The first step in becoming a great Player is becoming a great Listener!

(NOTE: Do not be intimidated by any of the tasks. Pick what you can and chose simple music or slow things down. Accuracy and Confidence come from Repetition and Refinement. Even if you think your notes are wrong, keep going, you might have to sing through all the wrong notes before you find the right ones. Get rid of the intimidation and embrace whatever level you are at so you can grow.)

You’ll often hear many great players state “I did more listening than actual playing” and that’s because one of your greatest assets as a musician is your ear.

Ear training takes many forms, however, one of the most overlooked is simply educating and exposing it to a wide range of music. We are going to refer to this as Ear XP.

XP = Experience Points, Just like in a video game, you accumulate experience points every time you listen and they help you level up. To maximise the amount of XP you get out of listening, we employ “active listening” or “interactive listening”.

To help you gain Ear XP I’ve created a playlist full of lots of diverse artists and styles to help you broaden your listening horizons and I’ve compiled a list of active listening techniques to try. I recommend listening to the playlist on shuffle for 20 minutes at a time. Working through 3/4 of the different listening techniques below.

So, on top of simply listening to the music, it would be beneficial to take part in active listening and analysis exercises. These exercises are going to focus on the the 3 ‘I’s.

Internalise – Imitate – Interact

Pick from the following list at random or look for exercises relevant to your current goals and ability…

1. Identify the instruments
2. Identify the tonality (Major/Minor/Modal)
3. Identify the time signature
4. Identify when the tonic chord is being played
5. Listen for repeated chords
6. listen for repeated progressions/sections
7. Listen for repeated melody notes
8. What do you think the composers intentions are with the piece? what feelings are they trying to create and what techniques are they using to do this?
9. Focus your attention on a single instrument, make everything else blur into the background. What do you think the player is thinking? What emotions do you think they are feeling and why? This will help you identify the emotional response the listener has to techniques like staccato, different vibratos, chromaticism etc.
10. Focus your attention on two instruments at the same time. See if they are interacting.
11. Listen for things you might not have noticed before when only listening passively.
12. Sing/hum along with the bass line
13. Identify the form/structure (32 bars, verses and choruses, AABA etc)
14. Identify any melodic elements you can eg pitches, intervals, contours
15. Sing along/repeat with the melody
16. Listen to a couple of bars, pause, clap or scat back the rhythms you heard
17. Listen to a couple of bars, pause, sing back the melody. Then sing it again and vary it.
18.  Listen to a couple of bars, pause, replay what you just heard in your minds ear
19. Identify what beats events are happening on eg that lick started on beat 3, that drum fill started on beat 2, that melody ended on beat 1
20. Sing any note, try and identify its function to the key.
21. Sing any note, hear how its quality changes as the chords change. Can you identify its quality to each chord? Pause and take your time.
22. sing any note, try and sing up and down the scale using your ear to guide you.
23. Sing any note, maintain that note unless it becomes dissonant to the underlying chord, resolve it using its natural pull to fit the new chord. Stay on this new note and resolve it again when it becomes dissonant again.
24. Close your eyes and visualise the guitar part being played, can you visualise the patterns?
25. Visualise the melody or instrumental parts as they would be written on the stave
26. Visualise the rhythms as they would be written on the stave
27. Sketch the contours of the melody as a graph on the staph, don’t worry about the rhythm.
28. clap along to the music on all 4 beats
29. clap along on beats 2 and 4
30. clap, tap or scat back the rhythms you hear. This can be from the melody, bass line or drums etc. You can pause and work on remembering longer and longer rhythmic chunks.
31. Imagine playing along, adding in your own licks and fill or rhythm parts. What would you add to the performance? Try to hear these ideas clearly in your head in real time.
32. Imagine an additional instrument not on the recording. Imagine a trumpet or horn part adding stabs and fills. Or imagine keyboard comping along. Pay attention to hear rhythms or lines that you might not normally play.
33. Imagine a specific player playing along, try and hear their tone, vibrato and phrasing. What would they play in this situation?
34. Listen to a phrase, pause, sing it back and then sing it back with a melodic variation. Keep repeating with different improvised variations.
35. listen to a phrase, pause, how would you have played this phrase? where would you have stretched the time or embellished? How would that melody sound if it had been you playing it?
36. Repeat 35 but imagine a specific musician playing the phrase instead. How would Richie Blackmore have played that lick?
37. Walk around the room in time to the music.
38. Listen to a short melody, pause, sing the melody back. Sing it back again 5 times in different keys.
39. While you’re listening, sing back the first note of every phrase.
40. When you’re listening, Sing back the last note of every phrase.