Real Ear Training: My Journey to Understanding the Music I Hear

My journey to developing my musical ear and really understanding the music I hear was a long one. I was an unhappy child pianist, dragging my feet along the sidewalk to my lessons. I found them boring, practice was boring, and even when a piece was right, it was boring too. But then, at age 14 I was asked to join a band—“you play the piano, don’t you?”—and a light switched on for me when I discovered music I loved. Very soon I knew that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

I started sitting at the piano making things up—things we could play in the band, and I found that chords, rhythms, and tunes came to me easily. I grew and in time our band edged towards fame, we got a manager, and a van… and then we split up. And my music-making seemed to split as well, down two routes: on a quest to become a serious jazz pianist, and with the hope of becoming a composer. At this time there were no colleges teaching jazz and no conservatoires or universities that thought like I did—that Mahler and Duke Ellington were worthy of the same investigation. And so, I had to teach myself, consuming composition and analysis books by the armload, listening to records, and studying scores. I learned songs and picked my way through Bach and more.

However, during my whole musical experience up to this time, I still felt like that young piano student, dragging his feet. I felt ‘outside’ music. Although I was immersing myself in the glory and groove of it all, I was desperate to get properly ‘in’ and understand it. I knew instinctively that I had entered music the wrong way. It was not flowing easily from my inner ear through to my fingers and into sound. I knew that was what a real musician could do. But without a proper teacher I did not know how to achieve this.

Developing a Musical Ear

To supplement my earnings from gigs, I started teaching jazz piano. As I figured out a method and built a course, I found that I was again teaching myself. I learned that dedicated teachers are always one of their own students. The door to music started opening and I began making the connections between ear, notes, and keys.

It was around the same time that I joined an African band in London where I was introduced to a whole new way of making music. Nothing was written down and little was explained in words—only playing, playing, playing, and demonstrating, and teaching the music through the instruments. The sax player would play a song’s introduction and from that we would get the groove, the key, and the chord sequence. During a song, changes would be flagged up through his or others’ playing. The door into music continued to open for me through this baptism of fire—I was improving my ability to play and understand music by ear.

And so, the secret to being able to listen to music, hear the sounds, and understand them gradually revealed itself to me. I had decoded a way to listen to pitches and rhythms, contextualize them, visualize them on the staff, then write them down. I called this Real Ear Training and it is the foundation of a university course I teach, and my book, Real Ear Training .

Real Ear Training

Real Ear Training condenses my years of learning and self-development into a unique course to help everyone understand and write down the music they hear. I hope that through this book, students can avoid taking the same long-way-round route that I did and begin to understand music in a natural way.

Real Ear Training works for all types of music but has been developed from a practical jazz, rock & pop background by someone who never felt they naturally had a ‘good ear.’ The essence of the course is breaking the learning into step-by-step chunks, and isolating rhythm and pitch so awareness of each can be developed separately. From these solid foundations, students are able to master hearing and notating melodies and two-part melodies, percussion ensembles, full drum kit rhythms, three-part rhythm sections grooves, and triads and chord inversions.

It’s a genuinely practical resource that I use regularly with my students, so includes many hints and tips I have found have helped over the years—it explains fills and grooves, how the instruments work together, counting silence and how to decode different inversions, amongst other tricky areas.

Although I am still on my own journey, I now feel the music is playing me. The piano is my instrument. I hear what I play just before I play it and I know what it is I’m hearing. And simply listening can now work better for me than studying a score—and I can practice in my head! Real Ear Training has brought me into music from the outside and it can do the same for you.