1-5 · Why Ear Training Matters (and Two Tools to Start Using)

Most of this course is about understanding the fretboard, but ear training is a related skill that many guitarists overlook. Head and hand knowledge can only take you so far. If you want your playing to sound intentional, like the music you imagine in your head, you need to connect what you hear to where your fingers go, and without that connection, your music can sound like an intellectual exercise.

The most fundamental ear-training skill is perceiving how each interval sounds within a harmonic context, or in other words, how each note of a scale sounds inside that scale. Some notes sound much more stable than others. The musical term for that stability is consonance, its opposite is dissonance, and the two form a spectrum. A lot of what drives good music is careful control of dissonance over time. If that all sounds like gobbledegook for now, don’t worry. Just trust that a little careful listening each day is worth the time, and use these two tools to make it easy.

1. Sonofield Ear Trainer (for practice away from the guitar): The app always gives you a tonal center, a steady drone in the background, and it poses musical “questions” that you answer by tapping the interval name for how the note feels relative to that home base. Start with the “Degrees” preset on Novice difficulty, which has no time limit, then work through the three paths. The Path of the Sun builds up the major modes degree by degree, the Path of the Moon does the same for the minor modes, and the Path of the Union builds both at once. The learning curve is gentle, each step forward is a small increment, and a lot of the functionality is free. I recommend 5-10 minutes a day. The paid Pro upgrade adds features and lets you change the instrument sound (I prefer the piano to the synthesizer), and I found it worthwhile. You can get a 20% discount on Pro by visiting https://sonofield.com/fretscience (affiliate link).
2. A “Freeze” pedal (for scale practice at the guitar): An infinite sustain pedal captures a snapshot of whatever note or chord you’re playing when you tap the footswitch, and it holds that sound indefinitely. For almost every exercise in this course, freeze the root note or the tonic chord of the scale you’re practicing. The drone anchors the scale in place and gives your ear a constant reference point, so you’re no longer hearing abstract notes; you’re hearing how each one sits in the scale, which ones blend and which ones pull. Freeze a C and play the C major scale along the B string and you’ll hear it: the 3rd is consonant, the 4th wants to resolve down to the 3rd, and the 7th is the most dissonant of all, pulling your ear up to the root. Keep those qualities in mind as you practice and your brain will start to recognize the “feeling state” of each scale degree without your having to label anything, and the rectangle and stack framework will make it easy to connect the sound to the shape. I don’t like telling people they need to buy gear, but a way to create a drone is a worthwhile investment. I own and can recommend these two pedals¹
   • Electroharmonix Freeze pedal — This is the original analog pedal that created this genre, and it’s still my favorite.
   • TC Electronic Infinite Sample Sustainer Pedal — This is a more modern take with some additional features.

As an alternative to a "freeze" pedal, I created a Drone Generator that you can use for all of the exercises in this course. It has a metronome function, and many exercises in this course provide preset drone/metronome settings you can access with a single click.

Be patient. Developing this skill will take time.