Ear training is one of the most neglected things among guitarists. A lot of people find it daunting, partly because it's so hard to measure. If you go from 100 bpm to 110, you know you've got 10% faster. With your ears you can't really put a number on it, so people get put off.
So here's my framework. You don't have to do all of it, just the bits you find useful. Over time your ears should improve, and so should your playing. You'll probably find you remember songs better and have more creative ideas too.
Start with two intervals: minor and major second ▶ 0:42
An interval is just the change in pitch from one note to another. To keep things simple, think in semitones. A semitone is one fret: frets 5 to 6, 11 to 12, 0 to 1, or 1 back to 0.
I use a quiz website for this (I like tonedear.com, but there are others, and there's my own ear training tool too). Start an interval quiz and untick everything except:
- Minor second: one semitone, a one-fret gap.
- Major second: two semitones, a two-fret gap.
These are the two main intervals you'll come across, and you build everything else off them. The quiz plays two notes and you decide which it is.
Use song references ▶ 2:31
The trick I use is associating each interval with a song.
- Minor second: the Jaws theme.
- Major second: the first couple of notes of Happy Birthday.
- Minor third (three frets, like the 9th to the 12th fret): the first few notes of Seven Nation Army.
- Perfect fifth: Star Wars.
Over time you stop thinking about the song and just recognise the sound. You'll get quite a lot wrong at first. Don't worry, this takes practice.
Lower doesn't mean minor ▶ 3:31
A mistake a lot of people make: when the two notes are low, or the interval goes down in pitch, they assume it's minor. And when the notes are high, they assume major. That's not true. Two very low notes can be one fret apart or two frets apart. What makes it minor or major is the fret distance, not whether it sounds lower or higher.
Add intervals by contrast, not in order ▶ 5:43
There's a big list of intervals in these quizzes. I'd ignore the minor and major ninth for now. They're not a priority yet.
Next, take away the first three and work on just two that are easy to tell apart:
- Octave: super clean, the same note higher.
- Major seventh: pretty dissonant. It sounds like it wants to be an octave, like it's stopped just short.
Then add the minor second, major second and minor third back in. Now when a new interval plays, first ask: do these notes sound close together, or really far apart? That rules out half the options straight away. Then if it's far apart, does it sound clean like an octave, or not quite there like the major seventh?
From there, add the perfect fifth to split the difference. If it doesn't sound like either bracket, it's probably the fifth. Then keep working inwards: major third and minor seventh, then perfect fourth, major sixth, tritone and minor sixth. Personally I always struggle with sixths, so don't worry if you do too.
Move on to chord types ▶ 9:35
You don't always hear notes one at a time, so work on chords the same way. Start with just major or minor. Does it sound happy or sad? I find minor chords sound quite dramatic. And the same warning applies: a higher chord isn't necessarily major and a lower one isn't necessarily minor.
Ignore augmented for now, as it doesn't come up very often. Add diminished next, because it sounds quite distinctly different. Then these are the chord types I'd recommend a guitarist gets the hang of:
- Suspended second and fourth (sus2, sus4)
- Dominant 7th, major 7th and minor 7th
- Probably diminished 7th
- Major 6th, and maybe minor 6th
- Half-diminished 7th at a push
If you can hear all of those well, you're doing well. I'm not perfect at them either. The core ones are what you'll come across in contemporary music, and the different types of diminished 7th aren't so common. Honestly, I'd focus most on intervals, because chords are made up of intervals.
Know the intervals on your fretboard ▶ 13:11
Next, take the quiz to your guitar and try to find the notes it plays. Use your ears first, and only use the guitar to check, or if you're really stuck. You don't want to rely on recognising shapes. But being able to find roughly where a note is on the fretboard is a really important skill.
For that, you need to know how to play each interval. Here they all are from one root, the 5th fret on the low E string, which is A.
e|----------------|--------------------|-----------| B|----------------|--------------------|-----------| G|----------------|--------------------|-----------| D|----------------|--------------------|-5---6---7-| A|----------------|-4---5---6---7---8--|-----------| E|-5-6--5-7--5-8--|-5---5---5---5---5--|-5---5---5-|
The first three are on one string: 5 to 6 (minor second), 5 to 7 (major second) and 5 to 8 (minor third). Play those two notes one after the other. The rest pair the 5th fret on the low E with a note on the A string (major third, perfect fourth, tritone, perfect fifth, minor sixth) or the D string (minor seventh, major seventh, octave). (The major sixth isn't in this set.) Things get more complicated on the higher strings because of how the guitar is tuned, so stick to these for now.
Sing the interval from the root ▶ 15:35
A good next step: play only the root note and see if you can hear, or ideally sing, an interval above it. Play the A, then sing a semitone higher and come back. Then a major second (think Happy Birthday), a minor third, then bigger ones like a minor seventh.
The big ones are hard to pull out of nowhere. I went for a major seventh instead of a minor seventh, but with a couple of goes I got close.
Play melodies you know by ear ▶ 16:53
Take a song with a pretty recognisable vocal melody and see if you can play it on guitar. That trains the intervals, trains you to find roughly where a pitch is on the fretboard, and gets you learning longer sequences. You might even find some of those melodic ideas creep into your own playing.
Sing a phrase, then play it ▶ 17:20
If you know your scales well enough, put on a backing track in a key you're comfortable jamming in and try to hum or sing a little phrase before you play it. That's quite tricky. If you struggle, play a phrase first, sing it back, and then try doing the two together. Start really simple, like a little minor rundown from A.
You don't have to sing brilliantly. I'm making no effort to sound nice. As long as you know which note you meant to hit, that's the important thing. Unless you want to be a singer, pitchiness doesn't matter.
Be patient with it ▶ 18:12
This won't come to you overnight. I couldn't tell you when I suddenly got quite good at picking songs up by ear. You just get more and more accurate. And the good news is, if you're one note out, you'll often hear it quickly, move up a fret, and there you are.
So start today with just the minor and major second, a few minutes a session, and use the Jaws theme and Happy Birthday to tell them apart. When you're getting most of them right, add the next pair.
