Guitar Ear Training: The Secret to Better Guitar Playing

Do you always find yourself searching for tabs of your favorite songs on the Internet? You’ve been learning guitar for a while but have a small repertoire? Or you want your solos to sound fresh and stand apart from all the mundane stuff out there?

The key to all this and more is Guitar Ear Training. Ear Training is one skill that every beginner avoids and realizes the mistake much later in their Guitar learning journey.

The ability to play what you hear is what sets musicians apart from campfire guitar players. The sooner you start working on your ear training the farther it’ll take you in perfecting your musicianship.

In my experience the best and the easiest way to start ear training is to start transcribing music. In this article you’ll learn different techniques and methods available for ear training besides various apps/websites you can explore to help you with ear training.

What is Ear Training?

Ear training in music is the systematic approach to training your brain to identify musical sounds by listening and reproducing them accurately using your own voice or an instrument.

Ear training includes identifying notes, scale tones, note intervals, chords, chord progression and rhythm.

Babies learn to speak human language by listening. You listen to grown ups around you, start babbling and over a period of a few years start to speak the language – without knowing alphabets, words or grammar.

Similarly, with a systematic, repeated exposure to music sounds (pitch) trains your brain to recognize those pitches in diverse settings. 

However the process of learning differs slightly from how we learn a human language. Which is what we’ll explore in this article.

How Ear Training Helps Guitarists

Training your ear for music has clear and permanent benefits for all musicians including Guitarists. In fact, most famous Guitarists in the popular music genre don’t read music but trust their ears to make memorable music. 

For those new to ear training, here’s a few of the many benefits of ear training that I hope should serve to make ear training a part of your daily practice routine.

Learn Songs Faster

The first benefit of ear training, at least for me, is learning songs faster. 

As you improve your guitar technique, music theory, along with your music listening skills, you’ll start deconstructing musical elements of songs faster.

Figuring out a song’s chord progression, melody or strumming pattern became easier. And that’ll help build a wide repertoire of songs you can play.

You’ll become better at improvising

One of the most fundamental skills needed to make your improvisations sound interesting is the ability to play the right note at the right time.

That is instead of technically targeting chord tones over a backing track you’ll use your ears to find the right notes to play. 

This approach sets you free to focus on making music instead of continuously chasing chords which maybe change too quickly for you to keep up.

You’ll spot mistakes (if any) in written music

Imagine you’ve got a gig this weekend and the band wants to include Nirvana’s classic ‘About A Girl’. You download the tab from a website and start practicing.

As you practice, you feel the Intro and Verse somehow sound different from the song.

Well, you’re right. The tablature says you should play an Em and G for Intro and Verse but actual chords played by Kurt Cobain are E5 and G.

Subtle difference but important nevertheless.

An unintentional mistake in written music is only natural. But as a guitarist it’s important you spot those tiny errors and keep our performance sound authentic. This is possible only with ear training. 

Freedom to do your own thing

Jazz musician Duke Ellington set all musicians free when he said, ‘If it sounds good, it is good’.

He wasn’t downplaying the importance of music reading skills but rather asking musicians to trust their ears more than the written note. 

Think of Kurt Cobain. He wasn’t a technically accurate guitar player. The hit album ‘MTV Unplugged in New York’ has umpteen instances of incorrect chord voicings (maybe he was being deliberate). 

But his music sounds magical – and that’s what matters.

A well trained ear will equip you with the confidence to translate music that’s in your head onto your guitar and mesmerize your audience.

Better and creative use of music theory

This is an extension of the point I made above. If you know your music theory, a good ear will help you ‘break out of the box’ as the need be. You’ll know when, what and how to step away from theory concepts and create your unique sound.

For example, you may take the familiar I, IV, V 12-bar standard blues progression and change it to say, I, iii, vi, V to suit your music. 

Or, borrow chords from A Minor for a song written in the key of G instead of it’s relative minor E and make it sound good.

Music is a blank canvas. Music Theory and Ear Training are two of the many essential tools you have to paint it the way you like it.

A Practical Approach to Ear Training

Ear Training for Guitarists can be divided into two distinct approaches – perfect pitch and relative pitch.

Perfect pitch is the ability to identify a note without the use of a reference note. So for example, if I play any note on a piano or a guitar and you identify it correctly, you have a perfect pitch.

Whereas relative pitch makes use of a reference note to identify the note being played. In other words, you use the sound of the first note (relative) to correctly identify the sound of the second note.

In my experience, developing your relative pitch is a pragmatic and the widely adopted approach to ear training

If you wish to know more check out musician and teacher, Rick Beato, veteran music producer and educator explaining perfect vs relative pitch in greater detail in the video below.

