Sing and transcribe as much as possible.
Disagree about really needing a teacher for this unless you have motivation problems or a lack of ideas on how to practice these two things, but some vocal lessons for the basics would not be a bad idea. You ought to sing in solfege (or raga syllables or whatever naming system floats your particular boat) so make sure you understand that.
But you don't need a lot of guidance for technique or complex topics in this case, it is mostly about regular practice of what is basically a simple process.
Computer ear trainers are less helpful, I think. Use them if you want, but don't replace singing/transcription with them.
notes and chords
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- KVRian
- 1297 posts since 23 Jun, 2007 from Findlay OH USA
"Sight-singing and dictation", that's how the local schools used to label courses in ear-training.
I encourage my students to gain as much experience and skill as possible with relative pitch recognition and rhythmic accuracy. I recommend Tom Cato's excellent free (and multiplatform) Solfege for their practice :
http://www.solfege.org/
And again I'll recommend Modus Vetus for traditional ear-training and Modus Novus for advanced non-tonal training. Great books, a bit expensive but worth the cost (if you practice).
I'll also second the practice of transcription. Even if you can't name the musical events you can acquire an enhanced cognitive ability. I have many friends who know nothing about ear-training but they have most certainly trained their ears to a high degree of accurate recognition, i.e. they can learn most popular and jazz tunes "by ear" with little effort.
I wore out a lot of vinyl in Ye Olden Tymes, slowing 45s to 33 rpm, stacking nickels on tone-arms, but it was good aural training.
Remember: Django Reinhardt couldn't even *read*, much less read music, but his predictive ear seemed pretty good to me.
Btw, if you want to name notes and chords directly you're probably after what's called "absolute pitch" aka perfect pitch. However, perfect pitch is not a musical panacea, and just working on your sense of relative pitch may be sufficiently rewarding.
I encourage my students to gain as much experience and skill as possible with relative pitch recognition and rhythmic accuracy. I recommend Tom Cato's excellent free (and multiplatform) Solfege for their practice :
http://www.solfege.org/
And again I'll recommend Modus Vetus for traditional ear-training and Modus Novus for advanced non-tonal training. Great books, a bit expensive but worth the cost (if you practice).
I'll also second the practice of transcription. Even if you can't name the musical events you can acquire an enhanced cognitive ability. I have many friends who know nothing about ear-training but they have most certainly trained their ears to a high degree of accurate recognition, i.e. they can learn most popular and jazz tunes "by ear" with little effort.
I wore out a lot of vinyl in Ye Olden Tymes, slowing 45s to 33 rpm, stacking nickels on tone-arms, but it was good aural training.
Remember: Django Reinhardt couldn't even *read*, much less read music, but his predictive ear seemed pretty good to me.
Btw, if you want to name notes and chords directly you're probably after what's called "absolute pitch" aka perfect pitch. However, perfect pitch is not a musical panacea, and just working on your sense of relative pitch may be sufficiently rewarding.