Most listeners would not even notice the difference, unless you played it in both keys, one right after the other.Īll minor keys are also heard by most listeners as interchangeable, but there are important differences between major keys and minor keys. If someone really wants the piece to be in a different key (because it's easier to sing or play in that key, or just because they want it to sound higher or lower), the whole thing can be transposed, but the only difference that would make (in the sound) is that the entire piece will sound higher or lower. The thing that matters is not what note you start on, but how all the notes are related to each other and to the "home" note (the tonic) of the key. Since all major keys are so similar, a piece in a major key will sound almost exactly the same whether you play it in C major or D major. If you play four chords in a row, they can tell you that you played a tonic-subdominant-dominant seventh-tonic (I-IV-V7-I) chord progression.įortunately, having relative pitch is good enough, and for many musicians may even be more useful than perfect pitch, because of the way Western music is conceived. In other words, if you play two notes, they can tell you that one of them is a major third higher than the other. However, most musicians can be trained to recognize relative pitch. (For more on this subject, you may want to look up Robert Jourdain's Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures our Imagination.) This is an unusual skill that even most trained musicians do not have, and research seems to suggest that if you don't have it at a very early age, you cannot develop it. A few musicians with particularly perceptive ears can even tell you that a piano is tuned a few cents higher than the one that they play at home. These people, when they hear music, can tell you exactly what they are hearing: the G above middle C, for example, or the first inversion of an F minor chord. The term ear training refers to teaching musicians to recognize information about notes and chords just by hearing them.Ī few people have what is called perfect pitch or absolute pitch. When musicians talk about ear, they don't mean the sense organ itself so much as the brain's ability to perceive, distinguish, and understand what the ear has heard. If you can identify your starting note, and then identify your intervals as you progress through a piece of music, you're in good shape.\) In my opinion, the most valuable skill set is a combination of pitch recognition and interval recognition. Harmonic minor scale: do re me fa sol le ti do That's what we have solfege for (do, re, mi.) If you want to be able to identify a perfect 4th, sing the opening of "here comes the bride" ("do - fa" going up). Training relative pitch, the ability to identify intervals, is more valuable in my opinion. If an elevator in your office dings at a specific pitch, you could identify it and memorize it. Orchestras tune to the note A every day, so many recognize that pitch. Training absolute pitch, the ability to identify a pitch out of thin air, is a matter of just memorizing a pitch through repetition. It depends upon whether you'd like to train absolute pitch (pitch recognition) or relative pitch (interval recognition.) I would advocate the latter. I like playing along with old movies myself. The tv thing is something I picked up from some guys when I was coming up. Just sight singing and transcribing from records is how alot of players learned to do it. Transcribing from records is great stuff, too. Play along with the jingles on commercials, play along with the background music in a scene, play along with the theme music for the shows.TV provides random melodies a-plenty to ear up and play along with Playing along with the television is great stuff, too. Find simple melodies to sight sing or take bits of the pieces you are working with and sing them Sing the bass, sing the melody (you might need to sing and octave below depending on how high it goes). Take one of your guitar pieces and sing one of the inner voices. When I was in music school, ear training and sight singing were the same course.
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