Hi all! I'm trying to wrap my head around how hearing melodies really works, would love to get your insights...
I'm an aspiring musician, my goal here is to be able to transcribe short ( 5 notes) melodies in a simple scale like pentatonic, instantly or near instantly.
I've been working on this daily for 6 months now, and I've reached another kind of roadblock.
First I got good at the interval trainer on tonedear.com, but realized this is a slow way to transcribe, because of the context switching: my interval songs are in a different key than the melody I'm transcribing.
Next I switched to scale degree identification. Using an app that sets up a tonal center with a short chord progression, and then plays a note from the scale. I sing back to the tonic and identify the scale degree. This took another 2 months but did help a bit. I'm still pretty slow though.
My question is... those of you who can do this, do you hear melodies as independent notes, where the scale degree pops into your head as soon as you hear it (2 1 3 or re do mi), or is more like hearing the notes relative to each other (one step down in the scale, two steps up).
This would help me decide whether to try to train more on recognizing melody shapes vs. more work on identifying scale degrees faster.
I've also heard one teacher recommend practicing to identify pairs of scale degrees in a tonal context, in essence developing a 2-note vocabulary internal database.
Sorry for the long post, I appreciate any feedback!
@paul kesler i would suggest singing everything as much as you can at first. but you definitely want to eventually turn off the resolution and not even play it in your head. if you use solfege, it will probably take a few weeks before you’ll memorize the syllables themselves pretty well. interval barks is one of the most useful exercises on this website to also help with that.
on the ear training as a whole: this stuff takes a lot of time to master, especially to become useful in real life scenarios. i’m sure there will be room for me to get better even at the simplest concepts for years to come
my progress looked like this when i started this journey about a year ago: - 1 month with functional ear trainer to be able to identify scale tones within the major scale - 1 month to expand that to all keys and multiple octaves - i think within another month i was able to remove the cadence entirely and identify 100 diatonic notes without mistakes and quickly.
since then i have been working on filling in the gaps, working on chromatics (which turned out to be incomparably more difficult), just getting faster at everything and more intuitive, and focusing less on artificial exercises and more on improvising and transcribing real music. what i didn’t anticipate is how big of a gap is between “just getting through exercises” to application, and that is what takes a lifetime to work on.
