Author: musicalitywrld

In fact there are two! In this clip from the archive of live member Q&A calls at Musical U we talk about these two types of scale ear training and how each can help you.

If you want to get more out of scales and ear training, don’t miss this episode.

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Links and Resources

• How to Make Scales Less Boring
• Musicality Now – Music Theory You’ll Love to Learn, with Glory St. Germain
• Musicality Now – About the Power of Solfa
• Musicality Now – About Scales and their Flavors
• Musicality Now – How to Improvise For Real, with David Reed

Transcript

Stewart was pointing out that some people have been asking about scales. Maybe I’ll just give a quick explanation of how we view scales inside Musical U because it’s maybe not the typical approach which hopefully is a good thing. We talked in the previous call about how to make it interesting to practice scales. This is because if you’re learning an instrument, scales are probably a big part of your life particularly if you’re learning in the traditional semi-classical approach like ABRSM or the Trinity Exam Board. Every exam, you have a set of scales to learn and your teacher is probably drilling you on your scale practice and they are valuable for sure particularly for that instrument technique.

But when it comes to the inner skills of music, the stuff we focus on at Musical U, it becomes a bit more confusing. People aren’t always sure what they should be doing for scale ear training for example, what they aren’t sure how to bring the theory of scales to life and how to make use of those instruments skills they’ve been learning. If you found yourself in that boat, let me just briefly explain why scales are useful, in terms of listening skills and how we approach it at Musical U so that you can get the benefit of those training modules. Scales are useful as a framework. This is what’s often lost in the instrumental approach to scales where you use them as an abstract exercise but you never really apply your use of scales.

You learn the fingerings and that might make it easier to play a piece in that key, but they’re always a bit arbitrary and abstract and that’s why a lot of people find them quite boring and why we were talking previously about how to make your scale practice interesting. But in terms of what you hear in music, scales are really to be thought of as a framework and they can reveal a lot about what you’re hearing in music and give you a headstart on some of the more practical skills like playing by ear or improvising. They are an important topic but you need to approach them in the right way for them to be useful. If you take our ear expansion scales module, you’ll see we split scale listening skills into a couple of categories.

The first is identifying different types of scale. As an instrument player, you may know major scales and minus scales. You probably know a few different types of minor scale and you might not know a lot more than that. Maybe if you’re a guitarist you’ve learned the minor pentatonic. You might’ve learned a blues scale or a few other more esoteric scales but, fundamentally the thing here is just to know that there are different types of scale. The different types have different purposes. For example, if you’re writing a song in a major key, you’ll probably use the notes from the corresponding major scale, similarly, in a minor key.

Or if you’re improvising in a certain style like blues guitar, you might pick the corresponding scale, well not corresponding but the suitable scale like the minor pentatonic can be great in blues. The different scales have their different contexts in music and that means learning to recognize the type of scale by ear can be very useful. That means, in the first instance if you literally just hear the scale note by note, you can recognize, okay, that was major or, okay, that was a minor pentatonic. But more practically, it means when you hear a melody or an improvised solo using the notes of that scale, you can hear, okay, that was a melody based on the minor, or the natural minor, or the pentatonic.

Then that gives you a really big headstart in figuring out what those notes were, if you wanted to write them down or play them on your own instrument, or use them as the basis for your own improvisation. Learning to recognize different scale types, that’s something we cover in our training module called scale recognition. It’s really useful just because it gives you that big headstart. If you hear a melody and you want to play it by ear, rather than thinking, “Every note could be literally any note on my instrument.” You think, “Okay, these notes are all from the minor pentatonic.” That narrows it down considerably. You start to hear how they fit into the scale and so that gives you another clue as to which notes you should be playing on your instrument when you play by ear.

