How to Train your Ear for Guitar Music

One of the most daunting things for new guitar players, especially if guitar is their first instrument, is the idea of learning how to read music.  While learning to play songs from sheet music or from tablature is important, learning to develop your musical ear, a collection of abilities that allow you to play songs just by hearing them, is just as important.  A player who can read music perfectly but who has not developed his or her musical ear will be entirely restricted to what is written on the page.  On the other hand, a player who can only play by ear will have a more difficult time remembering entire songs without any means of writing them down.  However, both the ability to read music and the ability to play it by ear are important, and developing one of these abilities will usually help develop the other more quickly.  Therefore, as a guitarist, it is very important to learn how to train your ear for guitar music. 

Perhaps the most important ability involved in learning how to train your ear for guitar music is perfect pitch.  This is the ability to hear a pitch and know exactly what it is—A, F#, D, etc.—without using the guitar, a tuner, or any other tone as a hint. 

There are varying degrees of this ability—being able to find a given pitch on your guitar is better than nothing at all, and can be helpful in developing perfect pitch—but the ultimate goal is to simply know what pitch you are hearing and to be able to play it on your guitar from memory. 

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Another ability that is involved in ear training is called relative pitch.  This is the ability to identify certain tonal intervals.  In general musical terminology, these intervals can be thought of in terms of steps.  However, for the sake of guitar players, these intervals can be thought of in terms of frets.  Relative pitch is the ability to identify the difference between two tones.  For example, a guitar player hearing a note followed by another note and being able to say that the two notes are five frets apart is a demonstration of the ability of relative pitch. 

The abilities of perfect pitch and relative pitch are the building blocks that are essential to the further development of your musical ear.  Once you have developed these abilities you will find that it is as if you have a sixth sense when it comes to playing the guitar.  You will be able not only to identify tones you hear, but to play the tones you hear in your head.  No more will you think, “if only I could play what I hear in my head.”  You will start to simply see the playing patterns for the songs you are thinking of, and you will be able to play them as if by instinct.  The importance of learning how to train your ear for guitar music in addition to learning to read music cannot be stressed enough!

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