Inspired by the pit thread “These Chords Are All Wrong”, I am very interested to know the best techniques for training one’s ear to do the following:
Be able to pick out single notes and know their absolute pitch (not just relative to each other, which I am decent at)
Be able to sing single notes at a certain absolute pitch (oy)
Be able to pick out chords and know what type it is (C7 vs. Cmaj7 vs. Cmin7 vs. C6 vs C* vs. etc) and what inversion it is
Be able to pick out chord progressions and reproduce them after only 1 or 2 listenings
Is it just straight practice? As in brute force try and sing Bb and check against the answer (my guitar)? And keep doing it with random notes until I get it perfectly every time? I’ve tried this, but I gave up after 30 minutes or so. Should I just keep going?
Or are there any nifty techniques that would do me better?
With regards to chords and chord progressions, I’ve just been brute forcing trial and error as necessary, often relying on the bass or highest note and running through likely chords (straight major and minor rarely give me problems anymore, except for figuring out its absolute value, eg E major vs. F major)
The Sol-Fa system is a pretty good way to learn to sing and recognise intervals.
As for chord sequences unless you are naturally gifted the answer is probably just practice – no “nifty tricks”. As someone said in the pit thread, once you have learned and/or worked out a bazillion progressions you get to recognise changes and common sets of chords.
Anyone one with any musical leaning at all will be able to distinguish between major/minor and major7/dominant7 and so on. It may help to have a teacher to point out what to listen for. For inversions? Just go and get the dots.
For absolute pitch you need perfect pitch, which I doubt if you can learn.
Absolute and perfect pitch really aren’t that useful. They’re good for party tricks, but little more. The vast majority of successful musicians have neither. But Small Clanger is right, that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solfege]solfege (not ‘sol fa’) is a good training method. Any other singing is also very useful.
As for chords, and particularly progressions, familiarity is the key (pun not intended…) That really means a familiarity with the theories of keys, modulations, cadences, and so on. This reaches the point where you can often anticipate likely sequences in realtime. Try http://www.tonalityguide.com/ for starters, although it might be a bit heavy-going if you’ve got no knowledge of notation etc.
Hey thanks a lot for the solfege tip! I downloaded GNU Solfege and tried it out for about half an hour, and I already see that I’m recognizing intervals a bit better. Think I’ll tackle interval and chord recognition for a while before moving on to the sequences and theory.