Most guitar players - even those with good technical skill - will often have a terrible ear. The reason (in most cases) is the students lack of dedication to the study of ear training. Why? ...Well, mostly it's because studying ear training is a combination of being very boring and very difficult. If you've let ear training slide in your own musical skill set, then this lesson will be absolutely fantastic... 




Developing ear training skills can be a pretty tough study as far as music skills go. Ear training ability can take a long time to grow on you as a musician and there will be hours of in-depth study that will involve several other music training areas which you’ll need to fully develop before you have a complete handle on being able to listen and learn songs by ear.

And, that doesn't even include learning the chords that fit into a piece of music, transposing and being able to properly chart rhythms and musical notation so that you have the ability to write out your songs in proper, traditional chart-copy form...

The good news is that any musician can learn how to do this. However, it does require a lot of long hours in order to gain the technical skill for being able to learn and copy out recorded music strictly by ear!

Sometimes, people neglect to do certain types of musical training because the study of it, itself seems far too simplistic. And, Ear Training is certainly an area that falls into this type of category.

When it comes to ear training, the initial work seems so simplistic that musicians often blow it off and don’t bother studying it at all.

This isn't good, because in order to be able to learn how to recognize notes, chords and rhythm, you’re going to have to start at the very basics. This means doing analysis and transcription of the most simple melody lines and harmony parts.

These types of lines are most common to and most popular within the works of children’s melodies. This means that children’s melodies are some of the best songs for the initial study of ear training.

In this lesson, we're going to focus on common children’s melodies, and as you watch the video with the ear training segments, I’d like you to stop the recording as much as you feel that you need to in order to learn this melody by ear.

WATCH THE VIDEO:




IMPORTANT: Don’t rush to looking at the answers here in the Blog-Post page at the first signs of adversity. If you rush to the answers and look at the music right away, you'll defeat the purpose of working on these exercises.

Instead, listen to the video and learn each melody by ear... to the best of your ability. Even if it takes you a while to learn it. Do it by ear - that's the exercise.




HEARING SONG MELODIES (Part 1):
Our first study isn’t a very hard melody to learn, but you'll probably need to jump back in the video clip several times in order to hear the song parts played over and over. This is perfectly normal, even for the pros!

Study 1). Arrorró Mi Niño




DEVELOPING CHORD PROGRESSIONS:
Once you’ve developed the ability to hear the simple melodic lines of a children’s melody (like the one above), it’s time to also start learning what chords would fit along with the melody line.

This is where the use of the “I-IV-V” harmony concept in chord progressions can really come in handy. You can use the I-IV-V chord harmony to apply a backing chord progression over any melodic line.

Practice doing this and try to hear what that might sound like if you were to go ahead and play a “I-IV-V” series of chords over the melody above.






HEARING SONG MELODIES (Part 2): 
Now, that you’ve spent some time trying to learn a melody, and you’ve had some experience learning a backing chord progression (associated to the melodic phrases), let’s try all of this again using another simple children’s melody.

Once again, start by listening closely to the melody line, focus on trying to learn it by ear. Remember to stop the video as much as you need to when you’re transcribing the melody…
 
Study 2). On the Bridge of Avignon





Learning a melody along with a set of backing chords is good work, in fact its more than that, it’s incredibly valuable. But, you unfortunately can’t stop there. You’ll need to take your ear training studies a few steps further in order to be able to really build your ear training ability up to much higher levels.

Two further steps I’d like you to take (beyond learning the single-note melody lines and the backing chord changes), will be learning how to accurately write out the rhythms and learning how to properly notate the piece in traditional music notation (not TAB).





TRANSPOSING:
Along with melody work, I also want to add in learning how to transpose any song over to another key.

Why? Because being able to do all of these additional tasks will lift you from being a guitar player, up to being a musician! And, that is a great place to be.

In study 3, we'll take that last piece we practiced and play it in another key. I’d like for you to listen to this new rendition and learn the new key signature that it was transposed into…

Study 3). On the Bridge of Avignon (transposed)




CONCLUSION:
Learning ear training skills can be a pretty tough study as far as music training will go. Ear training ability can take a long time to grow on you as a musician and there will be hours of in-depth study that will involve several other music training areas that you’ll need to fully develop before you really have a complete handle on being able to listen and learn songs by ear.

That includes learning the chords that fit across a piece of music and being able to properly chart rhythms and musical notation so that you have the ability to one day write out music in proper chart-copy form.

The good news is that any dedicated musician can learn how to do this. But, it does require a lot of patience and long hours in order to gain the technical skill for being able to learn and copy out recorded music strictly by ear and by ear alone.




VISIT THE WEB-SITE:
As always, thanks for joining me, if you liked this lesson, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe for more on YouTube, (and remember to hit that bell when you subscribe so that you’ll never miss any of my uploads to YouTube).

Until next time, take care and we'll catch up again on the next lesson. Also, I should let you know about the guitar courses over on my website at CreativeGuitarStudio.com.

I’ve got step-by-step; Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced courses that work alongside of in-depth elective programs to form the best guitar course available online.

The courses work to help you learn to identify what's required to get you up to that next level of guitar playing, in a very organized step-by-step way, that makes sense.

So, I look forward to helping you further at CreativeGuitarStudio.com