Listening is the most important skill that a musician can develop. Not only will you learn to “play by ear” as you improve your listening, you will also tighten up your rhythm, heighten your ability to play with expression and increase your collaborative skills when playing with other musicians.
Begin training your ear by learning to accurately match your voice to random pitches. Using a piano or a well-tuned guitar, strike a note that you feel is within your vocal range and sing that note. If you don’t feel that you are singing the note correctly, slide up or down until your voice matches the pitch that you are playing. If you are not certain that you are matching tones, either ask a teacher or a musically savvy friend to check you or record your practice and then listen back to check yourself.
Practice this often. When you are certain that you are consistently and accurately matching pitches, begin playing notes that are not in the comfort range of your voice and practice matching them. Although you may not like the quality of your voice in certain ranges, keep in mind that ear training is not about singing beautifully, it is about developing pitch awareness.
Next, practice matching two and then three tones played in a row. Take your time and be certain that you are singing the notes accurately. Analyze the intervals you are singing in terms of direction and distance.
Now it’s time to learn to sing tonic (scale degree “1”) in any song or logical sequence of notes that you hear. Tonic is the note that sounds like home. If you sing up and down the scale, you will notice that one note feels more stable than the others. That note is tonic.
You can practice finding tonic by playing a short portion of a song, stopping the recording and immediately singing the first note that comes into your head. Alternately, you can have a friend or teacher play a series of notes within a given key and stop suddenly. It is essential to sing the note immediately, before your brain gets to work on it. The harder you work to hear tonic, the more likely you are to experience frustration, so don’t try – just sing!
There is a pretty good chance that the note you sing when the music stops is tonic, but you may need to practice a bit before you are able to consistently find it. If you have someone who is working with you, that person can verify that the note you are singing is tonic. If you don’t have help, you can verify it by playing the scale of the note you have chosen and confirming that every note of that scale works with the passage that you were using. It’s much easier to practice this with a teacher or a musically educated friend, but if you don’t have help, don’t let that stop you. The key to success lies in your willingness to relax and experiment. The most common mistake people make when they begin practicing this exercise is to sing scale degree 5, rather than 1. If you are doing this, simply sing down or up until you reach 1 or 8. In other words, sing the note you have found as “5” and go down (“5, 4, 3, 2, 1”) or up (“6, 7, 8”).