Q&A: I’m getting no results from my ear training – should I give up?

We’ve all been there. You’re working away diligently, trying to improve your musical ear, but as days, weeks, even months pass with no apparent progress, you start to wonder: should I just give up?

We had a great question from @Lutemann on YouTube this week:

“So I wanted to be able to play on sax what I hear in my head. I wrote out 60 diatonic patterns (Example: 5, 4, 1, 7, 6, 8). Then I would pick a key and sing these patterns while fingering notes on the sax. I did this for a couple of months and got no results. Do you think I gave up too soon?”

Here’s my answer…

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• @Lutemann on YouTube, thanks for the question!
• Musicality Now: Q&A: What can you do if you struggle to audiate (imagine music)?
• Ear training: How long does it take?
• Musicality Now: Is it time to “break up” with music?
• Musicality Now: When to stick with it – and when to move on

Transcript

So, as I mentioned in the first episode of this rebooted series of Musicality Now, I don’t get to do Q and A with our students very much any more. We have so many members at Musical U asking questions every week, and we have a phenomenal team, and that’s the combination now! I’m not really in that picture. So we have live calls happening every week and a monthly Q and a where people can ask questions and get direct help, but it’s very rarely me in the seat any more answering questions.

But that’s what we’re going to be doing on today’s episode, which I’m super excited about. This was a question we had over on our YouTube channel this week, and it was on our video, which was “what to do if you struggle to imagine music in your mind?”

And it was a slightly related question. It definitely has to do with audition, but let me pull the question up and we’ll dive in. So @Lutemann asked:

“So I wanted to be able to play on sax what I hear in my head. I wrote out 60 diatonic patterns, meaning patterns from the major scale example 541768.

Then I would pick a key and sing these patterns while fingering notes on the sax. I did this for a couple of months and got no results. Do you think I gave up too soon?”

There is so much to talk about here, and the first thing to say, I instinctively want to shout this, I’m going to hold back, but the first thing to say is, just don’t give up!

It’s amazing, at this point… You know, when I started Easy Ear Training back in 2009, which then became Musical U, I definitely had the belief that you should never give up and that everyone can do it. And I had what we would now call our Universal Potential pillar belief that, you know, these things are possible for anyone.

You don’t need to be born with talent or gifted. And I had enough of my own experience to kind of know that was true. But what’s amazing is that these days we see day in, day out at Musical U, musicians of every kind, whether they’ve been learning for a few months or a few decades, all instruments, all styles, all ages from 16 through to 96, learning these things successfully.

So I just want to say that to really hammer home, never give up. If you worry that you’ll never get it or that your ear isn’t good or that you’ll never manage to play by ear or improvise the these things absolutely are possible for you.

So with that being said, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sometimes give up on the way you’re currently trying.

I remember I wrote an article back in the day, this must have been around 2012, maybe, a really, really long time ago now. I wrote an article along the lines of “how to know when to give up and when to keep going” with ear training in particular. And if I can dig it out, I’ll put a link in the show notes.

I think – I hope! – the advice there is still relevant, but there’s definitely kind of a timing or a pacing in terms of expecting results from ear training. And certainly if you’re doing the same thing for a few months and seeing no progress, give up much sooner.

You know, with the right approach – and we’ll dig into that a bit in a moment – you really should be able to see results, maybe not daily, but certainly on a weekly basis.

And that’s a big reason we have our Progress Journals inside Musical U.

You know, our members post updates typically every week on how their ear training, how their musicality training, how their superlearning is going. And it’s great for reflection and it’s great for getting input from the team and other members, but you can really see clearly there that there should be weekly progress.

So in terms of, you know, did I give up too soon? I would say you probably persisted a bit too long with that method, but you definitely shouldn’t give up on trying to achieve that goal of playing by ear, whatever you want to on sax.

So the next thing to say is that I love the attitude here. Like this chap, @Lutemann, he has a YouTube channel, you should check it out. He has great guitar videos as well as maths videos, amazing! But he clearly has a great attitude, which is: I’ll figure it out.

You know, he was innovating. He came up with his own exercise, and he clearly had the discipline and the dedication to follow through and give it a good try. I also love that he was singing.

