QUOTE (JesseJ @ Jun 13 2012, 04:42 AM)
Yah for me my weakness has always been my ear. And although I think it is very important to develop your strengths , you cant just give up on something and be like oh that's my weak area so i'm not even going to try. For me personally I know I am going to be working on my ear for a long time and it is going to be hard but I am not going to give up on it . At the same time I am going to keep working on my strong areas because I want to be a good all around guitarist .
You're right it is hard, an uncovered and lacking part of many a guitarists skills including mine. When ear training there are all kinds of undiscovered nooks and crannies I find in my skill which I am lacking that I wouldn't have known otherwise.
I just bought a Techaffect USB footswitch and have it set to my left mouse click which I hover over the play / pause button on media player (there might be something out there specifically built for this but it was cheap and good enough for me). Without the pedal singing then repeating on guitar with backing tracks that use more than one chord doesn't work because once I have imagined / sang the phrase, by the time I play it back on my guitar, often the backing track has moved on. The pedal allows me to pause the track and play my phrase then carry on, obviously it doesn't sound great stopping and starting but I think it's the only way to do this particular kind of ear training with chord changes. Otherwise one chord vamps are usefull for this.
I start from the bottom and work my way up i.e. I, IV, V chord sequence I sing the roots of the chords only first time round, next time round it's the roots and 5ths, then roots and 3rds, roots 3rds and 5ths, b7ths. I could be a better Blues player or any other style than I am by now, but there are only 12 intervals and 12 notes in all music and I am going for long terms goals in less time rather than short terms goes in less time making the long terms ones longer.
I started with identifying the 12 intervals, most of the time you should use the guitar and play your answers so you connect muscle memory to your inner ear.
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