GUITAR
EAR TRAINING CHALLENGE | David Harsh
If you want to develop your ear for greater musicianship, guitar playing and more, you’ ll appreciate these thoughts.
Ear training is the art of developing our ears so as to recognize musical elements without having to see them on the page.
Since I’ m working to help you with your ears today, you’ ll be best served by watching the video I link to in this article. It contains the three essential elements of ear training and will guide you through each, showing you how to develop your aural skills.
Why practice ear training? Some of the main reasons include:
• You can listen to a song and learn to play it by ear.
• You can lock into rhythm as you play.
• You can play chords and discover which melody might work with them.
• You can create music and make intentional choices about what sounds good.
Any time we play music with other people, whether we know it or not, we are listening. The question is – how well are we listening, and what are we listening for?
The day we stop developing our ears is the day we stop listening to music entirely, which I hope is, well, never!
Music is a lot like a conversation, and the better we listen, the more intentionally we can contribute to that conversation, right? So, the first ear training concept I’ m going to help train your ear with today is rhythm.
There are clinical definitions for rhythm, but the way I like to think of rhythm is: musical sound over time. Some sounds are shorter, some are longer. Some are slower, and some are faster.
62 June 2025 Subscribe for Free...