We’re huge proponents of that at Musical U, whether or not you consider yourself “a singer”, there’s nothing like your own voice for developing your musicality. And that deep biological connection between your ears and your voice mean that if you’re not singing as part of your ear training, you are absolutely missing a trick.

So what’s super interesting here is that actually this exercise is not a bad one. You know, the fundamental idea here of singing the scale degrees as you finger it on your instrument in different keys with different patterns. Nothing wrong with that.

The devil is in the details. And this is kind of the downside of innovating and trying to figure it out yourself. And even the dangers of DIY, like if you do an online course… We used to really rail against courses back in the day, and we’ve ended up finding a way to do a course that works really well.

But the big danger with courses is that if you put everyone on the same straight line path and expect it to go smoothly from A to Z, almost nobody succeeds with it. And the real danger is you can’t adapt and change. But it also, sad to say, like a lot of online courses and training, they’re not designed for the mass student population.

They’ve worked for the person who made the course. And so they think that’s the right way to do it, but they haven’t really been battle tested. And so, you know, I think I’ll share a bit of my own relevant experience in a moment.

But certainly over the last 15 years at Musical U, we’ve had tens of thousands of people go through our material, and it’s really forced us to figure out how to sequence things in a way that it will work for basically everyone.

So all of that just to say, if you’re doing things in isolation in your bedroom, at home, whether you’re making up yourself or you’re following a prescribed method, there can be a real danger of this kind of thing happening where you’re not getting traction, you’re not making progress. And it’s really easy to start blaming yourself when really it’s just the sequencing and the structuring and the pacing that aren’t a fit for how you’re getting on.

So I mentioned I can relate to this. And when I read this question the other day, it really brought back these poignant memories for me. And, you know, I’ve shared my own story quite a lot over the years, but I don’t think I’ve talked much about this bit, which is, you know, I had a job doing research and development in audio engineering, and that clued me into audio ear training.

So evaluating audio quality, listening for audio effects, artifacts, glitches. And through that, discovered this area of musical ear training. And normally when I tell this story, I kind of jump to “and it worked! And I started my company and now I help other people with that.”

But there was this really painful period that I don’t talk much about where I had discovered ear training and I had bought a few books and methods and courses, and the Internet wasn’t what it was back in. This would have been around 2009, I guess, 2007 to 2009.

There wasn’t the wealth of information we have these days. And so I would take these methods and kind of like I just talked about, I would try and follow it step by step, and I wouldn’t get traction, I wouldn’t see results, and I got really frustrated. And I can really…

I have this really vivid memory of me sat at a piano that I had in my house, not this one, but the predecessor. And I had been studying the music theory of intervals. And I’m a very kind of scientific, analytical, logical, left brain type person.

And so my thinking was, I’ll figure out how to spell the intervals in different keys, I’ll learn the names of them, and then I’ll just, like, practice all of them at the keyboard, and my ear will figure it out. And fundamentally, that wasn’t wrong, but I was falling into exactly the same kind of trap that this chap Lutemann has. And it then happened to me with Solfa, too.

I discovered solfege, do re mi, and I kind of dabbled with that for a bit and made exactly the same mistake. Also with chord progressions. I was like, I want to figure out how to play guitar by ear. I know the chords. I know how to play them. I’m just going to listen to a song and then try and figure it out. And it was so painful.

Like, I just, I remember the heartache, like, the self doubt and self loathing and heartache it caused in me because I just couldn’t seem to do it. And now it was even worse because I knew other people must be succeeding with this ear training stuff, and I wasn’t getting it.

And it took another couple of years of trying things that other people were teaching, trying things I made up myself and really cobbling together solutions to the point where I could do it. And I felt happy sharing it with others and, you know, making resources at that point, iPhone apps to help other people do it. And like I said before, now it’s been a decade plus, helping all kinds of people with Musical U and all kinds of methods.

But that early period of figuring it out was painful. And here’s the crucial thing that I wanted to share related to this question, which is: The human brain is amazing. Like, the way the brain learns is phenomenal, and anyone who watches a kid learning, or even watch an adult learn a new skill, can’t deny that the human brain has an incredible capacity for just figuring it out – BUT it needs to be fed the right information at the right pace.

And there’s then a special case for music, I think.

