The Art of Ear Training: Part 2 Hum In Uh Hum In Uh Hum In Uh

This is part 2 of the ear training series. In part one we discussed putting on the radio and trying to learn a song in the time it plays on the radio. Hope you all read it and had a good time with it. In part two we are going to go over humming a note to pitch and humming the notes of a chord.

Tune your guitar/bass up to standard pitch. What you want to do is play a note and hum that note to pitch. A good note to start on is your 5th (A) string's C note. It is on the third fret. Play the note and hum it to pitch. Once you have hummed it to pitch, sing the note, saying the name of the note as your singing word. Example: You are on the C note, sing the letter C to pitch. You can tell your in tune by listening for the "waves" to go away. You can also use any tuner that has a built in mic to help you too. After you have it right, just start working your way up the string, humming then singing every note. Do it on every string from the low E to the high E that you can. This will get you use to the way a note sounds. Doing this enough will help you be able to identify notes when you are listening to a song in your car or anywhere else you listen to music. It will "pump up" your ear. It will exercise the snot out of it!

The second thing you can do is play any chord, start with the lowest note , hum it. Go to the 2nd note , hum it. Play and hum every single note in the chord. This will get you use to the notes of a chord and how they sound. Do this one enough and you will be able to identify chords in songs like you will the notes from the previous exercise. Play major, minor, dominant 7, diminished or whatever kind of chord you want to do or that you play. This also will "pump up" your ear.

This is it for "The Art of Ear Training Part 2: Hum In Uh Hum In Uh Hum In Uh. work this one for a while and see you soon for part 3!!

The Art of Ear Training: Part 1....The Shizzle...The Nizzle..... Fo' Shizzle My Nizzle...

This is going to be a series on something very important to a musician, your ear. Having a good ear is at the top of the mountain of things you need to be a good player. Being able to put what's in your head out into your instrument, pick up on a jam without knowing the key, being able to learn songs quickly, being able to know what chord you want to use and how to figure out what you want to solo with are all very well dependant on your ear. We are going to look at a bunch of ways to exercise your ear and get it into shape!

The first thing we are going to exercise your ear with is what I call "shuffle zone." We are going to use being a guitar player as the instrument of choice on this. You can use any one you like though. As a guitar player tune up to standard pitch, plug in and get near a radio. Put the radio dial on shuffle. Whatever station it lands on crank up the music. What you want to try and do is play along with the song and try and figure it out. There is no rewind or start over. You only have the time the song is playing to work with. What you want to do is try and figure out the chords by just doing single notes on your guitar. Once you get an idea of where your at and where to go, start trying to incorporate the major, minor or whatever chords are actually being played. Don't worry about soloing yet. Just try your best to learn the song that's going on at the time. It does not matter what style of music the radio lands on when you shuffle. It can be the crappiest bubble gum pop or a type of music you hate. Your goal is just to be able to get your ear to figure out the song. Once the song ends just start on the next song that comes on. If a commercial jingle comes on just try and play with it too. After a while hit shuffle again and start the whole process over again on whatever station it lands on. You also don't have to use a radio. Pandora, Sirius XM of put random music on from YouTube will work just as well. The point is to get something you are not familiar with and work your ear trying to learn it. It might take a bunch of times doing this to be able to pick up songs quickly but after a while you will be playing along with songs you never heard before! You will also find out most songs sound the same! The same order of structure and beats and a ton of other things! I have used this technique many many times. It has benefited my ear and taught me a ton of songs and also turned me on to a bunch of new music that I would never have found otherwise. So listen playa..... Go get your gitfizzle and git to strumming and pazickin with the "shuffle zone!" Fo' Shizzle my nizzle!


sidenote: and for anyone who has never seen the movie goonies, the picture is of the "truffle shuffle" that the character "chunk" does in that movie....i needed some kind of picture for shuffle and that is the funniest thing i could find!