Essential Ear Training Techniques For Guitarists

Assuming that you’re convinced about working on your relative pitch let’s discuss the different techniques available for you to develop a well rounded ear as a Guitarist. 

Be aware though. My intent here is to help you become a better Guitarist and not turn you into a pitch identifying nerd. Choose wisely.

Scale Ear Training

Scale Ear Training is the ability to recognize sounds of different scales in music. It starts with the most basic form, i.e. identifying the major scale and can go all the way up to identifying all the modes of major, minor or pentatonic scales.

If you can sing the solfege (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do) your ears already know the sound of the major scale. 

You can begin by playing and hearing the sound of the major scale on your guitar in different keys and positions on the fretboard.

In fact, our brains are wired to hear and sing the correct notes of different scale. Here’s proof…!

Interval Ear Training

An interval in music is the distance between two notes. On Guitar musical notes are separated by frets on the fingerboard. 

The major scale I mentioned above is nothing but a collection of music intervals.

There are 6 types (or qualities) of intervals of interest to guitarists – Major, Minor, Perfect, Unison, Augmented and Diminished. 

Of these five, you’ll use the first three for a considerable amount of time in your journey to Guitar mastery.

And for each of these intervals you train your ear to correctly identify melodic and harmonic intervals.

Melodic interval is the distance between two musical notes (or pitches) played separately. For example the distance between the note C and E is called a Major third.

Harmonic interval is the distance between two or more musical notes played together. For example, you get the C Major chord when you play the notes C, E and G together.

Music interval training is an absolute must as it is the building block of melody and harmony.

Chords Ear Training

Chord ear training is the next step after learning to clearly identify harmonic intervals mentioned earlier. You begin by learning to identify chords followed by chord progressions.

If you’re a singer/songwriter or wish to learn songs by ear, identifying chords and chord progressions correctly is a vital skill that’ll help improve your songwriting skills.

Here too, the most important chords a guitarist must focus on are major and minor chords followed by suspended chords and of course power chords.

Rhythm Ear Training

“Hey, what’s the strumming pattern of [insert your favorite song title]?”

I’m sure you’ve heard this question before or maybe asked it yourself as a beginner.

I did too. It’s the most common beginner question and there are umpteen videos on the subject on Youtube.

Rhythm is the essence of music. Without rhythm, pitches are just a bunch of different sounds. Rhythm is what transforms sounds into music to our ears.

The ability to hear, understand and write rhythm is an essential skill for every musician. 

Training your ear to hear and identify the rhythm of a song will not only help you learn songs faster but also aid your creativity and apply unique and interesting rhythms to a popular song.

Functional Ear Training

The title sounds geeky but it’s just another form of training to hear and understand music but a bit different.

In functional ear training unlike other methods you focus on learning to distinguish between tones in the context of a particular key. In music every note or tone performs a certain function depending upon it’s place in the scale and the key.

For example, in the major scale in the key of C the fourth note, F plays a certain function (i.e. makes a peculiar sound). 

Now if we changed the key to say E, then the note A which is now the fourth note will sound exactly the same as the note F in the key of C! Amazing, isn’t it?

In other words, functional ear training will also help with relative pitch, interval recognition and melodic dictation.

Ear Training Skills To Avoid For Guitarists

Ear Training for musicians is a vast subject and includes training for non-instrumentalists such as music producers. As Guitarists you don’t need to invest time and effort in these areas. 

As a beginner and self-taught Guitarist it’s possible to head in the wrong direction training your ears.

Ear Training modules such as Audio Frequency Training, Level Matching, Audio Effects Training, Compression Analysis are required for music producers and sound engineers but not for a Guitarist.

The Only 2 Methods you need for Guitar Ear Training

The two methods discussed here are old school but have stood the test of time for generations. Yes the Internet and the Smartphone has made it way too easy and fun to train our ears and we’ll be discussing those.

But including at least one of the below in your practice routine on a daily basis will take your Guitar skills to a completely different level.

If you wished you knew the secret of Guitar greats such as B.B.King, George Harrison, David Gilmour, Mark Knopfler or John Mayer – here it is.

Transcribing Music

As a Guitarist, I highly recommend this approach. I don’t discount the importance of training tools, websites and apps for Guitar Ear Training. But from my own experience, nothing comes close to the ability to reproduce the sound you hear, onto your instrument.

Also called learning/playing by ear. Transcribing is the art of working out songs by ear. And the sooner you start the better. You can transcribe everything – riffs, melodies, solos and chord progressions. Beginners can start by working out simple melodies such as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Baba Black Sheep.

Later you can progress to riffs, solos and chord progressions.

I admit transcribing is frustrating. Even figuring out a I, IV, V power chord progression in Lenny Kravitz hit song Fly Away took me hours to get right when I started.

