J. Anthony Allen teaches how to identify intervals, the distance between two notes, by ear. Mastering this skill lets you transcribe melodies and later recognize chords. The course uses listening techniques and structured practice, with progress coming from deliberate, repeated work.
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Ear Training and Oral Skills, Part two, Intervals. So what we're going to do in this class is we're going to focus entirely on identifying intervals by ear. Okay? So I'm going to give you a whole bunch of techniques for different ways to listen, different ways to hear, and different ways to identify intervals. Now, the interval is a space between two notes, right? So what we want to be able to do and what you will be able to do by the end of this class is I'm going to play two notes. I'm going to tell you what the first note is, and you're going to tell me what the second note is, because you're going to be able to identify the distance from the first note, and that will tell you what the second note is. Now, you can imagine that the reason we want to get good at this skill is so that if I do it with more than two notes, let's say I do it with eight notes, you can tell the distance between every note, and that will let you be able to write down a full melody or play back a full melody on your instrument. This idea of interval recognition is the key to melodic ear training, identifying melodies. It also gets to be pretty important with identifying chords, once we get to chords. So this class is not a silver bullet. This isn't going to get you amazingly good at it overnight. It's going to take a lot of practice. This is hard stuff, and it takes practice. So in this class, I'm going to give you a whole bunch of techniques for how to do this, different ways, going to tell you about trying to find what way works best for you, and then I'm going to give you hours and hours of things to practice. It takes practice, takes even more practice. But I'm going to walk you through how I learned how to do it, how a lot of different people learn how to do it, how I teach doing it, and we're going to have some fun. We are going to work on some melodies in this class. We'll work on some other stuff, too, but primarily we're focusing on intervals. So let's get started.
