Lesson #4 - Super Review Lesson 1

As always:
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In this lesson I gave you lots of content to help hone your skills, and in turn, this episode's show notes will be about how you can start to build your own ear training routine. With this podcast we started at just about the very beginning, and slowly I have been adding on new ideas and making the exercises harder. If the only ear training you're doing is with this podcast,  then eventually you'll find your self left behind; once a week is better than zero times a week, but if you want to have those shiney golden ears, you'll need to put in a bit more time.

The good news is that you wont need to put in very much more time, at all. In fact, if you're doing more than say, 30 minutes every other day, it's likey that you're not using your time as well as you could. The devoted will claim that no time is truley wasted, but you'll find that the first half hour of practice is far more productive than the second, and so on. The best thing you can do for your ears is sit down three times a week, for at least 20 minutes, 45 at most, and really conentrate on listening to your exercises and doing them to the best of your ability, then move on to your regular practice as you normally would, ears primed and ready.

Practicing ear training is best done with a buddy. As much as I would love to be your friend, I'm more or less an NPC, I only say one set of phrases a week, and as such the exercises I play for you will get repetitive, until the new episodt we is released of course. So grab a friend to ear train with. Play intervals and melodies and have them identify, and then switch. Having to pound out the same rhythm six times as evenly and regularly as you can muster while they correct their work will teach you a very hard lesson about the consistancy of your time. It's an experience worth having.

If you don't have a buddy, don't worry. Just sitting at the piano, playing intervals and singing them back will go a very long way to improve your tunning, even though it doesn't seem to work for singers. I jest, I'm a chourister myself.

Next week I'll talk about methods you can use to help you practice with just your self and an instrument.