So to make this concrete. Imagine if you wanted to learn to read, but instead of learning your ABCs, learning the alphabet, learning each letter, and then starting to read “cat” and “dog” and “the”, or whatever the phonics equivalent is, my kids are doing phonics, it’s a whole different thing. But instead of starting with like two and three letter words, your method was, I’m going to write out a bunch of six letter words on twelve pieces of paper, and then I’m just going to try reading them every day for months. Your brain has no chance, right?

Like that hopefully instantly sounds a bit insane to you.

Or another example. I don’t know if I should share this. When I was about twelve, I was super nerdy. I’m still super nerdy. But I decided it would be cool to learn pi.

And so in school they taught us, it’s 3.14. I was like, there’s more digits than that. And so I sat down and I learned it.

And I think to this day I can recite like 3.1415-9265-3589-7932 3846-2643-3832-7950 two eight eight, like 35 digits of PI 20 years later. But you know what I didn’t do? I didn’t sit down with 35 digits of PI and try reading 35 digits all day, every day.

I broke it into chunks. And you might have heard when I said it just now, I said it in five number chunks, because I learned it in five number chunks. So this idea of chunking is really important.

And there is a lot of scientific research into the right size chunks and the right timing for memorizing things, and for intellectual things, where it’s data, where it’s information. There’s a whole science around that that’s well established, easy to learn about. And in our “Superlearning Beyond Music” training, Gregg Goodhart teaches how to take what we teach as superlearning for music and apply it to other things, like memorizing vocab in a foreign language, memorizing a speech, other things like that.

For the informational stuff, it’s kind of easy to understand that chunking. But I said there’s a special case for music and where it gets really tricky.

And what tripped me up back in the day, and what I think might be tripping @Lutemann up, is it’s really much harder to figure out for aural skills and for musicality in general, what is a chunk like, what is a sensible, suitable size, next step to give the brain? And that’s what we’ve poured so much effort into figuring out at Musical U and figuring out the sequencing, because when you get it right, it’s super easy to learn. And when you get it wrong, it’s painstaking and frustrating and struggle and endless effort and zero results.

So, you know, for us, when we were designing the Autumn season of Living Music, to give another concrete example, in Living Music, we have four 12-week seasons.

One of them, Autumn, is on the topic of playing by ear. And so it’s very ear training focused. And we did a couple of things in that season that were crucial.

One was introducing daily drills where you’re doing exercises every day to help your brain develop. And I won’t go into it today, but, like, there’s a whole thing around the neuroscience of learning and sleep and memory consolidation, where that daily pacing is super impactful, super valuable. But the other part of it was we structured everything in terms of building blocks.

So the end goal was to play a song by ear. But we didn’t say, here’s a song, try playing it. We said, look, it all breaks down into building blocks of intervals, sulfur or scale degrees and chord progressions.

And then we spend two or three weeks on each of those, introducing the building blocks gradually. And so with Solfa, for example, I think with intervals and with Solfa, in that autumn season, we get as far as the Pentascale. So the first five notes of the major scale.

But we don’t spend three weeks with all five notes with long melodies and then hope that after three weeks, you’ve got it. It’s sequenced bit by bit, small chunks, small steps forwards. Same for all three of those types of building blocks.

And the thing here, the goal when you’re designing your learning like this, is really to make it so easy you can’t fail, or to put in another way, make the steps so small you cannot fail.

I mentioned there of starting out making iPhone apps. My first app, relative pitch, was an interval recognition training app.

So you were learning to recognize intervals by ear. In the first lesson, I didn’t start by throwing all the intervals at the student and saying, can you recognize them? The first lesson in that app is same or different. It’s unisons and tones.

Is the note the same or is it different? Two notes, same or different? Anyone can do that in my experience. Like non musicians can do that, no trouble.

I did the same with my kids at that piano. You know, they’re six and eight now. A couple of years ago, when we were getting started, I literally started with, are these… Close your eyes. I’m going to play two notes, are they the same or are they different? And then we did higher or lower. And then we did, is it a big jump or a small jump?

And so it’s really about that sequencing step by step and making the steps so small, your brain kind of can’t help but learn the next bit. So, again, in Autumn season, we have those three types of building blocks. We sequence them out, and it makes it so step by step. It tends to work really smoothly for people going through that Aeason.

