I really want to be able to listen to songs and know what frets to press after a couple of listens but I’ve looked up many ways to train my ear for bass but every time I look I get a website or app and it’s always piano keys. Is there any ear trainer with just bass or another method I can use to help train my ears?
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Well there’s an easy way and there’s a hard way.
The easiest is to study the fingerboard, and start your ear training exercise. Learn your basic theories and chords progression. It gets things rolling.
The easy way is to start with easy song, do that a couple of hundred songs (easy) then move up to intermediate then difficult, by the time you get there you’d have it nailed. I’m half way down the intermediate.
The hard way is to play a lots of songs with tab on YouTube and hope you have great retention and hopefully when you play enough songs your muscle memory can get you there.
There’s no shortcuts. You scan learn “A” song and master it but to know all songs takes lots of dedication and hard work. Not even session pro can do it consistently on the fly.
Try this guy
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I can’t listen to music and immediately go “that’s an E” and wing it, but with enough time spent playing and listening I can usually get close. You will become familiar with what notes sound like on different strings and it will get easier.
What I do is hook up my bass, play whatever song it is i’m trying to learn, then just fret around until I find the right note. Since you can play the same note in many different places you just have to listen to the progression to dial in where exactly it’s being played on the neck.
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Hi All,
I just purchased badass course. when it comes to ear training. is this cover on this course too? I just want to improve my ear training. as a musician my frustration to cover many songs that I want.
Thanks.
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I’ve not completed B2B yet but by module 9 I haven’t come across any ear training. It does go into improvisation which is great. Others will be able to confirm whether there’s any ear training later in the course but I suspect not.
Mark Smith at Talking Bass has an Ear Training For Bass Volume 1 – TalkingBass course but I’ve not done it myself so can’t comment. In general Mark’s courses tend to be a little more theory based than Josh’s.
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Here’s the thing that I feel worried I purchased that course because of that. I think that is covered. one of my frustration is my ear since I can’t cover many music that I want. I don’t know what effective ways to improve it. I’m not entirely sure whatever skills I can produce after this course.
Well playing by ear is just one aspect of playing an instrument. B2B is about playing bass in the whole and there are a host of techniques to master and Josh’s course does a great job of doing that. You may just find that as you learn these techniques you find you ear improving along with them. I’d say that’s the case for me.
But maybe if it is specifically just ear training you’re are looking for you should look at the course I linked above.
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@HighlandBass. Thanks to share about your ideas and also the link you sent.
Probably I’ll try that Ear Training from Mark Smith once I finish B2B course.
Have you tried that already? how was it? Is that worth it to invest?
is that course can cover a whole bunch of materials to learn about Ear Training? Are you able to cover many songs by using that his course?
Thanks sir.
From the Talking Bass ear training course description.
What Will I Learn?
After completing level 1 you will have acquired an understanding of the following areas of ear training
- The ability to recognise and recreate basic melodies and bass lines in the major key
- Recognition of simple chord qualities
- Recognition of common chord progressions in a major key
- A better memory and recall of rhythms over several bars in length
- Highly improved Transcription skills
How Long Are The Lessons?
The lesson lengths vary but the Level 1 contains over 4 hours of video and many weeks, months and years of practice material.
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I haven’t done that one but have done a couple of his courses and rate them highly. Very different style to Josh’s but a bit of variety is always a good thing.
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Chord Tones is great. I’ll defer to Mike’s opinion for Ear Training over it (I have not taken Ear Training) but I will solidly recommend Chord Tones to really land some of the relationships to how chords fit together.
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Hi @howard, May I ask what prerequisite of Chord Tones is? I’m really convince that course but I worry if Sight Reading is really require. I’m still working my B2B course and probably I’ll next the Ear Training or the Chord Tones Essential from Talking Bass.
I would say just finish B2B and go directly into Chord Tones.
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I finished B2B and now I have been studying Chord Tone Essentials.
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@Fede79 how was it?
is that course can also cover a bit technique such as sliding, bend, legato, etc?
I have just started (I’m in lesson 5) and I don’t think the course covers technique, legato/staccato, sliding, etc…it’s has focused on chords (arpeggio), thriads, seventh, relationship between chords and many more.
