 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson, we are going to work on our ear training, more particularly our melodic ear. Now ear training has all sorts of departments, melodic, harmonic and rhythmic. I thought we'll use this lesson to look at what I'm calling the five levels of ear training, more specifically melodic ear training. So most of the ear training lessons or exercises which I end up doing, which I would insist on you also doing, is a three-dimensional way of practicing this music. So by three-dimensional, what I basically mean is that you train your theory, you train your technique and you train your ear pretty much all at the same time. So in a sense, this is more like a overall, all-round or a mind training exercise rather than a ear training exercise. So there are a lot of apps out there which deal with ear training, which promote the idea of perfect pitch, relative pitch, some of which may not even exist or may be very tough to actually get. But I think ear training should be learned in the most organic way possible. So you have your instrument, you have your voice and you have the theory of music. So you use all these factors and get your ears to become stronger and stronger over time. So in this lesson, I've divided it into five parts. Let's get cracking with the first part. And if you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel, hit that bell icon for notifications and also consider heading over to our Patreon page to get all my handwritten notes for this lesson, the previous lessons and everything we'll be doing in the future. Let's get cracking. So for this first part, I'm gonna look at just the first three notes of the major scale. Let's see all this stuff on the D major scale. Okay, so let's look at D major once. Two sharps, F sharp and C sharp. Let's figure that out again. D, E, F sharp, G, A, B, C sharp, D, D, C sharp, B, A, G, F sharp, E, D. Okay, so we may not use all those notes. In fact, in the first part, we are just going to use the first three notes, which is D, E, F sharp. So to train your ear with these three notes, what are we trying to achieve? We're trying to get the ear or the mind to know these three notes in every kind of pattern possible. So rather than knowing F sharp or rather than knowing E, it's the relation between these three notes, which I think is very important for the ear. Okay, so we'll start with these three notes. And the first thing you'd like to do is set it up on the piano. Okay, so you could play your root D in the left hand, just to give you the Sa or the root. And then you just have these three notes, nothing very technical, just three notes. So the first thing you'd like to do is just to get acquainted with the three notes. So just try and play it and sing it parallely, you know, or sing and play or play and sing, whatever works for you. Just go for it for about five to 10 minutes before the actual ear training begins. So the first thing is to get acclimatized with these three notes. So you could do stuff like, ta-ra-ra, just go up three, ta-ra-ra, go down three. Go down three. Ta-ra-ra, jumble it. Ta-ra-ra, or just jam along with those three notes. Sing it. Ta-ra-ra-ra, ta-ra-ra, ta-ra-ra, right. For a lot of us, our piano playing might be a lot better than our singing because as piano players, you focus more on the piano and not so much on your voice. So it's important to bring what you know on the piano to your voice, right. So, ta-ra-ra-ra-ra, you know, stuff like that. You could either have come up with it with your voice or you could have come up with it on the piano. So let's do that for a few more moments. Ta-ra-ra-ra, ta-ra-ra, ta-ra-ra, ta-ra-ra, and you could also try and develop the idea of singing all this stuff with the swaras or the solfege language, whichever you're used to, right. In the eastern parts of the world, you'll have things like sa-re-ga-ga-re-sa, which are the Indian swaras. You could also go do-re-mi-mi-re-do, whatever works for you. So I'm just going to use the swaras a little bit now. What will that be? Ga-ga-re-ga-re-sa, ga got repeated twice, right. Ta-ra-ra-ra-ra-rum, ta-ra-ra-ra-rum, re-ga-re-ga-sa, sa-re-ga-ga-re-sa, stuff like that. So get acquainted with these three notes in this way, you know, sing, play or play, sing or just go for it. Just see what happens for five to 10 minutes. And after that, you get into this kind of exercise where you have to sing something and then you have to immediately play what you just sang, okay. And it's also important and crucial to maintain a steady meter. So in the left hand, I'm going to try and stick with a four beat per bar or four by four system. So try and come up with a melody with just these three notes. So what I did right there was I played back exactly what I sung, no preparation at all, but I tried to play it back in the very next bar. What you could do is kind of digest it a bit more, give it an extra bar if you want, and then perhaps play it back. For example, ta-ra-ra-ra-rum, now try, right. It's not that easy. If you're just starting off, you'll have to work on it a bit more. That's why I've developed this with just three notes. Okay, let's proceed. Ta-ra-ra-ra-rum, ta-ra-ra-rum. Okay, what are you going to do? Okay, moving on. Another nice thing to do, okay, is to sing along with me right after I'm playing