So let’s come back to this specific question then. Lutemann was asking, did I give up too soon? I was doing exercises, patterns. Like in this example, he’s giving a six note pattern. He wrote out 60 patterns. And as far as I can understand it, he was using all eight notes of the major scale.

And so now that I’ve given some of that context, hopefully you can see what I saw immediately, which was this was biting off more than you can chew all at once. And I don’t know for sure. Like, maybe he had done a bunch of ear training before, and there’s some backstory that I don’t know about.

But on the face of it, like this, this was like having six pages of five and six letter words when you haven’t learned the alphabet yet. Right? Again, it’s that danger of DIY where I love the innovation, but if you don’t have someone handing you the building blocks and the step by step that’s proven to work, you’re really doing yourself a disservice.

So there were two, I think, two underlying issues here.

The first is that I would say there are too many degrees being introduced at once. The brain, it just can’t get a grip on any of them. When every pattern you give it features five or six or even eight different notes from the scale – what works really effectively is to feed the brain those scale degrees one at a time, gradually building up your kind of vocabulary of recognizing those notes.

The second thing I would say is that those sequences are probably a bit too long to begin with. And something we always have to be careful with in playing by ear in particular, is our musical memory is at play as well. And there’s short term and long term musical memory.

Long term would be like, I’ve memorized this piece. I can play it without the notation. Short term is like, if I sing or clap a phrase, can you sing or clap it back? And in my experience, most musicians, if it’s kind of four or five notes, it’s fine.

But as soon as it gets longer, than that, your brain starts forgetting the first one by the time you get to the 6th, then I think that was probably a part of an issue here. Certainly, if I was recommending a sequencing for this, I would want to start out with much shorter phrases and again, featuring fewer of the scale degrees. So I think those are the two underlying issues here.

And what I’d recommend really is, A, don’t be discouraged. You know, this had nothing to do with your aptitude. And again, I applaud the intention here and the effort and the belief that you could do it.

That’s all fantastic. B, definitely don’t feel embarrassed or sheepish that you tried it this way. Like I said, I did for myself. Like, I spent two or three years making it up myself and trying to work it out and, you know, gradually cobbling together what did work. And I love the innovation, the aspiration, the commitment.

And C, just start smaller. It really is that simple.

Like I said at the beginning, it’s a good exercise. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it. I love that you’re singing.

You’re just trying to run before you can walk. I think so just pick a few scale degrees. Just a short sequence.

In our Foundations course, and the Spring season of living music, where we’re really focused on Solfa, the do re mi system for scale degree recognition. We found that any musician can play do-re-mi melodies of four or five notes by ear within a few weeks, to give you an idea of what to expect. Like, within two or three weeks. If you start with just three or four note melodies and just use do re and me, that’s a good starting point.

Doesn’t have to be those, but, like, do as your home note, introduce one or two others, and you should be able to get there very, very quickly. And that may sound “Mickey Mouse”. I know that if you’re coming from playing jazz or you’re coming from playing quite complex, sophisticated music on your instrument, it’s natural to want to do the whole major scale and to want to do complex, long melodies and to expect that of yourself.

But you would probably be surprised how exciting and empowering and encouraging it is to do five note melodies just featuring three scale degrees, but you can nail it every time.

And the most important thing there is that that’s then something you can build on. So again, it’s about making the next step so simple you can’t fail. Once you’ve got do re and mi, in the Foundations course, we go to the pentatonic do re mi so la. In the Autumn season, we go the pentascale to match up with the intervals. And that’s do re mi fa so.

And so in both of those cases, in six to twelve weeks, depending, our students, can reliably get to those five scale degrees, playing by ear, no problem with a reasonable length melody of like five or six notes. So totally doable if you sequence it in that way.

And once you’ve got do-re-mi, another couple is easy to add. Once you’ve got the pentascale or the pentatonic scale, adding in the two remaining notes to get to the major scale is really no effort at all. And and so that whole major scale is not far off. It’s not that it’s going to take you two years to get there, it’s just that you need to approach it step by step.

So again, the guiding principle is design it so that each step forwards is so easy you can’t help but win with it. So simple you can’t fail.

And I hope that’s helpful, @Lutemann. If you’re watching, I hope that gives you some guidance, some reassurance.

Thank you for the question. It’s a really great one and I’ve enjoyed nerding out on it a bit today with you, and I hope this explanation is helpful.