That’s the first area, recognizing scale types. I just touched on the other secondary of which is learning where the notes fit into the scale. We’d call this scale degree recognition meaning you recognize which degree of the scale one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, the note you heard was. This is more sophisticated. It takes longer to learn. It’s very closely, excuse me. It’s closely related to interval recognition because one way to think about to is you’re trying to hear how far each note is from the root, the tonic of the scale. It’s very closely related to solfa at the Do-Re-Mi system we were talking about at the start of the goal, because solfa really is a way of associating each degree of the scale with a meaningful name, which helps you tune your ear into recognizing them.

Inside Musical U, solfa is actually the approach we take to scale degree recognition. Most of our modules so far are focusing on the pentatonic scale because that’s very widely used and it’s a great first step. Our new score to sound with solfa module covers the major scale too. If you want to be able to hear a melody, for example and know more than just, okay, that’s a major key, or that’s using the minor pentatonic. If you want to very quickly move to playing by ear or transcribing, you’re going to want to recognize not just that the notes are all from a certain scale, but which notes from the scale each note is. solfa is a way to do that because when you hear the notes in the melody, you hear, okay, that was Fa-Fa-Mi-Mi-Re-Re-Do.

Then you know in C major, that would be F-F-E-E-D-D-C. That gives you a very quick shortcut to playing them on your instrument or writing them down or whatever you might like to do. Those are the two areas of scale training you can do really in music. We do separate them out a little bit in Musical U. If you’re thinking about scales, if you’re training, I’d encourage you to think a bit about which of those is more useful to you. In general, you’d probably want to start with some scale type recognition so that you can clearly spot major from minor and spot pentatonic versus a full diatonic scale, just because logically that’s the first step before you try and figure out where the notes fit into the scale. But you can also go directly to solfa if you know you’re mostly going to be playing major key songs, maybe that’s a quicker route for you.

As always, if you have any questions around this, feel free to post in your progress journal and myself with someone in the team will be more than happy to help. Hopefully that addresses the questions Stuart was raising there about scale training. It’s not something we focus a lot on just because it’s a means to an end. You could spend endless hours learning to recognize each and every type of scale each and every mode of each scale. But realistically for most people’s musical lives, you want to be able to recognize a few different types, like major, minor, and pentatonic and you want to be able to start to recognize the degrees of those scales which is why we focus a lot on solfa inside Musical U.

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The post Q&A: How (and why) should you do ear training for scales? appeared first on Musical U.

At Musical U we strongly encourage every music learner to sing because of the huge positive impact it has on your musicality – but what if you find you just can’t get the notes right? Here’s a clip from the archive of live member Q&A calls at Musical U where we talk about just that.

Enjoy!

Watch the episode:

Subscribe For Future Episodes!

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• How to Learn to Sing in Tune
• Musicality Now – Finding the Notes Yourself, with Sara Campbell
• Musicality Now – About Singing as a Tool
• Musicality Now – How to Sing Smarter, with Meghan Nixon
• Musicality Now – Singing that Sounds Good – and Beyond, with Davin Youngs
• Musicality Now – All Things Vocal, with Judy Rodman
• Musicality Now – The Instrument Inside You, with Ben Parry
• Musicality Now – What Your Voice Can Do, with Jeremy Fisher
• Musicality Now – Find and Make Peace with Your Voice, with Nikki Loney
• Musicality Now – About the Power of Solfa

Transcript

Member Kim, who has been with us for a while and been making good progress, I think. She has been working on her singing and she posted a couple of questions this week that I thought were quite interesting for most singers in fact. I think Kim would probably classify her herself, she’d probably say a beginner, but I think she’s really intermediate. I think she is quite capable once she knows the song, but she has some concerns over finding the right notes. And so she posted two questions this week that I wanted to pick up on because I think they’re of interest, not only to our dedicated singers, but actually to all of our members who are working on singing a bit and trying to get control of their voice for general musicianship purposes. Kim came with two different questions that I think are boiled down to the same key point in a way.

