Basic ear training for songwriters
How much music theory or ear training do you really need to write great songs? Not as much as you might think. I’ve condensed some of the basics down into a set of simple ear training exercises to get you started, in a manner focused towards the beginner home musician who wants to write better songs.
Beginner ear training exercises for songwriters
Here’s the complete set of beginner ear training exercises; read on for more information and how to get started.
Level 1 ear training: major and minor chords
Level 1a: adding inversions with major and minor chords
Level 2: introducing dominant 7th chords
Level 2a: adding inversions with dominant 7ths
Level 3: introducing diminished and augmented chords
Level 3a: adding inversions with dim and aug chords
Level 4: all chords and their inversions (major, minor, dominant 7th, diminished, and augmented)
How to use these exercises
When you click on any of the exercise links, it’ll take you to a page that looks like this:
The chord ear training exercise viewer at musictheory.net.
To start, click on the speaker icon and you’ll hear a chord, or set of chord tones played in sequence. You can click on the speaker icon again, and listen to the example as many times as you need to.
How to play/replay audio examples in the musictheory.net exercise viewer.
Next, select whether you think the notes that you just heard were a Major triad or a Minor triad (or another chord type, as applies to whatever level of exercise you’re on). If the button flashes green, you got it right, if it flashes red you got it wrong.
Choosing an answer.
Click on the three dot icon on the top right of the page to see the answers, and a progress report of how you’ve done so far.
What to listen for, and troubleshooting
If you’re having technical audio issues, try copy/pasting the exercise link directly into a different web browser; I’ve found Chrome works very consistently.
For the very first exercise (Major and Minor chords), listen for similarities in how major vs. minor triads sound, or similarities in how they make you feel. No matter what notes are being used, a major triad will tend to sound “happy” or “settled”, while a minor triad will tend to sound “sad”, or “angsty”, and more unsettled.
Don’t worry if you get a lot of these wrong at first! Ear training is a skill that takes time and repetition to master, especially if you’ve never done this before. In pro music school, I had two full years of this type of training in a class that met three times a week! So, give yourself plenty of time, and be patient. Touching these exercises a few times a week for shorter periods consistently will lead to better results than trying to move through all of the levels as quickly as possible.
Before you move on to the next level of exercise, you should be able to accurately identify a given chord at least 80% of the time, and you should be able to make that decision correctly within 5 seconds of first hearing the example. Take your time, and try to truly master the level you’re on before moving up to the next level.
To complete the basic ear training set of exercises, complete levels 1-4. All of the different levels of these exercises will follow a similar structure to what I’ve outlined above.
Once you’ve mastered this entire exercise sequence, you should have a much better handle on how the most common chord styles used in songwriting sound, and how they might be combined in different ways to make more unique-sounding chord progressions within your own original music.
The curriculum
This curriculum was derived from the first two semesters of a standard music school performance degree program, but focuses only on the practical skills helpful for songwriting, leaving out much of the not-immediately-practical technical stuff like music notation, chordal analysis, etc.
For many songwriters writing music at home and taking a more intuitive approach, you don’t really need to start out with lots of technical information, though learning music theory and music notation more formally can be very helpful as you get more advanced.
Instead, when you’re first starting out, you just need to be able to hear commonly used chords more accurately, so you can combine them in interesting ways inside of your riffs and chord progressions. That’s what these exercises are made for: training your ears, so you can recognize chord styles and their moods by ear, in order to write music in a more intuitive and fluid manner.
These exercises were generated using the excellent website musictheory.net, in combination with my own expertise.
Level 1 ear training: major and minor chords
Major and minor chords form the basis of most Western popular music. This exercise teaches you how these two different types of chord sound.
Level 1a: adding inversions with major and minor chords
A chord inversion occurs when you take the notes of a given type of chord, and stack them in a different order. An inverted chord has the same general mood or feeling as its non-inverted counterpart, but sounds a little bit different. This exercise teaches you how to recognize major and minor chords by ear, whether they’re inverted or not.
Level 2: introducing dominant 7th chords
A dominant 7th chord is often used as a comma in a musical sentence: you’ll see these used just before a chord progression resolves itself, or at the very end of a musical loop or riff, before it repeats back to the beginning.
There are no wrong answers for this exercise: just hit the button that says “dominant 7th” and the next example will play. Repeat this until you’ve memorized the sound of a dominant 7th by ear.
Level 2a: adding inversions with dominant 7ths
This exercise teaches you how to recognize the sound of a dominant 7th that’s inverted.
There are no wrong answers for this exercise: hit the button that says “dominant 7th” and the next example will play. Repeat this until you’ve memorized the sound of an inverted dominant 7th by ear.
Level 3: introducing diminished and augmented chords
Diminished and augmented chords are similar to major and minor chords, but with slight modifications to one or more of the chord tones. When writing music, they can be used to add spice, additional flavor, or additional interest into your chord progressions. Try throwing in a diminished or augmented chord anywhere you’d use a major or minor chord and see what happens!
This exercise will teach you how to recognize diminished versus augmented chords by ear.
Level 3a: adding inversions with dim and aug chords
This exercise builds upon the previous by adding inversions to diminished and augmented chords, and will teach you to recognize the sound of these chords whether they’re inverted or not.
Level 4: all chords and their inversions (major, minor, dominant 7th, diminished, and augmented)
This final exercise combines everything we’ve learned previously into a single lesson. In this exercise, you’ll be asked to identify major, minor, dominant 7th, augmented, and diminished chords by ear, including all of their inverted variations.
