Become a better musician: Ear training
Ear training is the process of developing your ability to recognise and correctly identify musical sounds such as pitches, intervals, chords, scales, melodies and rhythms.
For any musician who is serious about wanting to improve their musicianship ear training really is a must. The ability to play by ear, to learn new material and to jam with other musicians, as well as your overall understanding of music, are all greatly improved by ear training.
A musician with a well developed ear will learn new material by ear quickly and will not become lost when someone else in the band suddenly modulates to a different key or starts throwing in chord substitutions.
Practising your particular instrument is certainly an important part of improving your musicianship, but if you're really serious about progressing then part of your regular practice schedule should be given to training yourself to recognise more and more complex musical sounds by ear alone.
One way of working on ear training is to work with another musician and each take turns in playing intervals, chords, scales, melodies, and rhythms, with the listener attempting to identify what has just been played in a blind test. This method has the disadvantage that it is really rather boring for the musician who is simply playing random intervals, chords, scales, melodies, and rhythms.
Another method of ear training is to record yourself playing various random intervals, chords, scales, melodies, and rhythms. When you have enough of them recorded you can then randomly play them back and attempt to identify what is being played.
In order for this to develop your musical ear though you need the test to be a test of your ability to identify musical sounds by ear alone, and not be merely a test of memory. The test will not be truly random as when you do correctly identify what you have just played back on the tape there is a possibility that you are simply remembering what you played when you recorded it, and not truly identifying it by ear alone.
The ideal method of ear training involves using a software package, for obvious reasons; computers excel at generating random sequences within specified parameters, which is precisely what you need to be happening with any ear training method.
There's an ear training software package from Jana Software that's worth checking out. They offer a free trial download. It's called Personal Ear Trainer, and you can get the free trial here. On checking out the program, I found it to be simple to install and run, and it offers sufficient control over its parameters to enable you to work on ear training at any level you like, from absolute beginner to highly advanced.
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