She was saying she has trouble sometimes knowing if the note should change or not. When you have a melody and it has repeated notes, sometimes you can hear that the notes are repeated and sometimes it seems like they change and vice versa. If you have a melody where the notes change a bit, sometimes you think they repeat. And so I think she was finding some of the songs she sings, she was just getting that wrong. And she changed the note when it’s not meant to change or she’d stay on the same note when it was meant to change. And so she was wondering how to get around that. And the second question she had was sometimes she just misjudges how much the note changes. Yes, it should move to a different note, but she jumped too far or she didn’t jump far enough. Those were the two questions and I wanted to just discuss them both a little bit.

The first one, knowing whether the note changes, I don’t want to give a solution here, but I do want to dig into this question a bit and explain why it’s tricky. The human voice is one of the most distinctive and unique instruments. It is unique, clearly, but it has certain characteristics that really set it apart from other instruments. One of those is that it has totally variable pitch. If you go down and sit at a piano, whether or not the piano is in tune, each key plays a particular note. A trumpet would be the same. To some extent a guitar is the same if you just play the frets of the guitar. The instrument is designed to produce set pitches.

Our voice is not like that. You really have to train your voice to hit the notes dead on because our natural speaking voice goes up and down in pitch very continuously. You can slide totally up and down in pitch across all of the notes. And there are other instruments that can do that. For example, a guitar that I just mentioned, you can play slide guitar or you can pitch bend the strings. An instrument like a violin that doesn’t have frets on the fingerboard likewise has a continuous pitch range. But it is something that’s very distinctive about the human voice. And it means when you listen to a voice singing on a recording, it can be very tricky to know if the note is staying the same or going up a bit. And that’s actually amplified, it’s multiplied by the fact that we’re generally speaking. We’re not just singing ah or la, we’re speaking lyrics and words and we’re speaking them with emotion. And actually you can hear it when I just said emotion, my pitch changed slightly. I didn’t say emotion. I said emotion.

And when you listen to a singer, that kind of inflection to give expression to the words and the changing of words can make it very hard to know is the pitch of the note changing? Or is it just the way the singer is singing the note? And so I wanted to just clarify that because it’s not as simple as listening to a guitar and knowing is the guitar changing note? When you listen to a human singer, it can be very subtle to know whether their pitch is intentionally changing and the note is changing or whether it’s just the sound of their voice that’s changing and that can mislead you. That’s why it can be tricky and it can be tricky. And I wanted to reassure Kim that she’s not alone in this. It sounds very simple, is the no changing or not? But it’s not that simple. It is subtle when it comes to the human voice.

And so that leads onto the second question. How do you know how much it’s moving by? And this is why I didn’t want to give an answer to the first question because it’s essentially the same as the second question is, is this moving a little or a lot? It’s just an extension of is this note moving? There are a few factors here. Knowing how much a note is changing in pitch is what we call your sense of relative pitch. It’s knowing the pitch of one note relative to another one. And there are the two fundamental tools we use to train ourselves for this, are intervals, interval recognition. You’ll find a lot of interval modules inside Musical U and the solfa framework, which is, it’s not quite, those aren’t two completely different things. They are very related, but they are the two ways we tend to think about relative pitch. You can recognize the intervals, or you can think in terms of solfa and scale degrees.

And we have modules for both of those in Musical U. Knowing how much a melody is moving in pitch is tricky because melodies, most of the time, move by small steps. If you take most songs you know, there will be leaps, there will be jumps, but for the most part, it’s going to move in step wise motion. Half steps or whole steps, which we also call tones or semitones or major and minor seconds. These are literally the smallest intervals we use. And so when you’re listening to a melody and trying to hear how much the notes move, it can be tricky because the chances are it’s moving only by quite small amounts.