But if you stick with it, I promise transcribing will transform your playing. You’ll almost never need to refer to a tab. Not to mention you’ll actually be able to write better melodies and chord progressions for your original work (if you’re interested in going that way).

And as you get better at it, you’ll not only save money canceling tab website subscriptions but also make some extra bucks selling your own tabs online. Cool hunh! 🙂

Sight Singing

Most likely you’re not very eager at the idea of singing.

But sight singing won’t turn you into Pavarotti. Sight singing is simply the ability to sing a written piece of music with accuracy. 

And as you learn to sing the correct notes, you’ll also start recognizing the correct notes when you hear them on your instrument.

You already know a bit of sight singing. If you can sing solfege syllables [Do, Ri, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do] you know how to sing the major scale.

Sight singing works on different aspects of your musicality including pitch accuracy, rhythm skills as well as interval identification.

Based on my own experiences with each, both are useful in developing your ear as a musician. But given our time constraints, I’d choose transcribing over sight singing as it’s way more fun!

Apps & Websites On Ear Training For Guitarists

Technology put to the right use can do wonders. The Internet & Smartphone revolution has made learning music easy and fun. 

Access to high quality ear training is right inside your phone. 

And the best thing about ear training apps is they set you free. You can do a 5-10 minute session anytime of the day. You don’t need your Guitar for that.

Coupled with the methods above, the following apps may help shorten the journey to develop a refined musical ear.

The apps / websites mentioned below are designed to help you work on one or more skills/techniques we discussed above.

However, be aware that software is simply a supplement to your time transcribing songs. They cannot replace the ability to reproduce the sound you hear onto your Guitar. And if you’re time constrained, just stick to transcribing.

Functional Ear Trainer

This is my favorite ear training app. The training modules go perfect with the two methods to ear training described above – play by ear and transcribing.

I’ve already described the concept behind Functional Ear Training that I hope you have read and understood.

If you just want one app to cover all ear training (except rhythm) then I highly recommend you download this one. A daily 10-minute training routine is guaranteed to help you recognize melodies accurately.

The default sound with the app is of a piano but you can install instrument plugins of your choice for the price of a pint.

The software is also available for Mac, Windows and Linux if you wish to run it on your PC.

Complete Ear Trainer

Complete Ear Trainer (CET) is another app available on Android, iPhone and iPad that’ll be a great addition to your music learning app collection.

Slightly different in approach from Functional Ear Trainer, CET takes the relative pitch and interval training route to help you reach your ear training goals.

The app comes free with basic exercises. The paid version gives you access to 150+ progressive drills with increasing levels of difficulty, 24 intervals for each scale types, melodic dictations and chord progressions.

You can also create custom drills to suit your requirement and also share and invite friends to join them – great option if you’re a Guitar teacher.

Sight Singing School

Sight Singing School is a website dedicated to learning ear training with sight singing. Created by Australian composer Mark O’Leary, the website is a collection of carefully selected 399 musical examples and exercises. An annual subscription will cost you $30 AUD.

It begins with simple exercises comprising just two notes of the major scale and goes all the way upto modes and chromatic melodies. It’s hard but worth it.

Sight singing as a method has a multitude of benefits besides training your ears. Doing the exercises you’ll not only train your ears to identify notes and intervals but also helps with reading sheet music, pitch correction and rhythm development.

Though I feel, the website may be better suited for classical or Jazz Guitarists but if you’re curious you can surely check it out.

Complete Rhythm Trainer

I’ve said this in more than one article here and I’ll say it again – rhythm is the essence of music. Without rhythm there’s no music.

Here’s my favorite video that beautifully explains the essence of music – rhythm.

Interestingly, basic rhythm is already coded in your brain. There’s a reason mom and dad sang all those nursery rhymes to you.

Now you just need to take your basic rhythm knowledge and raise it to a level needed to learn and make music with your Guitar.

Complete Rhythm Trainer (CRT) is a thoughtfully designed app that takes a step-by-step, structured approach to improving your rhythm skills. Over 200+ exercises are carefully designed to take your rhythm skills from 4 beats to a bar to polyrhythms.

My favorite feature in this app is the drill types. Each new rhythm element is introduced with at least 3 different drill types – rhythm imitation, rhythm reading and rhythm dictations. Practicing these drills will give you a thorough workout and develop your sense of rhythm.

Conclusion and How To Begin….

Hope I’ve convinced you enough in investing your time in ear training. Without ear training your guitar skill will unfortunately remain limited, you’ll always be dependent on tabs and lead sheets and worse might get bored of the Guitar itself.

And we don’t want that.

Start with just 5 minutes. 

One of the best places to start is figuring out music intervals. Here’s how you begin.

Happy Learning!