Flawless Ear Training 1: Perfect Your Pitch and Musical Ear

What is Flawless Ear Training?

Flawless Ear Training is a revolutionary new way to train your ear. The course has been carefully created to provide you with personalized instruction. Kevin Ure developed the ideas for this program while teaching in a university for nearly decade.

It’s like having your very own private ear training instructor in your home.

Unlike programs that have you guess until you learn to recognize intervals and chords by ear, this course walks you step-by-step through the process and gradually builds your ear by laying a strong foundation first.

The Benefits of Ear Training and Why Most Techniques Fail

When you ask music students to conjure up images of ear training, they typically think of the long hours of interval training and sight-reading brief musical examples. Students often refer to this kind of training as ear straining.

The truth about ear training is that it doesn’t need to take hours a day or require the relentless drilling of intervals and chords.

The Flawless Ear Training Course is unique in that is it designed to first open up your ear to hear inside musical structures.

Ear Training by itself won’t help you hear the inner parts of a musical work. Most ear training is designed to be slow, and only the most talented will find success.

The Flawless Ear Training Course teaches a method that is designed to help you hear inside of a musical structure and recognize intervals, chords, and progressions with greater ease.

Most ear training methods ultimately fail to produce results because they involve an automated process. The concept followed by most programs is to introduce one interval at a time until all of the 12 basic intervals have been learned.

Not only is this method boring, it fails to produce good results. These programs also tend to offer too many different options, which leaves the student confused about the best path to follow.

Musicians need a multi-faceted ear training approach that includes exercises that complement and support each other.

The Flawless Ear Training Course is professionally designed to include complementary exercises so you can complete your daily ear training and go about your day.

…Opening Up the Ear…

If you want to open up your ear and hear more deeply into the music you love, you need a process that gradually improves your ability to hear the inner workings of music.

When attempting to identify an interval, many musicians use one of the following methods:

• Using a familiar tune such as the opening notes of “Hear Comes the Bride” to hear a Perfect Fourth, or “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” for a Major Sixth.

• Mentally play a major or chromatic scale to “count” up to the interval they are trying to uncover.

• Use a familiar “anchor interval” to determine other intervals. A common anchor interval is the Perfect Fifth, which is often used to hear a Minor Sixth.

• Invert an interval that is smaller and then singing it down or up an octave to hear the larger, seemingly more difficult interval. (This works because of the way intervals invert, a major third ascending becomes a minor sixth descending when the ascending third is later sung an octave lower).

• Using solfége syllables to internalize various intervals.

• Visualizing a keyboard to mentally hear the half steps and whole steps in an interval.

In addition to these methods, there are many other even less effective ways to develop the ear, including attempting to manifest a better ear or listening to the sound of an interval over and over again while the individual sleeps.

All of these methods may provide some degree of results, but the development of the ear is a natural and simple process.

Most importantly, ear training shouldn’t require more than 30-45 minutes per day. The best method is to train your ear daily and then go about your day. When the training is completed in the proper way, the ear will continue to develop naturally throughout the day.

There are some indications that you are on the right track with your ear training program. You should begin to notice these differences within 3 weeks of starting a reputable program.

• When you hear birds and notice that you can identify the intervals being sung.

• When you are running on a treadmill and hear a major or minor second.

• When you get in your car and realize the warning lights are beeping a major or minor third (even if they are slightly out of tune).

• When you begin to hear additional notes that weren’t there before when listening to an interval. (These are called overtones).

• When you listen to someone speak and realize that the words are melodic, and you start to naturally hear intervals within the speech.

Active vs. Passive Listening

I categorize ear training into two distinct categories that need to be combined to develop the ear.

Active Listening

Active listening is any ear training activity that requires thought. The following are a few types of active listening exercises.

• Mentally identifying an interval that you hear.

• Breaking apart a chord to find the notes it is made up of.

• Writing down a melody that you hear using a process known as dictation.

• Singing or audiating (hearing the music internally) printed music at sight.

Passive Listening

Passive listening is any activity that doesn’t require much or any thought. Here are some activities that qualify:

• Listening to a specific interval played at different octave registers in a loop.

• Singing a melody by rote, such as when you sing “Happy Birthday” or a song you love.

• Completing an exercise daily that eventually becomes second nature, such as the Daily Routines and Mirror Exercises.

When Active Listening Becomes Passive

In short, active listening and passive listening are very simple concepts:

• Active listening requires effort.

• Passive listening requires no effort.

There is a point where an active listening drill becomes a passive listening drill. This is the goal of the Flawless Ear Training Course.

There are two basic ways to learn a melody.

1. Play it on the piano and memorize what it sounds like. (This is what many music students do).

2. Carefully work through the melody, sounding out each interval until the musician know what it sounds like.

Both processes produce the same end product. Both students would get an A if they sang it correctly, but the student who followed the second process would develop their ears faster.

Both processes use an active process to produce a passive result.

The Flawless Ear Training Course is effective because it uses the right degree of active and passive listening.

Start the course and if you like the results, continue your journey with me.