And this is what brings us back to the first question of, is it moving at all? Once you throw in the inflection of the human voice and different lyrics, a semitone difference, a half step can be very similar to just kind of changing the tone of your voice to express anger or frustration or excitement. The melodies don’t always move that much in pitch, so that can be hard to hear. And when they do leap, those big intervals can be quite hard to distinguish. Hearing the difference between a perfect fifth and a minor sixth, it takes a lot of practice. And when you’re talking about a leap in the middle of a melody, getting the accurate both in your ear and your voice, it’s tricky. Again, just to reassure Kim, this isn’t a unique problem. This isn’t a strange problem to have. This is a normal part of what comes with learning to sing.

This does take practice and the big point I wanted to make is it takes practice for a particular song, for a single song and in the big picture. My main piece of advice, I think to Kim and to other people in her situation, is to remember it does take practice to master even one song. You have to be a very good singer before you can pick up any song and sing it well, straight off. Most singers will spend most of their career choosing a new song, spending weeks, days or weeks, practicing that song, learning to master those changes in pitch and those leaps in the melody. And then they will feel like they can sing that song very well.

And the more you do this, the more you practice individual songs, the better your big picture skills become, the quicker you are at learning new songs and the easier it becomes to pick up a new song and actually sing it well straight off. Which ties back funnily to our to score to sound module that I was talking about at the beginning, that ability to pick up a new sheet of music and know immediately and be able to perform immediately how it should sound.

This is a process. Even if you’ve been singing for a while, you shouldn’t expect yourself to be able to sing any song and always get every note right. It does take time and it takes dedicated practice for each song, not just dedicated practice day to day.

Let’s break down the skill a little bit, because there were a few different bits and it’s really useful to understand what you should be training. It’s not just learn a song, try and sing it, see if you get it right or not. There are a few component skills here.

The first one is your ears. If you can’t hear what the notes should be or what the notes are when you listen to a song, you don’t really have much hope of getting it right. Your ears are really fundamental. And the modules I talked about before the intervals and the solfa modules for relative pitch, really focus on that ear skill. Can you recognize, is this interval different from that one? Is this leap in pitch the same one you heard a moment ago? Or is it a slightly smaller one or a slightly bigger one? Honing your ear skills, honing your sense of relative pitch to be very accurate and reliable is really the foundation for being able to sing accurately and reliably. That’s the first area, your ear skills. And like I said before, we have dedicated modules for this. It does take practice, but it gets easier with time.

The second area is your mind’s ear. And Kim actually posted a follow up comment a couple of days later that talks specifically about this. It’s the skill we call audiation, the ability to imagine music in your mind very vividly. It’s very closely related to musical memory and the more accurately and vividly you can imagine music in your mind, the easier it becomes to then perform that music yourself. And again, you can kind of see it logically. If you can’t hear it clearly, you won’t be able to imagine hearing it clearly. And if you can’t even imagine hearing it clearly, you don’t really have a hope of singing it clearly. And so the trap a lot of singers fall into and maybe Kim was having trouble with this is, you expect yourself to shortcut the entire process. And so you hear a song and you sing the song. And in reality, what’s happening is you hear the song and your ears need to do what they should. And then your mind’s ear, your imagination needs to imagine yourself doing what you should and then your voice needs to do what it should.

And the voice is the third of those three areas I mentioned. Once you can imagine it vividly in your mind, you need to bring it out through your voice. And that sometimes comes naturally, but it doesn’t always. And this is what we call vocal control. And you’ll find we have a dedicated module for this in Musical U with some practice exercises, because it does take time. It does take work. Like I said before, the human voice, it doesn’t have keys. It doesn’t have buttons you can press to produce each note. You need to train your voice, when I want to sing this note, my vocal chords need to be here. When I want to sing a note one step above that my vocal chords need to be here. And obviously you’re not quite thinking through that, but fundamentally you’re training yourself physically to hit those notes dead on and to know what it feels like and what it sounds like to sing a whole step or a half step.

