There is now a free software package available for you to download here that you can set up specifically to learn the sounds of every note in relation to a key area. Within a couple of months I was programming the exercise into a music sequencer. Originally, I had to practice this with an acoustic piano which was rather time consuming. My jazz improvisation teacher Charlie Banacos taught me this exercise and it took me a year to be able to hear every note accurately. You must listen to these pitches over and over again against a strong key center cadence until you eventually internalise the sound of all the notes. The process to learning all of the twelve chromatic pitches in a key is achieved through repetition. Because music moves in time, you would have most likely missed that moment, lost your place in the music or at the very least ended up several bars behind everybody else. Try to visualise yourself stopping to sing something on a gig (let alone being able to discern what you are trying to sing due to the volume of the band) in order to hear the relationship between two pitches. The same goes for developing crutches such as singing the first two notes of a song to reinforce the relationship between two notes. Learning to recognise the sound of any interval may seem to be a valuable skill, but it has little value outside of the classroom if you can’t relate the notes you hear to a key center. Most ear training programs concentrate on relating one pitch to another pitch. Relative Pitch, succinctly put is based on developing pitch recognition that is relative to a key center. With many different sources all endorsing alternative methods to understand pitch recognition, one thing is very clear- the up and coming bass guitarist often becomes frustrated and confused because, although all of these methods mentioned hold some value on the surface, they only allow the student to hear the individual pitch and/or the distance between pitches- NOT how they relate to a given key center. Many approaches and mixed opinions exist: some espouse you must be able to hear intervals some say that you should develop perfect pitch some advocate learning the first two notes in a song and singing them to recognize the pitches some advise sight singing melodies some state the only way is through transcription, while others insist that musical dictation is the key. Ear training is a ubiquitous concept within a musician’s vernacular, but often the quest for the acquisition of “good ears” is filled with a road of misinformation from post to pillar.
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