it. I'm giving you a little bit of time. So try to sing it back and then try playing it on the piano. That could also help because I'm teaching you. In the real world, it's just going to be you singing and you trying to play. So... Ta-ra-ra-ra-rum, ta-ra-ra-rum. Ta-ra-ra-rum, ta-ra-ra-rum. Play now. You could do it with swaras. Ta-ra-ra-ra-rum, ta-ra-ra-rum. Okay, stuff like that. Okay, let's do a few more examples. Ta-ra-ra-rum, ta-ra-ra-rum. Ta-ra-ra-rum, ta-ra-rum. Now try playing. Also, what will happen? You may be pleasantly surprised that your hands may not work together some of the times because you will be singing something without a filter between your mind and your fingers. That's the beauty of singing. It's a very natural way to get music out of you. So I would encourage you to sing naturally and then it also ends up becoming like a hand independence exercise because you have to maintain a steady pulse there while playing whatever it is you are trying to sing. So in this explanation, I haven't made mistakes while singing, but I would definitely tell you that mistakes will happen initially and this is a very organic way and I think a very fun way to practice this. If you have a musician friend in your neighborhood or in the family, you could practice it with one of them. Get them to challenge you. So there are a lot of ways to go about this. So this is the level one of my ear training exercise. Three notes sets, practice them and practice them hard. If you'd like to accompany them with like a major chord in the left hand, feel free. I would say just go with a single note and that should do very fine. So let's move on. So in level two of ear training, we are gonna try and train our idea of chords. So if you just take a simple major chord like D major, so great way to train once here is to play the entire chord in the left hand, either together like this or you can break up the chord like that or you can up agitate it. There are lots of lessons where we've talked about a ton of left hand patterns. So explore our YouTube channel. There are a lot of playlists we've made which make it very easy to access stuff for the left hand, for hand independence and obviously for ear training, which there's a lot of lessons and material for. Okay, so you go something like that, this pattern. And now on the right hand, what you're expected to do is to be able to know the notes of this chord, not only with the right hand, even with your voice as this entire ear training process is about the voice, meeting the piano or vice versa. So the notes of the D major chord are D, F sharp, and A, right? So you go, two, two, two, first get acquainted with the notes. Two, sing each note. Da, na, figure out a pitch which works for you. Usually for female voices, it's gonna end up being right, for male voices, obviously a bit lower. Two, you could even name it with the respective swaras, which is Saga, paga. Saga, paga. Okay. So when you're singing for obvious reasons, you can't sing more than one note at a time, right? You can't do that with your voice or that. You can only do the whole process monophonically or one note at a time. So it becomes a great challenge. So you sing over this chord, sing a bar of music, using only the notes of that chord, and then obviously we need to try and play it. So your hand is essentially here. So anytime you go away from that chord, your ear will know. So ear training is not only about getting it right, it's also about knowing when you are wrong. That's another important aspect of ear training. And again, I've never been a fan of any of these ear training apps because ear training is this one thing in music which can be done and dusted without a book, without an app, without, sometimes even without a teacher. You can really figure out your own methodologies, you know, on your own. And I hope that what I'm doing is a guide for you to further explore. Because ear training is a very personal thing. It's just between you and the piano. You don't need a book and stuff like that too. To help you along this path. So anyway, play the chord in the bass and try to sing specific notes. Anyway, I'm staring at it. I'm staring at D F sharp A, right? So you go... Figure out how to play that. And make sure you're on time. Don't sing random stuff. Make sure you're following the pulse. Two, three, okay? So... Ta-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. Okay. Ta-na-na-na-na-na-na. Right? Ta-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. Ta-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. Right? So this is a great ear training exercise. It's an awesome ear training thing even for me right now as we speak. So that's pretty much the deal. Now, if you sing something like this... Ta-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. You see it went away from the triad. So when you're in the world of the triad, you need to stick with the triad. Earlier we did three consecutive notes. Now we're doing three notes of the triad. Ta-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. Okay? Ta-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. It'll also train, as I said earlier, it'll also train your hand independence. There's a lot of things which can be worked on at the same time. And while you're doing all this, remember that you're making music. Everything you're