Those are the three areas, your ear, your mind’s ear or audiation and your voice. And like I said, a lot of the problems come when you try and shortcut the whole process and you want to go straight from hearing a song on the radio to singing it yourself and you start getting the notes wrong and it’s very hard to know why or what you should do about it. And what tends to help is to break it down into those three steps and to ask yourself, “Okay, are my ears really up to scratch? Can I hear easily and reliably what the intervals or what the solfa degrees are in that melody? If so, can I then imagine that? Once I’ve heard the song on the radio, if I ask myself an hour later to imagine that song again, do I get kind of a blurry version of the song? Can I imagine each note very clearly in my head? And if not, I need to practice that area. And finally, once I can imagine it vividly and remember it vividly, can I bring it out through my voice?”

And the interesting thing here is if you’ve got those first two steps, the third one actually isn’t that tricky because you’ve got what you need to get the notes right. You may not get it right first time, but you know in your head how it should sound, you can listen to yourself, sing it and you’ve got kind of a feedback loop there that lets you quite quickly train yourself to get it right. And you can make this easy by recording yourself and literally listening back. Or you can do it in the moment just by listening to yourself sing. But as I said before, if you’ve skipped those first two steps, you’re a bit stranded because you get it wrong and you might not even realize you’re getting it wrong until someone tells you or you listen back to the recording. Whereas if you’ve put in those first two steps, it’s very easy because you know you’ve got it wrong and you know if it’s too high or too low, because you can hear in your head how it should sound and you can hear in the real world how it does sound.

If you take it in that three step process, it becomes a lot easier and a lot more, I don’t know, it’s a lot less intimidating. You feel a lot more secure because you know, okay, I know how it should sound, I know how it does sound, I know how to fix it. And I think that would maybe go a long way for Kim who was in this situation of starting to hear that she wasn’t getting it right. And that’s fantastic. If she was aware of that and she was conscious of this being her problem. And now it’s just a matter of her practicing to slowly hone in on getting it right first time. And again, I just come back to what I said was my main piece of advice for her, which is to remember, you need to take each song one at a time and not expect too much of yourself on too many songs at once.

She gave a few examples of songs she’s been working on where she knew she was making a mistake and my advice would just be to pick one of those and really hone in on it. And practice just that section. This is a common thing in choirs or in singing lessons. If you take singing lessons with a teacher, just pick the one bar where you make the mistake and sing that one bar for 10 minutes or however long it takes you to reliably hit those notes. And go slow. Partly the problem is if you’re trying to sing the song at full speed, your brain doesn’t have a chance to think through what it needs to. If you take it a bit slower, bring the tempo down, you have a bit more of a chance to imagine the notes before you sing them.

And in Kim’s case, it seems clear she knows how it should sound and she knows she’s getting it wrong. And so I think just slowing down and spending a bit more time practicing those tricky spots, she’ll be able to pause before singing the note that’s always hard, imagine how it should sound and then sing the right note. And if that last step is tricky, we have the vocal control module that gives some exercises to help you hit the notes dead on first time. But I think that overall process of honing in on the problem spots for just one song and thinking in terms of those three steps, your ears, your mind’s ear and your voice, will make it a lot easier for Kim to quash those problem spots and more and more hit the notes right first time, rather than feeling like she’s jumping too far or not far enough or singing the same note when it should change or vice versa. I think that overall framework should really help her nail them.

I hope that’s useful for anyone else who’s hit this problem before of kind of singing notes wrong and not knowing quite why. If you break it down into those steps, you should be able to pinpoint, oh okay, my ears are fine, but I can’t really imagine the music so that’s why I can’t sing it. Or I can imagine the music, but I can’t quite hit the notes right, I need to work on my vocal control. And so on. Just having that framework can go a really long way from what I’ve seen.

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The post Q&A: I sometimes get the notes wrong when I sing – what can I do? appeared first on Musical U.

Learn the answers in this clip from the archive of live member Q&A calls at Musical U. Enjoy!

Watch the episode:

Subscribe For Future Episodes!

