definitely independent scale degrees, just like do always feels like home and if you try to imagine any other scale degree in its place, it will not make any sense. similarly, all other scale degrees start having their own colors and will jump at you.

it just takes a long long time. i spent about a year on this and only now getting to a point where i can identify all diatonic scale degrees with confidence in a short melody, but it's still not instant and sometimes i need to repeat the melody.

also make sure you practice minor and major keys separately. i like la-based minor scales approach which reinforces the same intervals found in a relative major scale. after that you can venture to minor modes and other minors (melodic, harmonic) all of which i see still as la-based minors with alterations.

super helpful exercises to me were Nadia Boulanger's sequential exercises, as well being able to sing as many patterns with solfege scale degrees as possible. you'd also want to transcribe every simple pop song melody you hear and make sure you can sing it 100% in tune and connect with all the scale degrees involved. they are usually simple enough and are ear worms, so will stick with you for a while.

lastly, if you are using Functional Ear trainer, make sure to reduce the frequency at which the cadence is played till you can get through 100 notes (in one key!) with cadence only played once. this will strengthen hearing the relationships between any two scale degrees, make you not just relate everything to the tonic. also make it not play resolutions after correct answers. this exercise isn't enough to immediately start hearing melodies in solfege or scale degrees, but it will definitely get you closer to your goal

I'm not familiar with la-based approach. Do you start on the sixth? Thank you both for these interesting posts.

@Paul Kesler thanks for the tonedear.com reference. Had not heard of this one. Will check it out. Good luck on your musician journey!

good luck

just wanted to say i’m impressed with how consciously and intentionally you are practicing, wish you the best

@Terri Winters yes, you just start on the 6th degree. for example, if you sing through Autumn Leaves that is traditionally in G minor, don't start with do=G, start with do=Bb. you will land on la, which will be the minor tonic, so it sounds like:

(up)la-ti-do-fa
(up)sol-la-ti-mi
(up)fa-sol-la-re
(up)ti-re-(down)-do-la

in other words, i think of it as if any song can have both minor and major tonics within it, but autumn leaves is of course the best example of this.

Thank you @Dima G clear, cogent explanation. It feels like an ocean of stuff I still don't know, but posts like yours help me to understand things that may be important.

Thanks for the feedback @Dima G!

I have to say I'm surprised you're still working on this given your Diamond badge, you must be miles ahead of where I am.

I am indeed using the Functional Ear Trainer from miles.be, so I really appreciate your tips there.

I will look into Nadia Boulanger. Thanks!

La-based minor solfege has me intrigued. I've been using chromatic solfege for minor keys (Do re me). I'm not sure if I understand the advantage although I have to say chromatic solfege and it's different names for going up or down the scale feels a bit clunky.

One more question for you @Dima G .
When you do the Functional Ear Trainer, how important is singing the names of the degrees when singing back to tonic ?
I would assume pretty important, as it hammers in the name of the note you identified and are singing first.

Though I find I usually have to sing without names, then count (4 scale steps up to tonic = sol), then do it again with the names.

@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.

Thanks all. Very interesting posts.

I agree, very nice posts, thanks @Dima G