My Electric Toothbrush Hums in Middle C: Using the Sounds Around You to Improve Your Ear

Want to get the music out of your head and into the world? The best way to do that is to pay attention to the sounds around you. Here are some habits that you might want to develop to become a better musician.

By Daniel Roberts and Dave Kusek

(We’ll be covering these tips and more in a Free Music Theory Master Class on Thursday, January 19 at 1PM EST. Plus, we’ll take a look at how hit songs like Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” actually put these music theory concepts into practice. Sign up here.)

Stop Guessing What the Chords Might Be

Instead, learn about keys and harmonic function. This will take enormous amounts of guesswork out of the process. You don’t have to try twenty chords if you know that it can only be one of six chords you like in a key.

As we show you in Hit Music Theory, almost all music has a key. Keys are used to organize how we hear sounds and make it possible to quickly find harmonies and other musical ideas that fit with each other.

For instance, if I am playing in the key of A major, I know right off the bat that the chords A, B-, C#-, D, E and F#- will all work very well with each other. Since we usually hear musical ideas inside of particular keys, the more aware of which chords are in which keys, the more you can limit how many chords you need to try to find the sound you hear in your head.

Develop Your Ear and Become a Better Musician

Believe it or not, you can learn to connect what you learn in theory to particular sounds you hear in music. You can train yourself to do this to such a degree that you can begin to identify EXACTLY what is going on without any instrument at all.

Notice what key you are in.

Training yourself to do this does not require perfect pitch. Instead, you can use things like solfege and other ear training approaches to hear how the music functions. The reason this is possible is that each note in a scale has its own kind of sound (this is why we like some riffs and not others, some chords and not others, etc. – we already can hear it all, we just don’t know what to call each thing we hear). If you give a name or syllable to each pitch in a scale, you can start to identify the sound of a particular note in a scale with a particular syllable.

The process of developing your ear never ends; so don’t worry about getting it right all the time. Learn the language of music and make it a priority to sing (singing these notes with syllables is really helpful) and analyze the music you listen to. The more you do it, the better you will become. Once you start being able to hear these notes and sing them, you can tie them into your understanding of keys and chords and identify the chords you are looking for even faster.

To see the other two tips, head over to HitMusicTheory.com.