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As someone whose learned by ear my entire life what I can say is that it takes time to develop that kind of recognition. There were no courses that taught anything like that years ago so I did it by listening to hundreds of songs focusing all of my attention on the bass lines as best I could hear them. Back then there was no way to isolate a bass track like there is now.
Eventually it just started to happen but without knowing at least some theory and fundamentals as far as typical progressions for whatever genre I was playing it would’ve been much tougher. If there’s a keyboard track and more specifically a piano track that will help since it’s fairly easy to hear the chord changes and the left hand is often playing some kind of a bass line or the framework of one.
Others here will know where some aids can be found that can help. I’ve been doing it so long now that it’s pretty much all I do. I seldom use tab or any other method. Being a guitarist and a vocalist has also helped me to be able to frame a chord progression based on the vocal line of a song. Once I know that the rest is just hearing what the bass is doing in support of the rest. Just remember that “feel” is and timing actually more important than learning anything note for note.
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Having access to a piano keyboard is the best, easiest way to learn ear training, as you can see the intervals in a way you can’t on the fretboard. It’s also a lot easier to play chords. A piano or keyboard works great for this, of course, but if you don’t have access to one of those, there are apps for phone and online that give you a keyboard to play with.
The first step in ear training is to learn the intervals. An interval is the distance between two notes. So e.g. you play a C on the keyboard, then go from there, C to C#, C to D etc. Each interval has a name. You learn what each interval sounds like. It also helps to sing them as well.
Then to learn a song by ear, you find the first note of the section you want to play on your bass. Then you can go note by note and figure them out by intervals. E.g. start on a C, then go up a minor third, then go up a perfect 4th, etc. The more you practice this, the easier, quicker, and more automatic it becomes.
There are other tricks to make it faster and easier too. Like bass lines often play the root or 5th of a chord, so if you know the chord progression, you can try those notes first.
If you know the key of the song, many songs begin (and end) on the key chord/note. E.g. if the key is C Major, then the first and last chord of the song will often be C Major. As we often play the root on bass, in this example the first note will often be C. And once you have that first note, you can go from there using intervals.
A great companion for explaining intervals and giving you easy ways to remember what they sound like is the book Music Theory for the Bass Player by Ariane Cap. The book also teaches quite a bit of bass-relevant theory beyond what we learn in BTB.
There are also ear training apps you can find on your app store of choice to help practice ear training.
Learning to identify various chords by ear is more difficult than learning intervals, but luckily as bass players, we don’t play chords that often.
As far as hearing a note and being able to say “That’s a C sharp”, that is called perfect pitch. Research has shown that perfect pitch is mostly inate and difficult/impossible to learn. However, relative pitch can be learned–which is what I’m talking about with leaning how the intervals sound.
Of course each interval will also have a set difference in frets on the bass as well that you can learn (shapes). It’s just easiest to learn them and understand their relationships with a keyboard, because you can see the arrangement of white and black keys. Each interval is really just a number of half steps. Each has it’s own sound, and you can learn to recognize that without perfect pitch. All perfect pitch would do for you is to make it slightly easier to find that first note.
Once you’ve played bass enough, you’ll begin to learn what specific notes on the bass sound like. For instance, I don’t have perfect pitch, and I don’t have all the intervals memorized (yet), but I can often recognize a low E or low B on bass in a song because I know what those specific notes sound like on bass. But I can’t do that with every note.
Oh one other thing. I think it’s easier and more fun to learn ear training with a teacher, so they can drill you and answer questions. If you’re willing and able to pay for lessons and there aren’t any bass teachers in your area, you could go to a piano teacher (or any other music teacher really, voice is a good one) and tell them you’re a bass player and you want to learn ear training with them. They’ll most likely be happy to teach you.
I first started learning from my trumpet teacher in high school, who also taught piano. Ear training is ear training, no matter what instrument the teacher plays. They’re pretty much all going to teach you with a piano anyway. Anyone who went to music school is able to play piano at least well enough to do this kind of thing.
Speaking of, if you’re on a budget, and there’s a college/university/community college in your area with a music program, you can often take lessons from students for cheaper than the going rate on your area.
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Also music theory too.
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