Ear Conditioning

Here's an (IMHO) excellent exercise that trains your ears and works on connecting your hearing and improvising. I forget where I got the initial idea, but this the the procedure I've developed and found helpful:


Take a chord progression (maybe a blues to start, or just I-vi-ii-V, or an easy standard like Autumn Leaves). Play through the whole chord progression on a chordal instrument, very slowly, while singing the tonic of the key over every chord (even the ones where it doesn't 'fit', even if the apparent key changes).

Repeat, singing the 3rd of the key.
Repeat, singing just 1 and 3.
Repeat, singing the 5th of the key. Then combine 1, 3 and 5. Depending on your range, you may add in octaves of these notes as well.

You may be surprised at this point how much music can be made with just those three notes, and that most chord changes can be negotiated by simply switching to one of the other two notes.

Keep repeating the tune (over several practice sessions), adding in the remaining diatonic tones. I recommend the following order: 6th, 2nd, 7th, and 4th, but feel free to experiment.

When you add a new interval follow the following pattern:
1st chorus: only the new interval {x}
2nd chorus: only 1 + {x}
3rd chorus: only 1, 3, 5 + {x}
4th chorus: all intervals

Once you can do this, again it may seem surprising how much you can play and negotiate changes just using the diatonic notes, by hearing which notes work where and how.

Then you can start adding in chromatic tones. I like to start with the "blues notes": b3, #4, b7. Then eventually add #5 and finally b2 (crunchy!).

In all of the above, I'm talking about the interval in the key, not intervals in relation to each chord.

Once you've done all 12 notes, then you can try going through the progression singing the root of each chord, then the 3rd, 5th, etc.

Note that different keys will put different intervals in different parts of your range. Practicing in different keys is helpful so that sometimes the tonic is in the middle of your range, sometimes at the low end, etc.

Ear Training

Ear training is obviously an extremely important pursuit for improvising musicians.  I spend a significant portion of my practice time on ear training activities, and try to find ways to incorporate an ear training aspect into all of my practicing.

One of the things that makes harmony so complex is that as you add notes, the complexity increasing in a combinatorial way, not an additive way.  For example:

If you hear an E against a C, it's one piece of information: major 3rd.

If you hear an E and a G against a C it's 3 pieces of information: major 3rd between C and E, perfect 5th between C and G, and minor 3rd between E and G.

If you hear an E, G, and B, against a C, it's 6 pieces of information: major 3rd between C and E, perfect 5th between C and G, and minor 3rd between E and G, major 7th between C and B, perfect 5th between E and B, major 3rd between G and B.

If you hear EGBD against C, it's 10 pieces of information: major 3rd between C and E, perfect 5th between C and G, and minor 3rd between E and G, major 7th between C and B, perfect 5th between E and B, major 3rd between G and B, major 9th between C and D, minor 7th between E and D, perfect 5th between G and D, minor 3rd between B and D.

Et Cetera.

So in order to learn all the sounds, we need to give names to specific combinations, like triads, and ultimately triads with added notes (including 7ths).

I've made a set of audio files (mp3 format) based on an exercise suggested by Rufus Reid.  Each file presents one of the four triads (Major, Minor, Augmented, or Diminished), and alternates with adding one of the twelve available tones to it.  The idea is to learn to hear the sound of all the available notes over each type of chord.

Download file here.

I used triads because once you can identify the sound of the 6ths and 7ths over a triad, then hearing more complex chords is merely a matter of identifying the chord as (Maj, Min, Aug, or Dim) triad+(6, b7, or 7) + additional note(s).

There are more than 12 files for each chord, because I included some notes in more than one octave (specifically, the 2nds/9th, 3rds/10ths, 4ths/11ths, and 7ths).  I did this because these notes can have some additional different characteristics when voiced close to the chord, and these differences can distract you from hearing the essential characteristics.  For these notes, I suggest spending some time going back and forth between the lower and higher version in order to focus on part of the sound that doesn't depend on what octave you're in.

There's a lot here (76 33-second clips), but it's pretty manageable.   There are a lot of ways to work with these files.  Here are some suggested playlists:

All Major Triads
All Minor Triads
All Dim. Triads
All Aug. Triads
comparing 3rds/10ths
comparing 4ths/11ths
comparing 2nds/9ths
comparing 7ths close-voiced or spread
All 7ths (or any other interval) over  Maj, Min, Aug, Dim triads
Compare min chord with added M3 with major chord with added b3: very interesting!
Compare maj chord with added b6 with augmented chord with added P5
Compare min chord with added #4 with dim chord with added P5
etc.

I hope this is helpful!

PS.  There's tons of stuff out there written about ear training, but here are a few of my observations:

-Singing is extremely important.
-Singing over a drone is extremely helpful.
-Deliberately 'hearing' notes in your head before you sing them is very important.  You can also use this to work on mentally 'hearing' more than one note at a time.
-Visualizing notes on your instrument as you mentally 'hear' them and/or sing them is very helpful. Visualizing a piano (if your main instrument is not piano) and written music are also helpful.
-Singing the root motion of chord progressions is great exercise.  So is singing guide tone lines (3rds and 7ths)
-Intervals can be heard two ways: as harmonic events or as distances.  Of the two, it's more important to hear the harmonic event (even when presented melodically). But it's helpful to learn to recognize the sound of a particular distance as well (some people argue that distance-hearing will actually impede your development, but I'm not convinced).
-Testing your ear is not necessarily the same as training it, though it can be helpful.
-One of the main ways we learn to distinguish similar things is through comparison.