Apple Podcasts | Android | YouTube | Google Play (US only) | Stitcher | RSS

Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• • Musicality Now – About the I, IV, V and vi Chords
  • Musicality Now – Choose Your Words Carefully, with Glory St. Germain (Ultimate Music Theory)
  • Musicality Now – In Perfect Swinging Harmony, with The Quebe Sisters
  • Introduction to Chord Progressions
  • What can you already play by ear? Harmony & Rhythm?
  • How To Sing Harmony Like A Pro

Transcript

So the first question, the one I mentioned was just quite interesting, was when I had come in via a private message earlier this month. So I won’t say who it was asking because they chose to make it a private message rather than a discussion. But it was one of our pianist members on Musical U and they were asking a slightly unusual question, which is music is a lot like language, so we often use this analogy that learning music is like learning a new foreign language, or that playing music is a bit like speaking a language. But this member was wondering, that’s all well and good, but what about when you have harmonies? What if I’m playing piano and I have my left hand and my right hand, how does that relate to speaking a language? Because obviously you can’t speak two languages at once.

And I had to think about this before answering because it is a slightly thought-provoking question. And in the end, what I came down to was that language is an analogy we use for music. It’s a useful analogy. It can help us understand some concepts, but it’s not a perfect analogy. Music is its own creative art form, and I think we all know it’s not as straightforward as speaking a language. It’s not as simple, maybe, as speaking a language. And so we can’t always expect that analogy to be perfect, but there are a couple of ways we can think about this particular question of how does harmony relate to music as a language.

So one way to think about it is that harmony, the obvious analogy is we have multiple people talking at the same time. So just like you have your left hand and your right hand on piano, or you might have a guitar player and the bassist combining their sounds for a harmony that matches. Language can be a bit like multiple people all speaking, and if they aren’t coordinated, which would be like if we had musicians not playing in the same key, for example, or playing from completely different scales, or not being in sync with their rhythm, it would be a hopeless jumble. If you have five conversations going on around you, it can be quite hard to tune into any one of them. Or if you have two people asking you a question at once, you have to really pay attention to answer one and then the other, and you can’t answer them both at once.

So when people are speaking at the same time and it’s not coordinated, it makes a big mess, and the same is true in music. That said, if people are coordinated, we know from music that that works. When we talk about harmony, what we normally mean is multiple voices contributing to something that works, something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. And the same can be true of language. So if you think about a crowd who are chanting a slogan, if they’re at a protest rally saying, “Down with the something something,” or a crowd of football fans at a match saying, “Come on Arsenal,” and they’re all chanting at the same time, and they’re chanting the same thing, that’s very analogous to music. So it’s almost like they’re chanting in key whether or not they’re speaking at the same note. And they certainly are aligned in their rhythm. And so we can see there even in language, there is the opportunity for a form of harmony or a form of working together like that. So that’s one way you can think about it, that your left and right hands are kind of working together and coordinating, even though they might be saying different things.

The other way to think about it, which is a slightly more heavyweight analogy, is that actually when we speak a language, it’s true that we can only say one thing at a time. We can only speak a certain sentence, and we can’t say two sentences at once, but actually that’s not the only way we communicate. So if we’re communicating with someone there’s also our facial expressions, there’s gestures, like I just inadvertently made with my hand. We move our bodies, we move our faces in particular. And that communicates as well as the speech. And if anyone who has studied body language knows that the amount of information you can receive from someone through their speech and their body language can be much greater than the speech alone. And you know, we all have an instinct for this. When we speak on the phone, we’re conscious that we don’t always quite understand someone as well as if we saw them in person. There are also situations where you kind of can tell from someone’s body language or facial expression that they don’t quite mean what they’re saying, or they’re saying something, but they mean it as a joke. Which doesn’t necessarily come across on the phone when you only have the voice.

