New answers tagged ear-training
1
There is no sure-fire way to tell and no substitute for experience listening. A general rule of thumb is how "breathy" the voice is. The breathier, the more likely to be a head voice. But you also have to take into account the individual singer and their range. Furthermore, there are singers who are so adept at making their head voice sound consistent with ...
2
Of the 10 kisses, seven of them are consistent. I've labeled these pitches below, with numbers for the non-consistent bells:
A♭
F G
C D E♭
B♭ 8 9 10
The remaining three, however, switch pitches for various harmonic and bass support. As one example, on "Christ" of the first "Christmas," bell 8 plays an A♭. (Also note that, on the ...
0
It's obvious to me that there are several different methods for determining the key of a song. I use the method described by Richard and I find the key almost immediately most of the time, but just like everything else in music, I had to work at it in the beginning, I had to learn how to hear it. I don't think that one size fits all with this technique and ...
2
I play guitar and generally start with ear and instinct. It gets a lot easier when my conscious mind knows what key signature I'm in. In order to confirm to my conscious mind, I look for the semitone intervals that match the song. For example, if the notes B and C both sound right to me, then it's either a mode of C major (with C as the tonic) or a mode of G ...
1
The way I do it, as the song plays, I just play random notes on my instrument. It's very apparent which notes are not in the key as they will sound like a train wreck when you play them along with the song. So I quickly know what notes to avoid, the notes that mostly sound like they "fit" will be the seven notes in the key.
The note that they all tend to ...
3
Disagree with the first two concepts, agree with Richard's.
The tonic note is literally key to it all. Find that, and you usually have the scale used and the chords available. may be major, may be minor, but that's not a big deal to work out.
The tonic is the 'home' note, and thence the home chord. It's the one where in a piece, things could stop at that ...
1
I just figure out the scale, and from there you're going to be able to ballpark what key you're in. A key can use different scales, but the tonic note is what gives the key away. If it's an A major scale chances are you're playing in A. It gets mroe complicated in classical or jazz, but for your rock/pop/folk/country/blues music this works more often than ...
10
Do you find it faster to try to figure out chords and then guess and surmise the key? ... or perhaps a similar method but with a basic scale or figuring out the melody by ear.
I would personally go with none of the above!
The "key" of a song (or composition, etc.) is just another word for the "tonic" of the piece. And by tonic, we mean the most stable ...
4
By ear
This is an ear training approach that many music programs use: try to sing the tonic note of whatever chord progression you are listening to. You start by singing the tonic of chords, then move to sing the tonic of a progression, to eventually sing the tonic of a song. That's your key. By doing this you are trying to find the pitch that sounds more ...
2
Learning by doing:
Sing and play along. (Most important: listen to the bass.)
Many children songs use only the tonic and dominant: I-V. As you may know they begin and end at the tonic (home chord).
progressively you can choose songs using also the subdominant. Here you can learn to differ between dominant and subdominant (e.g. Blues and Rock).
Next step ...
2
Relate the intervals and chord progressions to melody fragments and songs that you're familiar with, and let your brain's pattern recognition do the work. That worked best for me, and it seems to be the most common heuristic for ear training among the other people I've asked.
To use my own examples: Minor third is the Brahms lullaby, minor 2nd is the Jaws ...
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