In today’s video and blog post, I want to show you the absolute essential ear training skills that any singer should develop!

Ear Training For Beginner Singers! 

What is the difference between perfect pitch and relative pitch?

 The first thing I want to talk to you about today is  the difference between perfect pitch and relative pitch.

What does perfect pitch mean and who can develop it?

I think making this differentiation is super important because people get really confused. Sometimes people think that perfect pitch means singing in tune accurately and naturally.

Not quite! Having perfect pitch means that you can listen to a random sound and know what pitch it is.

Perfect pitch is rare and only a few lucky ones have it. Usually, people with perfect pitch have been trained in music since the age of around 4 or 5 years old. 

What does relative pitch mean and who can develop it?

Anyone can develop relative pitch. And that is really good news! You need to know a bit (quite a bit) about music though, as relative pitch has to do with the relationship between the different pitches.

 When you have developed the relative pitch, you understand the relationship between the notes.  This is useful for singing and for music in general because  when you have a relative pitch  you can hear all the different intervals,  you can recognize different chords, and different chord progressions.

Every musician has to train their relative pitch  skills – at least if they are serious about it! – and for singers, it has a lot of benefits.

Benefits of developing relative pitch for singers

Improvisation

The first one is if you like to improvise  or create your own vocal arrangements, understanding relative pitch will allow you to come up with new, fresh and creative arrangements. It also makes it much easier to improvise! You are able to improvise melodies knowing what you’re doing in real-time, rather than relying in divine inspiration.

Easily changing keys of a song

The second benefit of developing a relative pitch for singers is that this allows you to change the key of a song much more easily.

This is truly important, especially if you jam with other people in open mics or similar.   You are asked to sing a song, and  maybe the song is not in a key that is good for you. For example, if you are a female and you have to sing a song that is in a key that suits a male, you’re going to have to change the key.

 Understanding relative pitch will allow you to easily and almost instantly sing in the right new key.

A great benefit of developing relative pitch for singers: harmonizing!

Another benefit of developing a relative pitch for singers is that it makes it much easier to be able to sing harmonies with other singers.  So if you like to harmonize with other people, which is something that most singers I know are interested in, developing relative pitch  will make it super easy for you!

(Watch the VIDEO for an example!)

How to start developing relative pitch for beginner singers

Something I wanted to talk to you about today is  how to start developing a relative pitch for absolute beginner singers.

It’s really hard to find  exercises that are  suitable for beginners. They’re usually, for more advanced people.  

Sometimes I have students who are just starting in the world of music and they want to go all in with interval training, learning all the intervals all at once.  As usual, this leads to frustration, because ear training takes time and it is progressive.

If you want to save yourself time and learn the smart way, you have to go step by step. Developing ear training takes time and there are certain skills you have to master before even starting to think about developing relative pitch.

Ear training for beginners: the first steps!

Ear training for beginner singers – START HERE! First step.

 The absolute first step when training your ear is to be able to identify if a sound is higher or lower than another one.  For most people this is easy and they can do it without prior training. But for some people, it’s a struggle. So if that is you, you need to start there. There are many ear training apps that can help you with that. This step might take you 1 second to check if you have it, or it might take you a few months to develop if you absolutely can’t tell which sound is higher when comparing two different pitches. 

Second step: understanding the movement of a melody and melodic recall.

Once you can easily and confidently differentiate high and low sounds, you need to start developing the ability to understand the movement of a melody.

 Basically, understanding  when the pitch goes up and when the pitch goes down within a melodic line such as the first line of the verse of a song.  In other words, ‘drawing’ the path of a melody.

You don’t need to know the exact intervals at this stage, but you have to be able to go up or down as the melody suggests.

This is a crucial skill to develop especially if you are interested in singing harmonies with other people. You need to be able to do that instantly.  So that is something you can train with any song you like, maybe take a slow one to start with, and then you can work your way up with that.

Developing ear training for beginner singers – step 3 – finding the key!

Something else that you can start training, which is super important  for anything you want to do in singing, is to be  able to  discover the key of a song you’re listening to. Not the theory of it, but be able to sing it.  For this skill, you need to know a little bit of music theory, as songs are built around scales.

But for now just know that  Western music  usually is organized in scales. The most common one is the major scale.  All those scales have a ‘center of gravity’, where all the other notes gravitate towards. For example, if you are singing a song in the key of C major, the center is gravity is the pitch C.

 This means  that everything you do in the song is going to redirect you to C. So C is your ‘home’, is where the song rests.  So you have to train the ability to listen to a song and find that note in which the song rests, which might or might not be at the beginning or the end of the song.

Music intervals for beginner singers

Training your ear to identify and sing intervals is a crucial skill for all musicians, and singers are no exception.  

Intervals are the distance between two pitches. There are different kinds of intervals, and they have a different feeling. 

The first intervals you learn to identify and differentiate when you are training your ear in music  are the major second interval (M2) and the major third interval (M3). If you think about the major scale,  a major second is the distance between DO and RE.  And a major third is the distance between DO and MI from the major scale.

 A major second is two semitones apart from a given note, and a major third is four semitones apart from a given note.

Identifying those is the first step in music interval training.

 Developing a relative pitch gives you the ability to get to that major second from whatever given pitch. This is something you are already training  when you do voice exercises with a teacher.

They usually show you an exercise and then take you a little bit higher and a little bit lower every time, so you are always singing the same melodic movement but starting on a different pitch.

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