doing right now is a composition because, well, you're not playing someone else's song, are you? So I would also highly recommend that you have a phone next to you or some kind of a recording app, a simple voice recorder to just document what you're doing over the, let's say 20 minutes of this ear training process. Documenting your work is very important because you never know what if you compose something really cool. So don't think of it as a drill or as a chore or as an exercise. Think of it as a way to compose music. That's always a better way to train your ear. So let's move on to level three as I'm calling it for your training, right? So the third way of training your ear will be again with the triad or with the major chord or even the minor chord, but using the concept of inversions or shapes of the chords as we call it. So if you take the D major chord, which we just learned, D F sharp A, you'll realize that it has various shapes. You can either go D F sharp A or you could take this D and put the D up top or you could do A D F sharp and play the F sharp up top, D on top. These are all your inversions, which in theory we officially say this is the root position of D major that's the first inversion of D major with the D on top or the root on top and this is the second inversion of D major with the F sharp on top and the D in the middle. So what you do is you basically expand or you extend this level, the second level, which I told you of your training and you also add your inversion. So let's start with maybe this inversion, which is the first inversion and again try to sing something and then try to play it back. First get acquainted with the shape very different because the root has gone upstairs. It's gone to the top of the music. So okay, come down. Okay, let's try and build some stuff. So it's a high one. Okay, so that was ear training over that. Then you could do ear training over A D F sharp. Okay, so okay, you don't want to go so high as a singer. You may ruin your voice. So be careful. Anyway, so this is the other inversion. So it goes something like and now try to sing some music around the inversion. Now try to play that. So let's recap. We have three inversions now for every chord. This one, this one and this one. So what happens now is it's kind of expanded your pitch range. Your pitch range used to be only so much in the second level, right? Now we've expanded it either that way or we have expanded it this way. Don't think the inversions are taking it higher. It could also take it lower. So actually now the entire keyboard can be explored over that one chord of three notes, which is D F sharp A. So eventually you should be singing anything on the D major chord, whether it's a higher note or a lower note. And you should try and figure out a way to match it on your instrument. So for example, okay, that was a lot. Let's sing that again. Let's play that. You see, I started with the F sharp there. And then you come down. Okay, let's try a couple more options. Maybe tricky to actually play, right? Sometimes it's not only about hearing it, it's also about being able to play it, you know? So that's why I like this approach of practicing the instrument, which I share with pretty much all of my students where don't focus on ear training only. Always look at theory, look at the technical aspects like, you know, fingering, hand coordination, developing a steady pulse, getting the rhythm sense going. So look at an entire all round way of learning music. Okay, so in this level, we have looked at many inversions or many shapes of the chords. Let's now move on to the next level. Right, guys. So so far we've looked at three notes at a time. You know, this package, or we've looked at the triad, which is still three notes at a time, but over the chord. And then we've looked at over the inversions of the chord. So what we ended up doing, sing something, which is one of those three notes and immediately try to play it back on the piano. So now let's expand our knowledge and our skills to maybe using five notes. That's basically the next level. So if you take the first five notes of the D scale, what will it be? D, E, F sharp, G, A. And what's nice is you use one finger for each of those notes. So thumb for D, index for E, F sharp, G, A, like that. Okay. And you could go back to playing a single D, if you'd like. Keep a pulse as always. And first of all, let's get acquainted with those notes. You could play it before you sing. Play it a couple more times. Now let's sing. Down. Down. So now that we've got acquainted with those five notes, we start building. All right. So I'm giving you examples. Okay. The assumption is after you finished watching this full video, you start working it on your own over the week, you know, or over the weeks, you know, to come. So it's the whole idea is to somehow get that, somehow play what you just sang. And if you make a mistake, you can always try again, but maintain a steady pulse while you do so. And here and there, you may squeeze in a couple of extra notes, like maybe. So now I'm playing a seventh there, right? So one option could be just crossover your finger. So here and there, you could adjust for those extra notes as long as you can play them, which is why I'm proposing just taking five notes sets at a time. Earlier, we started with three note