play the associated song, so listen...
and it's even better because you can associate any song you want. If I click songs...
I can go to perfect fourth.
and it'll have here comes the bride, la marseille, mon beau sapin
Amazing grace or some super mario rpg song