[jealousgelatin]

Ui looks nice mate! I’d consider myself an eternally intermediate guitar player. Hit a level of competence and haven’t had the time/drive to move past it. Slightly unrelated, but I’ve always found the current ear training apps to not really translate to helping me pick out songs by ear.

I’ve always wanted an app that focuses more on learning songs by ear, finding the root not and chords/melodies, vs just isolated interval recognition. I’d love to improve at this while on the train which an app would be great for.

I’ve tried: Functional Ear, Earpeggio, and Perfect Ear. Functional ear is my favorite but I find it isn’t translating into my jam sessions.

[epiccoleman]

My experience with ear training is that you really need to connect it to your instrument. If you're on the train where you can't play, obviously it can't hurt to train interval recognition and chord quality - but the ultimate point of training your ear is to build that connection between what you hear in your mind and what comes out of your fingers on the instrument.

If there's one "secret trick" exercise for guitar (and other instruments, I assume), it's singing as you play. Put on a loop and try to just sing the notes as you play them. Or scat a little lick and then try to replicate it on the guitar. It's really effective, it feels like it just "gets to the heart of the issue."

It works to boost interval training too - grab a root note somewhere, play, say, a minor third, get that sound into your head, and then sing it as you play it.

Transcription is also really helpful. Print out some blank tab, download Transcribe! so you can slow / loop sections, pick a song you like, grab your instrument, and just start trying to figure it out. It's grueling at first but it gets a lot easier with practice. As a side benefit, you get to steal licks from players you like.

For the most part, the great players are people who did a ton of this - whether it was rock guys listening to the same blues record over and over and learning the licks, or jazz guys doing obsessive transcriptions. Steve Vai famously found his way into Frank Zappa's band because he sent copies of his transcriptions to Zappa himself.

[zozbot234]

The closest thing to a "secret trick" on guitar IMHO is to learn (1) the diatonic intervals(!), and (2) the fretboard, i.e. how these intervals happen to interact with the guitar tuning you're currently using. Start by singing ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la (solmization) and find the notes on the fretboard as you do so.

(You may notice that we don't use ti or altered solfège syllables: that's because it's convenient to keep mi-fa as the only marker for a half-step and use an exceptional hexachord mutation whenever we need to reach other notes. (For example, the full major scale is sung ut, re, mi, fa, sol, re, mi, fa and descends fa, mi, re, sol, fa, mi, re, ut. Note how the half-steps are consistently mi-fa and fa-mi. Centering the system on that one feature agrees with the guitar's nature as a relative instrument; unlike on the keyboard, we need not think by reference to a single diatonic scale and its 'sharp' and 'flat' notes.)

The system also extends cleanly to other intervals; for example, the minor third is just re-fa or mi-sol, the major third is ut-mi or fa-la, etc. Very easy.

[Libidinalecon]

I also think it just takes your ears much longer to develop than your fingers on guitar if you start from zero.

Even zero though is highly variable. I have noticed how some children have amazing intonation when randomly singing and some are quite bad.

I think trying to copy Steve Vai would be as valuable as trying to copy the way Lebron James plays basketball. Of course, a ton of practice is involved but these are the supreme outliers in terms of being gifted at their task.

For many new guitar players, I would suspect transcribing lines is like trying to dunk the ball when you are only 5'5". I can transcribe anything on guitar 40 years later but I remember the immensely frustrating experience of not being able to transcribe anything. Reading how all the "greats" would do this. My ears just took a very long time to develop. Like 15-20 years long.

Any ear training was just a demoralizing experience for me because I really started from absolute zero with no ability to hear or sing anything note wise. I can remember all the hours I practiced various modes and scales. They were just finger patterns. It took so long to actually be able to hear them.

[Anthony-G]

Thanks. As a beginner guitarist just starting to get into ear-training, that all sounds like good advice. However, I’m curious as to what you mean by “Put on a loop”?

I also looked up Transcribe! and see that they have a Linux installer (32-bit in addition to the 64-bit!) so I must try it out: https://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/download.html

[xcf_seetan]

The only "secret trick" to play guitar that I know is practice, practice, practice. Nothing beats everyday practice, even it is for 10 minutes. Not even telling what you can achieve with 4 hours daily practice. The continuous interaction with your instrument, will make you learn that when you hear a sequence of musical notes, your fingers would naturally went to the correct position on the neck to reproduce it, even without thinking.

[apizon]

Thanks for the feedback

Not sure how those app works but as others have said apps alone will probably not be enough to entirely translate to the instrument and actually practicing picking up songs or transcribing them will be needed.

I can also recommend the great Sonofield Ear Trainer app by Max Konyi for intervals and melody recognition (no relations to him at all but I took some inspiration for the interval recognition part so just want to credit him). He also has a youtube channel and actually released a video called "From Ear Training Apps to Real Music" 2 days ago which might be of interest to you.

As for my app I think it does pretty good at training chord recognition. I also plan on adding lessons on chord progressions at some point in the future so there will be challenges associated to it, I think recognizing progressions is probably the most useful when trying to pick up songs by ear.

[tarentel]

I agree with the other person about singing. If you're any good at recognizing intervals already singing will really make it all click. Taking a few singing lessons would probably really help you even though it seems somewhat unrelated.