The ability to recognise notes, chords and chord progressions in music is one of the most important, and most useful skills that a musician can possess. The benefits are enormous. A good
musical ear enables you to work out the chords to songs just by listening, jam with other musicians, copy melodies and lead solos, compose music and much more.
These lessons will focus on developing your ‘
relative pitch’ ability, i.e., the ability to identify notes and chords according to how high or low they sound relative to each other.
One way to achieve this is by ‘graded pitch matching’ using self assessment tests. At its simplest, it involves hearing a single note and finding it on the guitar within a very narrow range. Gradually, as your ear learns to distinguish the distance between notes with increasing speed and accuracy, we raise the difficulty level until you are comfortable, not only with single notes but combinations of notes as are found in chords, lead and bass runs and chord progressions.
There are four main areas that we'll focus on in developing your relative pitch ability:
PART 1. Single notes
This involves hearing a note and quickly finding it on the guitar.
PART 2. Melodic phrases
This involves hearing a short phrase of notes and retaining it in memory for long enough to locate and replay the notes.
PART 3. Chord type
This involves recognising chord
types by their unique harmonic effect.
PART 4. Chord tone - pitch matching
This involves matching the pitch of individual notes of a chord and finding them on the guitar to recreate the chord.
PART 5. Chord progressions
This involves recognising the effects produced by chords when we hear them one after the other.
Lesson requirements
To follow this set of lessons you’ll need a properly tuned guitar. Use an electronic tuner for the most accurate results or tune by ear to the six string reference notes provided here.
Tuning reference - The 6 strings (low to high)
(Note* If you can tune accurately to the reference notes by ear you can probably skip the first few parts of the lesson)