3 Ways Ear Training Will Make Your Musical Journey More Enjoyable

This article comes from Just Rijna, the founder of StringKick!

If you’ve been learning to play music for a while, you’ll have heard it dozens of times: ear training is ‘good’ for you. But sometimes it can remain a little bit unclear what the exact benefits of training your ears are. So in this article, I’ll discuss three ways a trained pair of ears will not only make you a better musician but will increase your overall enjoyment of music.

1. Ear training will change your experience of music

Say you’ve decided you want to learn to paint. As a beginner, you’ll have certain pieces of art that you love, though it’s not always easy to explain why. But as you learn about brush techniques, composition, the effect of certain colour combinations and so on, you’ll increasingly start to realize how much is involved with creating a beautiful painting. Your appreciation for those works of art only grows as you start to see more and more detail.

Ear training can have the same effect in music. You’ll start to hear details that you’d missed before, pick up on the game of tension and release, differentiate between harmonic colours, follow the melodic storytelling, and much more. In short, ear training allows you to engage with music on a deeper level. This will make you enjoy the music you love even more, or have you fall in love with music you couldn’t fully appreciate before.

2. Ear training brings theory to life

Music theory and ear training are often treated as separate subjects, but they should go hand in hand. Imagine a painter learning about colours saying: “I mixed blue and yellow to get this colour, so it must be green.” Clearly, the painter is missing the most important part, which is simply what the colour green looks like. To use his eyes and look at the colour.

In the same way, you might know that playing a B, D, F# and C# together will produce a Bmadd9 chord. But knowing that is only part of the story. What does the chord sound like? How does it make you feel? What emotions does it convey? All of these questions are central to understanding what this chord is all about. Knowing what something sounds like brings theory to life and makes it useful in everyday playing. Without sound, music theory is just math.

3. Ear training helps you to compose music

Ear training might seem primarily about hearing a piece of music and recognizing musical elements, such as scales, chords and chord progressions. But ear training is also about creating a strong connection between your musical imagination and your hands. Music composition is one area where this is a vital skill. Ear training allows you to quickly translate the ideas in your mind to an instrument, sheet music or music production software. Imagine hearing a beautiful melody but then having to search for the starting note on your instrument… By the time you’ve found it, the rest of the idea might have already evaporated. Instead, you want the ‘translation’ from your imagination to an instrument or sheet music to be easy, fast and effortless.

Of course, composition often involves a degree of chance and randomness. For example, you might ‘find’ a few chords you like, while playing a new instrument that you don’t fully understand. But after that original ‘seed’ or idea, your musical imagination takes over to develop it. Your imagination suggests what should come next, and you need to be able to reproduce that idea on an instrument quickly. Trained ears are a vital tool in that process.

Get started!

Hopefully this article has provided some insight into how ear training can enrich your musical journey. I know training your ears can seem a little daunting. The first steps can feel awkward and tough at times, just like when you first picked up your instrument. But like anything in music, ear training is just a matter of practice. It might not always be easy, but training your ears is one of the most rewarding parts of learning to play music.

Just Rijna is the founder of StringKick, an online training academy for guitar players. StringKick is focused on helping you to train your ears, learn music theory and develop your musicality, all with the goal of making your musical journey more fun and fulfilling.

Published on November 15, 2022