If you’re a member of Musical U, hopefully this is all good reminders for you.

And if you’re not, and you’ve experienced similar frustrations, I hope this helps explain why some of those might have been happening, as well as giving you some pointers. If you’re going to DIY it, just be very cognizant of what are the steps you’re putting in front of yourself? What’s reasonable to expect? Are you feeding your brain an easy expansion of what you can already do, or are you trying to leap a gulf that might be biting off more than you can chew?

If you have a question, please post it in the comments on one of these live streams, or send it by email to [email protected]. Like I said, I don’t do a lot of Q and A in the business these days and I kind of miss it.

So do send me your questions. This is fun to have the platform and the opportunity to do it. I’ll be keeping an eye on the chat, on the comments, and I would really appreciate any feedback, any questions, any suggestions to make sure these episodes are as valuable for you as possible.

Coming up next on the show, tomorrow we have our first episode of Coaches Corner, which I’m super excited about and then on Saturday, I’ll have my first live guest on here with me. We’ll be digging into a bit of their backstory and some of their insights on musicality. That’s going to be a really fun and exciting one.

And don’t forget, we have a special live training coming up.

I have been procrastinating, not procrastinating, I’ve just been deliberating a bit too much over the title of it, which is why I’m talking in general terms about this new training. I haven’t finalized the title, but I will force myself to do that in the next day or two. And we’ll set up a registration page to make sure you get access to the call when it comes.

But for now, just save the date that’s happening on the Saturday, the 4th May at 4pm. UK time, 11am. Eastern, and I am super excited to share with you some insights, mostly from inside our Next Level coaching program.

Stuff that people not in that program haven’t heard about, some things that even they haven’t heard about. So really new and exciting stuff all geared towards how will I put this? Kind of greater self understanding and self guidance.

Self, to get a bit pretentious with it, like self actualization, like how to become the musician you’ve dreamed of being. That’s the focus of it. But in a really structured, framework based way that I think you’re going to really enjoy and get a lot of a lot of new insight from and a lot of new empowerment and motivation and acceleration in your musical journey.

So I couldn’t be more excited about that live session coming up on Saturday the 4th May. I hope you will join me for it live and I look forward to seeing you there.

Before we wrap things up, Willy, in the Facebook comments, “my ear training is going bad. Can’t hear what a guitar lead is playing guitar, drummer and me on bass.”

Cool. Willy, thank you for sharing that. And I can, like I talked about there, I feel your pain when it’s going bad. It’s frustrating, it’s disheartening.

It’s again, really easy to blame yourself and wonder, will I ever get this? And so I would just really encourage you, if you haven’t already, dig into some of what I’ve been talking about today. Like the whole topic of ear training. I don’t know what you’ve already done on guitar.

There’s a lot of people in the guitar world in particular, I would say, like, not to judge, I’m a guitar player myself, but in guitar in particular, there’s a lot of people who think it should just come naturally. And the way to do it is to just play a lot in bands. And if you do that for 20 years, eventually one day you’ll be able to do it.

And the danger is that can happen! Like, if you do it for 30 years, you’ll probably get some decent ear skills and improv skills at the end of the day. But it is such a slow and arduous and painful route.

And the shortcut is really to dedicate some time and some effort and some exercises to honing those skills specifically. And there are things you can do specifically on guitar. There are exercises we have inside Musical U on the guitar fretboard, with your instrument in hand.

But there’s also a vast amount you can do on any instrument, just with your ears, just with sounds. And, you know, whether it’s with us at Musical U or somewhere else. Again, I’d encourage you not to just diy it by yourself in your bedroom.

You really want, if you want to shortcut the process and quickly find out what you’re really capable of, you want someone who’s gone there before and helped thousands of other people go there before to show you the way and to be there to support you when things don’t go in a straight line from A to Z. So just to say there are great solutions out there. We’ve got some, other people have some.

But just make sure you’re equipping yourself with something that’s flexible, something that’s supported, and that really pinpoints exactly what it is you want to achieve on guitar with your ears. And I think you’ll be surprised how quickly things start to go for you. Hope that’s helpful.

Willy, thank you for tuning in live. Love the question. And we’ll see you tomorrow on our next livestream.

Cheers, bye.