Ear Training – Improve yourself as a musician!

Ear training is very important if you want to improve yourself as a musician! The only reason you are learning to play the piano or keyboards is so that you can play any song you like, all by yourself, without referring to any music sheet. You have to bring your ears to such a level where, after listening to something, you should be able to reproduce or imitate sounds on your instrument. This is what a lot of good musicians are able to do and even you should be able to this with proper practice.

Listen more
Now, this is again something which improves as you spend more time on it. You will have to consciously devote some time every week, where you will be doing only the ear training exercises. In general, you should include exercises to recognize pitch, chords, chord inversions, chord progressions, scales and rhythms.

To begin with, you can do the exercises all by yourself. You can play some notes and chords and then try recognizing them by not looking at the keyboard. Another fun way is to call one of your friends, who can play some instrument, and do these exercises with him/her.

Try with different sounds
You should even try doing these ear training exercises with the sounds of various instruments. You will notice that some of the notes and chords, which you are able to recognize easily with one particular sound, will not be easy to recognize once you change the timbre (sound). So you will need to practice with different timbres as well.

Perfect pitch and Relative pitch
Perfect pitch simply means you are able to recognize any note that you hear, without having to touch your instrument. The fact is that very few people in the world have this ability. Some great musicians like Beethoven had it, Yanni has it and maybe some other great musicians. Some people say that this is an in-born talent, either you have it or not, but some ear training software companies claim that their exercises can help you to get this ability.

With Relative pitch, you will play some notes on your instrument, then figure out how far it is from the note you want to reproduce and then move towards that note. This is how a lot of people are able to imitate or reproduce sounds on their instrument. A Lot of people have this ability and you can definitely get your ears to this level.

Ear training software
Finally, if you are really serious about ear training and would like to do it in a systematic manner, just get yourself "ear training" software. These softwares contain a wide range of exercises covering pitch recognition, chords and chord inversions, various chord progressions, scales and modes, and rhythmic patterns. Further, these exercises are graded so that you can try difficult exercises as your ear become better and take it to a different level altogether.

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