And so that’s, in a way, analogous to harmony and music in that we are communicating with someone in multiple ways at the same time, even though only one of them is speech. So that’s maybe a bit more analogous to singing and playing guitar at the same time. But that is an example of harmony. And it’s maybe less clear-cut to see that your left and right hand on piano is a bit like that. But if you held up a written message on a piece of paper and you showed someone the message while speaking to them, you could be saying two completely different things at the same time. And you could, if you wanted to, coordinate those in a harmonic way. So I thought that was quite an interesting question because we do so often turn to this analogy of language for music. And it can be helpful and thought-provoking to think about that, and to think about where are they comparable, and where actually does that analogy break down, and what can we learn about music from thinking about that?

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The post Q&A: If playing music is like speaking a language – what about harmony? appeared first on Musical U.

Learn how to choose the right headphones to level up your ears in this clip from the archive of live member Q&A calls at Musical U. Enjoy!

Watch the episode:

Subscribe For Future Episodes!

Apple Podcasts | Android | YouTube | Google Play (US only) | Stitcher | RSS

Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• • Musicality Now – About the Ear Training Trap
  • Musicality Now – About Active Listening
  • Musicality Now – About Listening as the Route to Musicality
  • Musicality Now – What Is Ear Training? (and why does it normally fail?)
  • Wired For Sound Part 4: Headphones
  • What are the best headphones for ear training?

Transcript

So, the other question that’s been coming up several times on the site over the last month or so in direct messages and a couple of the discussions and progress journals is about headphones. And I think, based on time, this will probably be our last question unless anyone has any last minute shout outs. The question… The issue that keeps coming up is particularly around harmonic hearing, so when you’re trying to hear a harmonic interval, both notes play at once, or you’re working on chord ear training and you’re trying to figure out different types of chord from one another.

It can really help to use good headphones. And that’s because once you’re hearing more than one note at once, your brain has to listen very carefully to pick apart those notes. And sometimes what you’re trying to do is separate the notes and really hear one and the other. And sometimes what you’re trying to hear is their combination, but in quite an accurate way. But, either way, if you’re listening on terrible laptop speakers, you’re really doing yourself a disservice because you just won’t be able to hear the detail you need to to recognize what you’re trying to. And that can sound funny if you’re not used to audio quality and paying attention to how good speakers are and that kind of thing. You might think, well, I can hear it’s a piano. What more do I need? Or, I can hear there’s an interval, there’s a chord. Surely I should be able to recognize it.

Actually, the ear is very subtle and the more you dig into this area, the more you realize just how much detail the ear is capable of hearing. And I often recommend musicians practice active listening, and that’s probably a topic for another day. But, just to say, spending some time really listening carefully to music can reveal a whole world of detail that you’d been oblivious to when you were just enjoying it as a song for a song’s sake. So, if you’re not used to thinking about this, you might be surprised to hear how much of a difference headphones can make, but they really do. And there’s a number of reasons for that. The first is that good headphones will just reproduce the audio much more accurately. And that means you’ll be able to hear detail in the timbre and in the various notes present that you just couldn’t if you’re listening on tinny laptop speakers or some cheap-o speakers you’ve plugged into your computer.

And the second aspect is just that earphones are either on your ear or in your year, and either way they provide a much better listing environment. So, even if it seems quiet around you, if you’re listening on speakers or you’re listening in the car, there’s a lot of noise that you may not be thinking about, but is interfering with your listening. And that can be as simple as an echoey room, or it can be children playing outside the part of your brain is having to pay attention to. But, getting rid of those distractions by using headphones instead goes a long way to letting your ear really hear what it needs to for these exercises. So, they reproduce the sound more accurately typically, and they isolate you in an idealistic environment to focus on what you’re really trying to focus on.

