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You do well on your ear training drills, but when you set out to learn real music by ear, you get stuck partway in. The skills are in place. What's missing is an order in which to put them to use.

In this episode I lay out the steps I use with my ear training students, from far away, and then we take the first one: the open listen.

In this episode:

• Where students get stuck when learning music by ear
• Open listens: let the music affect you before anything else
• Focus listens, one element at a time: form, then time, then pitch
• Listening for contour, listening for "do", and singing it back in solfège
• Making an assertion before each listen
• Using your eyes, voice, body and imagination
• Letting the music in instead of grabbing at it

Practice for this week: choose a piece you're learning by ear, or one you'd like to learn. Listen to it once, start to finish, with no task in mind. Afterward, name one moment that affected you. That's your first landmark.

Read this news-lesson: [NEWS-LESSON LINK]

Free live webinar, Saturday, October 17, 10:00–11:30 a.m. EDT. Bring a song you love, and we walk through the Holistic Ear Training process together. Save your spot.

Get the news-lesson by email each week:

https://www.tuneindigolearning.com/newslesson-signup-page

READ TODAY'S EPISODE.

Watch the video lessons on YouTube (next Saturday's video walks through every step on a short piece: https://www.youtube.com/@tuneindigomusic

More from Tune Indigo: https://tuneindigo.com

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Struggling to learn melodies by ear? You might be trying to hold too much at once. In this news-lesson, I share the one change that helps my students most: listening with a focus. That means choosing a single feature to listen for, like the highest tone, the sound of "do," or when an instrument drops out, and letting the rest of the music wash over you.

You'll learn:

• Why straining to catch everything at once makes learning by ear harder
• How to "guess, then check" to give your attention something to hang onto
• Why form (what's the same, similar and different) is the most useful focus of all
• A quick form exercise with "Ode to Joy"

🎙️ Free live webinar: Listening and Personal Style Saturday, October 17, 10:00–11:30 AM EDT. Bring a song you love, and we'll walk through the Holistic Ear Training process together on music that matters to you.

Save your free spot: https://www.tuneindigolearning.com/quick-webinar-registration

Also mentioned:

• This week's video, "There's No Shortcut to a Great Ear"
• Tone Hole for iPhone (free levels 127–129)
• This episode for your eyes (It's a news-lesson.)
• Get the weekly news-lesson by email.

Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.

Not all half-steps are created equal

Most ear training introduces the half-step as a single thing — usually as danger, with the Jaws theme as the mnemonic. That gets you an interval you can name. It doesn't get you the one thing you actually need when playing by ear: knowing which half-step you're hearing.

In this episode:

• Why "half-step" as a category is too coarse to be useful in real music, and what gets lost when the Jaws theme becomes the reference point
• The mi-fa half-step inside "Ode to Joy" — the same interval, an entirely different tone-feeling
• How fa leans down toward mi, and how mi sits without the same need to move
• A set of transformations that strip the opening phrase down until only mi and fa remain, so the pair concentrates in the ear
• Why you should build your own transformations rather than use mine, and the recipe for doing it
• The second half-step hiding in the same scale — same interval, different gravity

Try this after listening: sing the opening of "Ode to Joy" in solfège, then sing it again leaving tones out, keeping only what belongs to the mi-fa pair. Trade back and forth between solfège and a neutral syllable. Let it settle — no forcing.

Coming up: Listening and Personal Style, a free 90-minute live session — Saturday, October 17 · 10:00–11:30 AM EDT.

Links:

Ode to Joy In Solfège

Play with the mi-fa half-step.

This Episode as a Newslesson (with images!)