Tips to Improve Ears

Gordon says, "Improvise, improvise, IMPROVISE!!" 

Sing melodies & bass lines for 30+ method book tunes. Teach these to students 'ear-to-hand'.

Establish mode & meter before singing or playing otherwise crucial musical relationships are missed.

Do easy tunes in new modes & meters. “This Old Man” is really cool & Harry Potter-esque in minor & triple. “Minuet in G” sounds like a lively Eastern European dance when done in minor & duple.

Move in a variety of flowing ways with & especially WITHOUT music. (Be an octopus in chocolate syrup. Draw circles with shoulders & back simultaneously. Write your name in cursive with your hips.)

Learn the harmonic structure of the music.  Focus on the tonic pitch, then arpeggios of the harmonic functions, then the chord roots.

Move to the rhythmic structure of the music to physically feel, and later internalize the macrobeats and microbeats.

Avoid fingerboard dots; while they are assisting hands they are crippling ears & brains.

Sing and play for your students, not with your students. Make them listen to you.  Make yourself listen to them.

Stop singing along!!   When we want to learn something, we don't talk while the teacher is talking.  So don't sing while Ella, Barbra, Mel, or even Fergie is singing!!  After listening, then turn off your iPod & sing what you heard.  Your listening skills will grow immensely.

Hear each kid solo a bit each day.

Do major & minor songs concurrently. Add Dorian and Mixolydian songs ASAP.

Do duple & triple meter songs/raps concurrently. Add asymmetric meters (5's & 7's) ASAP.

Grow your tonal & rhythm pattern vocabularies. Learn them in Gordon's difficulty order.

Using syllable systems, learn how to aurally identify modes & meters.

Spend 3-6 months playing by ear, before introducing reading.

After reading has begun, spend ½ of every lesson playing by ear.

Use two different syllable systems.  One for tone & one for rhythm 

Select syllable systems based on how patterns function (what they do), not pitch names or duration names. (For tone use movable-DO with a LA-based minor, RE-based Dorian, etc. For rhythm use Gordon's beat-function syllables.)

And because it is the single most valuable thing you can do for your musical mind/ears, I reiterate Gordon's plea:  Improvise, improvise, IMPROVISE!!

Personal Note: Edwin E. Gordon’s Music Learning Theory provides the basis for just about everything in this blog. I urge all parents & teachers to discover the efficacy of MLT.  www.giml.org is a great place to start.