Your interest in music is great and your knowledge about bands and records is extensive. However, you never learned how to play an instrument and you don’t really know what a chord or a 4/4-rhythm is - you just enjoy the music! But you find that your interest is going beyond just listening to the music and you want to start playing music yourself or at least know a bit about music.

Train Your Ear
If you start training your ear before you start playing an instrument, you will find it much easier to master your instrument. Your ears will develop an understanding of notes and rhythms and you will be able to play a lot of your favourite music by ear.

In addition to that, you will quickly pick up chords and intervals and might be able to impress your friends by naming an interval or chord in a song even before you start playing your instrument!

You love the sound of an acoustic guitar and just borrowed your older brothers’ to practice on. However, no matter how hard you try, it sounds horrible when you play it and the chords never sound right. After some frustrating days you pick up a few easy chords, but can’t really fit them together, and because you concentrate so hard on the chords you can’t keep a rhythm.

Losing Motivation
You quickly put the guitar aside and even though you take it out occasionally, it soon becomes just another thing to dust off once in a while in your room. Even though you were highly motivated before you tried for the first time, you became frustrated and gave up.

Solution:
A combination of practising your instrument and training your ear will help develop your understanding of the music you are trying to play. You will also be able to hear if a chord sounds right or not without having to look at tab charts all the time. Motivation will remain high because results are seen much faster than without ear training and you are less likely to get frustrated and give up.

You decided to take expensive piano lessons given by a local teacher, but you find it hard to play the songs and exercises your teacher has given you. When you are at home practising, you feel completely lost, because it is much easier to do your exercises when the piano teacher plays along with you. You love playing the piano but do not feel that you are improving very much and soon piano lessons become a burden to you.

Solution:
A good musical ear will help you when you practise at home without the hand of a music teacher. You will be able to find desired tones by ear and will soon grasp reading notes because you will become better at hearing sheet music in your head. This will improve your self-confidence and you will progress much faster with your teacher.

You have managed to learn some chords and have no trouble playing along to various tunes. But you are still motivated and want to become a better guitarist. Luckily, there’s a band at your school that wants you to join in. The only problem is that you have to play lead guitar and you have no idea how to play a solo. Furthermore, you have trouble playing your favourite songs, because you can’t find the right tabs for them or they are too expensive to buy.

Trouble Feeling the Music
You might buy different books on scales, but quickly give up because the theory behind it is too tough and tedious to read. You then try to just follow the music the band plays, but you can’t keep up with the others and your solos are played hesitantly and with lots of mistakes, because you can’t improvise straight from your mind.

Solution:
With ear training you will be able to play the music you intend to play. You will become much better at improvising and soloing on your instrument, because you will be able to find the desired tones by ear. This will develop your ability to interact with other musicians. Your improved musical ear will also help you to copy chords or solos straight of a cd.

Your ambitions for becoming a great musician are very high, and you manage to keep your motivation through many hours of practising every day. Now you want to move up a level and start studying at a music conservatory. However, even though you can play almost everything on your instrument, you have very little knowledge about music theory or you have trouble using your knowledge when playing music and in order to be accepted at the conservatory you need to excel in this area.

Trouble Improvising
You can hear the difference between a minor second and a perfect fourth but you can’t name them, and you have no idea how to identify a chord or even transcribe it, let alone follow a rhythmic pattern from sheet music.

Another scenario could be that you have a good knowledge of music theory but you have a hard time using it when you play or improvise. Instead of using your ear and feeling, you constantly think in scales and chord progressions.

Solution:
By training your musical ear, you will soon be able to distinguish different intervals from each other. The more complex ear training lessons you complete, the greater your musical knowledge becomes. That means you will be capable of recognizing tones, intervals, chords, major/minor tonality, scales, seventh chords, dominants and rhythmical phrases. Musicians, who are well versed in musical theory, will get better at improvising because they can now use that knowledge and their musical ear when playing. Several students at music conservatories around the world are using EarMaster to train their musical ear.