logoalt Hacker News

trane_projecttoday at 2:01 AM1 replyview on HN

I highly advice anyone against taking up this type of ear training practice if what they want is just to play music recreationally. I did it for a while, stressed out about it, and I saw very little improvement in what really mattered to me, which was just to be able to play music freely.

If that is also your goal, you would be better served by learning how to play along recordings and use them to improvise along them. Your ear is already good, given that you can hear music, and this relies on using those existing abilities. There is no existing ability to label random sounds out of a musical context. I am still unsure how mastering all of these puzzles turns into actual musicianship, but some people swear by it, so I guess it eventually happens if you do it for long enough.

I wrote a guide on how to do this: https://trane-project.github.io/generated_courses/transcript...

Honestly I have stopped doing anything else and I have seen my actual musicianship skyrocket and I am having 1000x more fun than I did before. It's not that different from how music was taught before notation was widespread with the advantage of now having recordings and easy ways to loop them, slow them down, and change their pitch.

I am hoping to eventually make a product in this space based on this pedagogy once I finish the one I am currently working on. But honestly it's not really needed if you are fine with just doing it with the songs you like without a full curriculum and fancy scheduling.


Replies

LearnYouALisptoday at 3:04 AM

You "wrote" a guide, yet it's in "generated_courses"? Interesting

show 1 reply