combinations. Now we're looking at five note combinations. So again, sing, play, and just make sure you're on the right, you know, on the right notes. What will also help you greatly is if you practice this exercise on multiple scales. Don't just be comfortable on D. You could also avoid that repetition or sometimes that boredom of, you know, constantly hearing the same notes by maybe placing your fingers on some other keys, like maybe the first five notes of E major, which is nice. That also trains your technique or maybe F major. Those are the five notes or G major, A major, B major or C major or D flat, E flat, F sharp, A flat, and finally B flat. So that 12 scales, which you could actually practice this on and actually speaking, every scale kind of feels a bit different. So it's worth trying this out on as many keys as you can. And that's how your technique will also improve greatly. Okay, so this is about level four in this lesson where you're trying to use five note sets of whichever scale. As I've mentioned now, you start with D, then you can do five notes sets from E and so on and so forth. So now let's move on to level five. Right, everyone? So with level five, you're just going to take all the aspects of the first four levels and continue your ear training journey, but try to now use different intervals. So the first interval I would like you to change is take your major third or the third note. This one, F sharp. I'm still in the key of D. So take that F sharp, drop it down by a step. You get a completely different world of music. That's the minor world. Okay, so that's a great way to practice. So get acquainted and then go back to the first stage, which is just three note sets and practice your job. It also gives you a lot of discipline, which you need as an artist at any skill level. You may argue it's very easy to play these three notes, but when you're composing, you're going to have two challenges. The first thing is you have to only compose on those three notes. So what's going to happen is you're going to want to do more. Your creative brain will want to run around, but you should also realize that three notes can also be made very, very creative. You can just search on the internet, Eli Raja's three note song, where he just takes three notes and plays all sorts of music. He plays with an entire orchestra. So you can compose fancy music with just three notes. So you need to respect these three notes. So this exercise also to give you that sense of discipline and respect towards those notes so that you don't run away. Especially with keyboard players and guitar players, you have so many things you can do. So try to just stick with the same three notes. Okay, let's keep going with it. This exercise also forces you to come up with new melodies within the prison of these three notes, so to speak. Then what happens? You go back to level two where we looked at the triad, but in this instance, we are trying to take a minor triad, not major. We convert it to minor. So that one. Now that was not part of the chord. So you get the idea. You're going to make a few blunders here and there, but that's good as long as you know what happened. Then you look at the inversion. Three shapes of the minor chord. There are three shapes of any triad. So feel free to explore all those three shapes. And last but not least, the five note pattern, the first five notes of the minor. So keep your fingers all on those five notes and then start rolling. Try with some swaras as well. That could help. Then something like that. A few notes. Okay. With respect to D as the Sa. Right, guys. And of course, we've done it with the flattening of the third. But well, if you take a five note set of notes, you can do so many things. You can do all major, of course. That's the major scale. Then drop that to minor. You have another permutation to practice. Then you can start looking at all the exotic flavors, which could be where you flatten the second as well. Or you can leave the third as it is. Okay. So that's all your permutations with a flat two. So now you could practice ear training with that stuff. Stuff like that. And then of course, you can go ahead with the other very exotic flavor where you sharpen the ma or sharpen the four. So in other words, the G became G sharp. You can't bring it down. That'll come back to F sharp. So it gets a bit tricky as you drift away from the major and minor. So if you're new to this stuff, I would highly urge you to just focus your attention towards the five notes of the major scale and the five notes of the minor scale, keeping a steady root in the left. So these are the five levels of ear training, which you should practice in a three-dimensional way. Know it, hear it, and of course, play it. So with all of this going on, I would highly urge you to think like a composer. You are in a very composer music making environment. So think that you are going to make music, that you have a chance of making music each and every time. Keep a recording app nearby just to be sure, just to make sure that you get your compositions there, which you can share with people eventually. So hope this exercise was helpful. These are again five levels of ear training or melodic ear training to be more specific. And hope you guys have found the lesson useful. I will catch you in the next one.