Ear Training Studio

The loop is the same for all three drills: listen, commit to an answer, then check. The score is kept honestly — replays are free, but only the first answer counts — and the keyboard draws the answer so that the sound attaches to a shape you can see and replay.

#Learn in this order: intervals, then chords, then scales

Intervals first, because everything else is made of them. A chord quality is a stack of intervals heard at once; a scale is a chain of steps heard in order. If you cannot place a major third against a minor third, a major triad will always sound “roughly happy” rather than specifically major.

Once the thirds, fifths and sixths are reliable, move to triads — major, minor, diminished and augmented — and then to seventh chords, where the quality of the seventh is the thing to listen for. Scales come last: with intervals and chords in place, a mode is recognisable by the two or three scale degrees that make it different, not by memorising seven-note strings.

#Why reference songs stop working

A reference melody identifies an interval in one fixed context, usually ascending from a comfortable pitch. Real intervals arrive anywhere: descending, in the high register, inside a harmony, at speed. A minor sixth is not always the opening of a familiar theme, and under pressure the association fails.

What transfers instead is hearing by scale degree. Fix scale degree 1 in your head, sing up to it, and the interval is the pair of degrees you sang. The “anchor to a tonic” switch exists for exactly this: it sounds the tonic first, so every question is heard inside a key rather than in the void. A major third is then not an abstract distance but scale degrees 1–3, which you already know from every major scale you have ever sung.

Sing 1–2–3, then sing 1–3 directly and notice that the third note is the same pitch in both cases. That recognition — the third as a place, not a distance — is the skill the drill is building.

#Use the reveal, don’t peek at it

The discipline that makes the drill work: replay as many times as you like, but answer before revealing. When you reveal, sing the answer back before you look at the keyboard, then look and replay the notes one by one from the keys. The order matters — guess, sing, verify — because the singing is where the sound gets stored.

#A ten-minute routine

Three minutes of intervals with the tonic anchor on and five items ticked. Three minutes of chord qualities, block chords, starting with the four triads. Three minutes of two scales that differ in one place — Dorian against natural minor, say. One final minute on whatever you missed most. Ten to fifteen minutes a day of this beats an occasional hour, and you should stop while it is still easy: accuracy first, speed later.

#When to make it harder

Raise accuracy above ninety percent over twenty questions, then change one thing: add items, switch melodic to harmonic, turn the tonic anchor off, or move the register up, where the ear is less certain. Change one variable at a time — if everything gets harder at once you learn nothing about what actually improved.

#What this will not do

Recognising isolated intervals is the vocabulary, not the language. Real music adds rhythm, timbre, harmony, and the pressure of keeping up, and none of that is in this room. Treat the drills as a prerequisite and keep transcribing real pieces — short phrases, by ear, checked against the instrument — because that is where the vocabulary gets used.