How Ear Training and Aural Recognition Changes the Way You Produce Music
Most beginner music producers head straight into music-making before building foundational skills such as aural recognition. In this blog, we’ll explain why you should focus on training your ears to become a professional music producer:
Ask yourself this, when you’re listening to a song, can you recognize all the different notes and melodic structures? Do you know how every note is related to each other?
Before we discuss any further, watch this quick explainer from Pratosh Pal (Year 2, B.Voc Music Production & Technology) on how to get started with ear training and why intervals are a great starting point.
Aural Recognition through Ear Training – The Change in Perspective for Music Producers
Think of music as a large, interconnected web, strung together through various notes, chords, and harmonies. Unlike a web, you cannot see music when played live; you can only hear different elements as they come together.
Now, let’s go back to the DAW. You can see the screen is full of different elements. After you listen to any song, how do you know the best way to recreate the song you heard live onto the screen right in front of you?
Sure, you can tinker around the DAW and figure things out on the go, but that process is incredibly lengthy, and it could lead to a series of trial-and-errors for many hours on end.
Once you train your ears, you won’t need to go through all that painstaking effort. How? You’ll know exactly what you want and how you want it. It lets you construct melodies faster than people who have not undergone ear training.
You won’t just see the entire web, you’ll be able to label each and every part of it.
What Is Ear Training?
Ear training is the process of developing your ability to identify musical elements while listening to any piece of music, such as intervals, chords, and rhythms. For example, once you are a trained music producer, you would be even able to recognize complex time signatures within a song.
With practice, music producers begin to recognise patterns instantly. This strengthens your musical imagination and understanding, which helps music composition(sonofield.com).
5 Reasons Why You Should Learn Ear Training as a Music Producer
Aural recognition is one of the most fundamental as well as overlooked skills for music producers. Here are five reasons why you should learn ear training as a music producer:
You Can Understand What You Hear
When you listen to any piece of music, the last thing you’d want to do as a music producer is describe it with very vague terms, such as “that chord sounds funky” or “the entire melody sounds simple”.
You would rather understand and use the right terms for each element precisely, such as “The leading guitar starts with an I-IV-V chord progression in the key of C.”
Music producers with trained ears can isolate and analyze each component of a song in real time. This helps them understand each element of the song, identify problems, and rectify them (TGM Business).
You Make Faster Production Decisions
Like every other job out there in the world, the one thing you do not want to miss is your deadline. Once you miss it, no matter how well produced your song is, your paycheck will be gone.
Ear training dramatically speeds up your workflow. When your ears recognize intervals, chords, and other elements within music, you will be able to produce tracks at a much faster pace because you’ll know what to do spontaneously.
You Create Music Intentionally Without Much Guesswork
Many music producers find that once they undergo ear training, producing songs becomes less trial-and-error and more intentional.
Going back to the analogy of the large interconnected web, once you know the right terms for each note and how each note is related to one another, you’ll stop beating around the bush and move to the immediate next step.
You Enhance Your Creativity and Experiment More Freely
Ear training strengthens your musical intuition and helps producers explore more unique sonic ideas (metaldevastationradio.com). Once you connect your creative intuition with ear training, it’s easier to execute or experiment with newer ideas.
You Start Communicating Ideas Like a Professional Music Producer
After training your ears, you go from passive listening to active listening. Analyzing songs becomes a natural habit, and you start communicating your ideas to other musicians like a professional music producer!
Final Thoughts
If you want to understand how we prepare aspiring music producers through foundational and advanced training in our undergraduate Music Production program, learn more about it on our B.Voc in Music Production & Technology page or reach out to our advisors today.