So then, that naturally brings up the question of what is a good set of headphones. I said a couple of times there, “If you’re listening on good headphones”. And the reality is the headphones that came free with your mobile phone are probably not good headphones. And what I mean by good there isn’t about brand. It’s not necessarily about price. What it’s really about is accurately reproducing the sound. So, for example, your average person in the street might say, “My headphones are really good. They’ve got a lot of bass to them”, or, “My headphones are really good. They make the music sound so exciting”. Actually, that’s not really what we’re looking for. Obviously it can be great if all you’re doing is enjoying music and listening for the fun of it, but for ear training and for really developing your musical ear, you actually want them to be precise, not just sound good.

And there is a difference there. So, what I mean by precise is they are giving you exactly the sound that was originally recorded. They’re not boosting the bass. They’re not adding a reverb. They’re not doing clever effects. Bose, as a company, is particularly notorious for this. They’ll make speakers that sound fantastic, but actually completely distort the sound compared with what was intended by the artist. So, you need to be a bit careful to find good headphones. And there’re a few rules of thumb I can give you for that because I know when you go into your average shop, there’re so many brands and models to choose from. You’ve got a few things to think about. The first is choose the kind of headphones you prefer. So, the three main options are you can get what are called canalphones, where they go right into your ear canal.

And that’s great for sound isolation, but some people hate having something inside their ear. So, that’s personal preference. The next level out is just in ear earphones, like the kind you get with an iPhone or a mobile phone that just sit in this part of your ear. And the third type is what musicians often call cans, the big chunky ones that sit on your ears. These days you can get some smaller ones for sure. But, with those they can be good or bad. The bad is the 1980s Walkman style headphones where they just sit very loosely on top of your ear. Those aren’t so good. What you’re looking for is the ones with a bit of cushioned padding that really create a seal around your ear because that means you still get the isolation even though they’re not inside your ear.

So those are the three main types, and it’s really personal preference, but try and find some that fit snugly wherever they fit so that you do get that isolation from background noise. The second big thing is choose a good brand. So, that doesn’t necessarily mean expensive. And it doesn’t necessarily mean a very famous brand. And in particular here, you want to steer away from the fashionable brands. So, a couple of the big ones would be Skullcandy or Beats by Dre. They’re great if you’re into fashion. They’re not so great if you’re into audio fidelity. I think there is one model of Beats by Dre that are professional grade, but for the most part they would fall into the category of headphones that are more designed for style than substance. So, you want to steer clear of the fashion brands and you actually genuinely want to steer clear of electronics brands too.

So, people like Sony or Panasonic, they make decent headphones, earphones, but they’re not the best because they’re not audio companies, they’re electronics companies. What you really want to move towards is audio brands like Shure, S H U R E, or Sennheiser. And they do produce low end, low price point models too. So, you can pick up $30 headphones for sure. It doesn’t need to break the bank. But, if you go into that audio manufacturers range, you’ll be getting generally better headphones. So, pick an audio brand and you’ll find lots of information about those online if you look. And then, look for a model that doesn’t boast about its base response, or its amazing effects, or it doesn’t make claims about how it modifies the music. Some earphones are very much sold on, ‘We will make your music sound better’.

That’s not really what you’re looking for. So, generally mid price range is fine. So, if you’re paying upwards of $30, $40, you’ll probably be getting a good model if you factor in the other things I mentioned. So, an audio brand in that price range will do you just fine. You don’t need to go beyond that. If you go up to the hundred dollar price point, you can get some really nice… Getting into the professional grade there where they’re designed for studio use and that kind of thing. And really, if you want top end, you’re talking probably $200 for a serious pair of headphones that will last you the next 10 years.

But, it doesn’t have to be that. A $30 pair by Shure or Sennheiser will do you just fine. And, if you haven’t tried it, definitely factor that into your training. A, use headphones, and B, if you can buy some good headphones because you might find actually that lets you leap over the hurdles that have been holding you back. And it seems silly, but it just makes it so much easier on your ear when it’s not hearing a blurry sound, or a distorted sound, or a sound half drowned out by the noise around you. So, give that a try for sure.

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The post Q&A: Why use headphones and what kind should I buy? appeared first on Musical U.