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Courses/Stage 10

An Ear-Training Ladder: From Single Notes to Hearing Progressions

Handbook8 minBuying & care · how to practice · learning a song · gigs & recording · reading & ear

Musicality is built. Train your ear up a ladder from easy to hard, and “hearing it, singing it in tune” will slowly grow.

Video lessons are in production — follow the notes and practice checklist below and you'll learn it just fine.
Stage 10 · Extras · The Practical Handbook12 lessons

You're on lesson 12 / 12 in this stage

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  1. Choosing Your First Guitar8 min
  2. Changing Strings, Maintenance & a Gear Checklist9 min
  3. How to Practice So It Works: Planning, Warm-up & Plateaus9 min
  4. Follow Your Ears: Rhythmic Feel & Hearing Chords9 min
  5. Take a Song You Love From Zero to Done10 min
  6. A Style Map: Getting to Know More Genres9 min
  7. Playing & Singing in Front of People for the First Time: How Not to Panic8 min
  8. Record Your First Track on Your Phone8 min
  9. Livestreaming / Short Video & a Jamming Primer9 min
  10. Taking a Step Forward: Upgrades, Pickups & Tone9 min
  11. Reading Numbered Notation & Standard Notation9 min
  12. An Ear-Training Ladder: From Single Notes to Hearing Progressions8 min

The overall principle: you can only hear what you can sing

The heart of ear training is “listen first, then sing, and sing along.” Listening without singing keeps the notes from getting into your body. At every rung, give yourself a reference pitch with the guitar or a tuner — listen to one, sing one, then check.

The five-rung ladder

① Pitch up or down: play two notes and judge “higher or lower,” listening first then singing back; ② intervals: start with common ones like the perfect fifth and major third, anchored by the signature leap of a familiar song (the perfect fifth ≈ that jump from do to sol in “Twinkle, Twinkle,” for example), and once you know them, drop the crutch and hear the distance directly; ③ major and minor triads: tell apart the color of “bright (major) / dark (minor)”; ④ simple melodies: start from 2 bars, listen to a phrase, sing back a phrase; ⑤ chord progressions: picking up from this stage's “Follow Your Ears,” listen for a song's roots and major/minor, and try fitting an all-purpose progression.

  • 💡 A few minutes a day over the long run beats one big cram; use movable-do solfège (do is always the tonic of the current key) to build relative pitch — it suits playing-and-singing and transposing best.
Open the tunerWhen practicing single notes / intervals, use it to check whether you're singing / hearing them accurately.→

Practice checklist

  • Play two notes, judge high or low first, then sing them back — 10 sets in a row.
  • Pick 2–3 common intervals and find a familiar song's signature leap for each to “anchor” and remember it.