r/eartraining

Hey folks, I’m longtime musician with a not great ear and bad singing skills. I’ve been doing Sonofield daily for about a month along with some other singing and listening practices. I’ve got three stars on all of the “Sun” path (major scale ideas) in the “Degrees” tab of Sonofield.

I’ve gotten much better at recognizing and signing intervals, but I still really just don’t hear notes in my head. For example, if a note or chord is playing and I want to sing a major second over it, I can match the root and then jump to the major second pretty well, but just thinking of the major second and then singing it directly feels like total guesswork still.

I notice this when I do the ”Voice“ tab in Sonofield but also in general if I’m trying to sing a song or write vocal parts. This makes it really tough to sing live or with other people. It feels like even with the improvements I’ve made with my ear, it’s not totally helping me improve at what I want to do with music.

Any thoughts on this issue? Are there things to practice to get better here? Would appreciate any advice, thanks!

For as long as I can remember, I've been able to instantly recognize all the white keys on a piano without any reference. It works for other timbres too — even something like the squeak of a chair. But I’ve never been able to distinguish flats and sharps. If I hear a C♯, my brain just tells me it’s a C. This might stem from a bad habit: I’d sing a C even when the score said C♯.

(Edit: When I say I would sing a C even if it’s C sharp I meant that i think of it as a C in my head as I play that note. I play piano religiously when I was a kid and I thought if I think of it as C sharp that’s two words and it ruins the rhythm a little bit. I just tried the perfect pitch test online and identified 20/20 correctly of all 12 notes I guess I don’t have this problem anymore but i still WANT relative pitch !)

Recently, I’ve been trying to develop relative pitch. But whenever I try to use a movable-do system or imagine the tonic as “do,” my brain just won’t have it. It keeps telling me, “That’s not do, that’s a G.” I can force myself to think of it as “do” for a few seconds, but then my brain subconsciously flips it back to the absolute note name.

It’s like my imperfect pitch is actively preventing me from hearing relationships. I can’t be the only one who’s struggled with this. How do you work around it? I wouldn’t say I have perfect pitch cuz I only have a 50 percent success rate which is practically useless that’s why i really want to learn relative pitch.Whatever I have I just want to turn it off.

My primary school teacher told me point-blank that I just "wasn't a singer." I actually believed her until last year. It is wild how a single comment like that can shut down a hobby for twenty years, but it turns out most of what we think is "talent" is just a mechanical disconnect.

If you have been told the same thing, you should know that you are probably not tone-deaf. Real congenital amusia only affects about 4 percent of the population. If you can hear when someone else hits a sour note, your ears are fine. The problem isn't your hearing; it is the coordination between your ears and your vocal cords.

Think of it like a feedback loop that just got rusty. You hear a note, you produce a sound, you listen to yourself, and then you adjust. Kids build this naturally because they make noise constantly, but adults often stop singing for decades and the loop atrophies. It also doesn't help that your voice sounds totally different inside your own head because of your skull resonating. You are basically trying to drive a car while looking through a distorted mirror.

The most useful thing I did to fix this was something called drone matching. I would find a steady note on a piano app or YouTube and sing an "ah" to match it. The trick is to listen for a "wobble" in the sound. When that wobble disappears into silence, you know you are perfectly in tune. Doing that for five minutes a day for two weeks closed the gap for me more than any music theory could.

Beyond that, I found it helps to stop trying to mimic singers who have a totally different range than your own. You have to find where your voice actually lives first. I also started recording myself and listening back the next day because fresh ears are way more objective than "in the moment" ears. Finally, stick to songs you know so well you could sing them in your sleep. If you are struggling to remember the words, you cannot focus on the pitch. It is all about solving one problem at a time.

I’m building a new feature for my ear training app and want a sanity check on the idea.

The concept is a bite-sized daily ear training challenge: each day everyone gets a new short music clip and answers a few focused listening questions, for example melodic dictation, interval identification, chord quality or inversion, and rhythm tapping.

The clips are AI-generated, but the point is not to present them as finished musical products. The idea is to use AI as a tool to create fresh, purpose-built ear training material with clear musical targets.

Does that sound genuinely interesting, or more like something you’d try once and never come back to?

Would the fact that the clips are AI-generated put you off if the exercises themselves were good?

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Hi everyone, I'm actively training my ear right now: transcribing songs by ear, plus using Functional Ear Training and Sonofield. The problem is I don't have access to a guitar at the moment. Can I temporarily replace transcribing on guitar with a piano app (virtual keyboard)? Will it still be useful for ear training, or should I just wait until I get my guitar back? I'm specifically interested in melody training.

How do you go about playing a song, specifically the chord progression when someone asks you to play a song and then just hums a few bars. It's not much to go by but some people can fashion something representational of the song. What skill set/framework do you need in order to do this consistently?

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I've been struggling with Sonofield for several days now. I can't even get past the first level properly. Meanwhile, on Functional Ear Trainer, I consistently score 90–95% correct. I can also easily figure out simple songs by ear on my instrument.

What could be the problem? Am I doing something wrong, or does Sonofield use a fundamentally different approach? Has anyone else experienced something similar?

A bit of background: I'm a developer and a musician, and for the longest time I've been frustrated by how inconsistent my ear training practice has been.

I'm a developer by day so I just started building something for myself on the side. Nothing fancy, just a clean way to drill pitch and interval recognition. It kind of grew into something usable so I figured I'd share it: melodyminds.xyz

If anyone tries it, I'd genuinely love to hear what's missing or broken. I use it myself daily so feedback actually goes somewhere.

Feel free to remove this if it breaks any rules