Why You Need Great Ear Training Skills To Become A Great Guitarist

You make faster progress in your overall guitar playing when you have a good ear. Why? You’ll be surprised at the main reason…

A lot of guitarists think that developing aural skills only refers to being able to hear scales or chords. Fact is, it goes much deeper than this. Having ear training skills as a guitarist also means being able to identify mistakes as you play at faster tempos. This is crucial for being able to correct mistakes that only happen when you play fast. This helps you improve your guitar technique. When you have solid aural skills like this, you are able to hear mistakes in unclean playing, spot which notes are unclean and know why they are unclean.

The exercise below trains your ear to help you hear mistakes in your guitar playing at any speed:

Step One — Choose any item you want to practice that contains only a small amount of notes (5–10). You can divide up a phrase if you need to.

Step Two — Determine the tempo at which you begin to make mistakes while playing this practice item. Work with a metronome to pinpoint the precise tempo.

Step Three — Reduce the tempo by 5–8 beats per minute and play through the item for one minute without stopping. While you do this, focus your attention on one specific note. Pay close attention to listen for any mistakes or imperfections in that note.

Step Four — Think critically about what is causing any mistakes for the note you were focusing on in the previous step. Play through the item again while making any necessary adjustments to fix the mistake(s) that made the note sound sloppy.

Step Five — Play through the practice item for one minute without stopping while focusing on a different note.

Repeat this process as many times as needed until you have cleaned up every note for the practice item you chose. Then set the metronome up to the speed where the mistakes originally appeared and do this exercise again. The more you repeat this exercise, the stronger your ear becomes for identifying mistakes in your playing.

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About The Author:

Tom Hess is a highly successful professional musician, guitar teacher and composer. With his correspondence guitar lessons, he has helped thousands of guitarists improve their guitar skills. To become a better guitar player go to http://tomhess.net and watch free guitar video lessons, learn about effective guitar practice, and read guitar articles.