No, You Are Not Tone Deaf - Beginner Ear Training

In addition to the PDF there is another attachment of empty tabs. The first page has two measures a stanza and the second page has 4. Print these out and take them to your ukulele class and pass them around. Your club will love you for it! 

Today we are going to work on our ear. Perfect pitch is something people seem to be born with, they can hear a sound and tell you what note it is, they can hear a car alarm and tell you that it is a D minor. This is a gift, and while that is essentially unobtainable for most of us... but relative pitch is not! That is where you can hear a note, someone tells you that it is C, and based on that you are able to identify the next notes played because you have an anchor point to base what you hear off of. This uses intervals to do this. So how are we going to get started, we are going to get started with some very basic ideas that will help us start to hear melody.    

Where to start? 

• We have done ear training in the past based on harmony, meaning the chords. This one is simply hearing a chord and saying if it is major or minor. This is a very beneficial tool believe it or not, a song key has 3 major chords, 3 minor chords and 1 diminished chord. That way if you know the key and you are able decipher if the chords are major and minor then you can just guess which one of three it is, as opposed to one of 6 or 7 
• Click here for the major minor exercises 
• After that we are going to add one dominant chord, meaning the 7 chord. The 7 chord is always the V chord of the key, so then by being able to year the 7 chord you are able to understand the chord progressions even better. Here is the ear training exercise for that.
• Click Here for the multiple chord exercises  

Today's lesson has two different exercises. 

• Higher or Lower, this is very straight forward, you will hear two notes played you have to say which of the two is higher pitched and which of the two is lower.   
• The second one is fill in the blank. It is three notes, you will know the note on the 1st beat of the 1st measure and the 1st beat of the second measure with three quarter notes in between. Those notes will be one of 3 that are provided so you aren't just guessing out of thin air. The chormatic scale has 12 notes, so guessing out of just 3 is much easier.   

All four of these exercises you are able to recreate while you are playing with your friends. Each one. If you are in an ukulele group try to get there 10 minutes early or stay 10 minutes later and do these exercises so you can increase your listening and improve your overall musicianship because a sharp ear will make everything you do with music get easier.