Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Ear Training : Melody Playback is so hard!

In my 6 month piano journey nothing has been so daunting and hard. One of the reasons I started learning music so late (26) is because I thought I had a bad ear and music depended on being born with a perfect pitch.

But since my goal is to be a composer in the long run, I need to at least develop relative pitch and therefore I got Comprehensive Ear Training Series from Fredrick Harris (Part of RCM exams)

melody playback is when someone plays a memory without you looking at the piano and then reproducing it yourself from memory. you will know which key is it in to make life easier. The book is a collection of these exercises to prepare one for RCM exams.

I tend to intellectualize things- which is a weakness of mine. what is the proper way of approaching these melody playback exercises?

Do i need to know all intervals before attempting at these?
I think what I am asking is what are the necessary prereqs for attempting these exercises?

Warm regards,
Thank you all

If a person is struggling, going down to easier exercises is a suggestion. I have mentioned an Android tablet app in the past. It has four games:
* higher/lower
* match the note
* identify the interval
* identify the chord

There are also websites that feature similar games, though I don't have any links handy.

For true beginners, even higher/lower can be a struggle for notes that are anywhere near close to each other. However, with training, the games get easier, the scores on the games get better.

Playing back a melody might come easily and naturally for maybe 5% or 10% of true beginners. The rest have to work at it, and some have to work quite hard at it. No way to tell until a person puts in some consistent time.

On another thread, someone suggested transcription as a way to learn. The catch is that an average beginner might have to work hard for several years before they can transcribe even relatively simple pop songs (melody plus chords).

As an aside, it is a tiny percentage of folks that have perfect pitch. More than a few find it to be as much curse as blessing. Most musicians can develop some sense of relative pitch, and with work almost all will improve.

What seemed to work for me was practicing being able to sing the melody to myself. Once I got it fixed in my head, it then seemed to be reasonably easy to pick it out at the piano. Try to observe whether the opening ascends or descends,whether it move by step or by leap, if it ends on the tonic note or some other note (usually belonging to the tonic chord). I found the biggest challenge was the RCM Gr 10 exam when you had to pick out the lower voice melody - you had to train yourself to ignore the upper voice which seems to be the line we naturally pay attention to. I also used the Comprehensive Ear Training series and found it quite helpful. Just keep doing them - the more you practice the easier it becomes.

Have you tried picking out familiar songs (holiday carols, favorite songs, annoying advertising jingles, etc?) That is very good practice.

There are no "prereqs" ! Well, almost none.

As a child, you probably learned songs. Somebody sings to you, you sing back -- if you get it right, they say "good!". After a while, you learn it -- that is, you can sing it back correctly.

That's all you have to do, for these exercises. Plus two more steps:

. . . Move the song onto the piano keyboard,
. . . and then move it onto a written staff.

IMHO, the easiest way to do the exercise is:

. . . Sing the melody back, after hearing it;

. . . Fiddle on the keyboard until you can _play_ it back;

. . . Then, write it down.

You have no innate sense of the _sound_ of a little blob on the third line of a treble staff, or how it relates to the sound of a blob on the second line.

To go from "hearing" to "writing down", _without_ the intermediate step of playing it on a keyboard, requires that you identify pitches and intervals "by ear". It's not easy.

. Charles

PS -- I will yield to experienced teachers on this subject, if they disagree with me.

Playback consists of first hearing the pitches and then reproducing them, so it's a lot more than the standard pianist job of just reproducing

Yes, it seems to me that as a composer you need to be able to hear pitches and writing them down without having access to a piano.

I think intellectualizing this is a good thing. Why is it troubling you?

>Do i need to know all intervals before attempting at these?

I don't think learning intervals is very useful unless you aim for atonal music. For me, hearing all notes as an offset from the fundamental works much better. After all, music is written in a tonal structure, not as a series of intervals. Also it's much more error proof (if you hear an interval wrong, you would screw up all subsequent notes as well; but if you hear everything in respect to the fundamental, this does not happen).

But I don't know what is involved in the RCM exams. If they really want you to hear intervals, then I would find a more relevant course :-)

Well- thank you for the advice and to everyone else too. the suggestions have been very useful. Based on your suggestions and my understanding I need to know scales and their degrees.

Is solfege useful in this regard? (Fixed do I mean)
Let's say C scale
Do re mi Fa Sol La Si Do
c d e f g a b c
as well as other scales...
F Scale
Fa Sol La Se (Bb) Do Re Mi Fa
F g a b c d e f

It is easy for me to sing this for all scales and identify them on piano, but I believe to reproduce a melody I need to not sing them in a sequence but have an idea how each note would sound individually or out of order...

If you could elaborate on this, It would be great too:
Solfege in north america is very underrated - it is the domain of singers, but in other parts of the world, human voice is an instrument in itself and mastering solfege is viewed as a prereq for progress into other topics (e.g. think about cultures in which music has been passed over generations by oral tradition) ...One of my friends from those cultures told me.

Warm regards,

Yes sure



But I suppose solfege can be teached in different ways, we already discussed by learning to hear intervals or by hearing the notes in a tonal structure. Maybe there are other ways as well.

I can higly recommend you to get some solfege education.