(Image credit: Frank Micelotta/Getty Images) It may be helpful to sing the notes as you imagine them being played. To take this a step further, try this exercise: without a guitar at your disposal, picture the guitar’s fretboard in your mind, and then envision playing something so that you will “hear” and “see” the notes as they are played. When you finally do pick up the instrument, you will discover that you will instinctively be able to play these ideas that have taken form in your mind. The cool thing that happens is that you’ll begin to hear music more clearly in your head, allowing you to formulate musical ideas – write music – within your head, without the aid of a guitar. If you work on this every day, you’ll find yourself getting better and better at it, and it will become easier to do. Whether you stay within one octave of the guitar, or you sing the notes an octave lower than the sounding pitches, or you use falsetto to hit the high notes, you must be able to recreate all of the notes played on the guitar with your voice. This is an exercise in discipline: do not play anything that you cannot follow perfectly with your voice.
Don’t start wandering off into your favorite guitar licks to play save that for another time, when you’ve developed your ear to the point where you can sing just about anything you can play. First, only play/sing notes that fall within the key, staying within a basic note structure of a five-, six- or seven-tone scale. This is an exercise in discipline: do not play anything that you cannot follow perfectly with your voiceĪnother good thing to do is to record a simple one-chord vamp to play over. The idea is to endlessly improvise and sing what you are playing, using any key. Whether you’re soloing over a rhythmic vamp or are playing alone in free time, you have to really stick with it, and don’t allow yourself to slip up or drift into something else. This is an easy way to get your ear in sync with the sounds your fingers are creating. Once you feel comfortable, take a little piece of that scale, say, the notes C, D, E and F, and create a very simple melody with these notes for you to sing simultaneously, à la jazz guitarist George Benson. Start with one note: play the note, sing it, and then play and sing the note simultaneously. For example, you can play a C major scale (C D E F G A B) in any position – preferably one that is physically comfortable for you – and sing each note of the scale as you play it, being very careful to sing on pitch as accurately as possible. One of the easiest ways to begin working on ear training is to sing what you play. I believe it is extremely important to put aside some time dedicated solely to focusing on ear training. Below, I have outlined some of the ways a guitarist can work on ear training exercises using just the guitar.Īs guitarists, there are certain things that most of us do that are simply part of the program: we learn some scales, develop some exercises intended to improve our physical abilities, work on chord forms on different parts of the neck, etc. If you are just sitting there with a guitar, there are still a great many ways to develop your ears, in the quest to strengthen the connection between your head and your fingers.
Transcribing is an art that takes a lot of practice and a study that I encourage everyone to experiment with.īut fear not: you do not need to have the ability to sight-read or transcribe in order to practice ear training exercises. Many musicians, however, do not have the ability to pull the sounds – guitar solos, rhythm parts, melody lines, etc. The most well-known example of my guitar-based transcribing labors is The Frank Zappa Guitar Book (Hal Leonard), for which I transcribed, among other things, the entire Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar series of recordings. I’ve always considered transcribing to be an invaluable tool in the development of one’s musical ear and, over the years, I have spent countless glorious hours transcribing different kinds of music, either guitar-oriented or not.