Beginner Ear Training (the steps most teachers miss)

- Vibrant. - Vibrant. - Music teaching. - Proven and practical tips. - Strategies and ideas for music teachers. - You're listening to the Vibrant Music Teaching Podcast. I'm Nikla Kanta and today we're talking about beginner ear training for piano students. Hey beautiful teachers. So there are a few things that teachers often miss when it comes to ear training work with beginner music students. These are things that we sometimes take for granted, but if we miss over them, we can be banging our head against a wall, trying to teach more intermediate in ear training skills and we will never get anywhere. So step one with any new student, what I want to check on is opposites. And I want to do this with most transfer students even as well. Not in depth, it doesn't have to take long, but we do need to check on this. So can the student identify by ear the opposites of high and low, not by looking at a piano, by ear, high and low, and they don't mislabel them as loud and soft, which is the next opposite. Can they identify same and different if you play two pitches, say that are semitone or half step apart? They do know that they're different sounds, right? These are basic steps, but they are important. So let's say the opposites are no problem or you've worked on them until they're no problem. What's the next thing? Well, the next thing is pitch matching. Can this student accurately match a pitch? And if they can do it to your voice, can they also do it to the piano or to another instrument? So if the answer to that is no, you're going to have to do some extra work. One great exercise to do with students who can't pitch match, they can't sing a pitch and match the pitch that's already playing. Then you can try doing some slides up and down to try and find that pitch together. So to do this, you simply start at a low pitch. You slide your voice up like you're singing a glissando, I guess. You're sliding up or like a siren. And the idea is to stop when you get to the pitch that's actually being played on the piano or on any other instrument. And you can do this together with your student so that they can practice sliding slowly, sliding up or sliding down. You can try both ways and see if they can rest where they match that pitch. You'll have to do this a lot of times over a number of weeks or a number of months to get a student to develop pitch matching if they don't already have it. The next thing you want to make sure to include, absolutely is echoes. Right from the beginning lesson, you play something, they play it back. And at first it doesn't have to be blind, right? So they can see you playing the thing and they need to play it back. That will be challenging enough for many young beginners. And you want to keep it incredibly simple what it is that you're playing. Just a couple of notes in the beginning will do. And you can choose a palette of notes that's easy to find like the three black keys or the two black keys or something like that and progress from there. Just a little bit of echoes in every lesson really starts to build up students' ear over time. Now when they're ready to do the blind version, you could do you and another piano that they can't see or closing their eyes, but you could also use a VMT resource for this if you want something a bit different. I have a resource I created called Echo Gecko and that's available inside the Vibram Music Teaching Library. If you're not a member yet, you can sign up at VibramusicTeaching.com. So Echo Gecko is literally what a teacher might play on the piano but just in track form and it's very gradually progressing. So a lot of teachers struggle to really match the level or gauge the level to play each of these things for your student echo over time. So you're using this resource to give a very gradual step by step progression. It starts very easy on the three black keys and it just plays a couple of pitches at a time and they need to then play those back. And then very gradually it increases in difficulty and includes different rhythms and stuff like that. But this is going to help your student to develop their ear, develop their ability to echo something back while being very step-by-step and trackable for you. So it includes a chart that you can print out and have in the student's folder or use digitally and you can mark off where each student is so that you can easily keep track and make sure they're making real progress towards your ear training goals. Now the next thing is not directly ear training which is why a lot of teachers might not put this in this category or leave it at. And that is wrote pieces. It's incredible the difference in the ear training abilities, the oral abilities for our students that have started with us and done wrote pieces from the beginning. And most transfer students who haven't. Road pieces are essentially taught by echo, right? You're playing something for the student, they can see you and they can copy back after you do it and you're going back and forth like that. So they develop their oral memory through this and their ability to retain what you just played or what was played last week and they've been practicing that and they build that up over time. Road pieces are great for a number of other reasons that I've gone into previously, but this is another benefit of them is the student's ear. They develop their ear and their oral memory in particular, their ability to retain a series of pitches and rhythms and regurgitate it, play it back. My final suggestion for you today is to introduce self-at-or-selfage into your studio. This gives language to the abstract. So when we're doing something like an exam which includes particular intervals in terms of ear training, the examiner will say they need to sing a minor sixth or whatever. We're referencing self-a for that. We're saying, okay, so in our heads, we're going to go from Do to La and then we're going to drop down a Sanctuary. We're going to flatten the law. That gives us a language for an abstract thing. I know a lot of teachers like to use references, similar reason, by the way, for these intervals, like when it's a fifth, I think of this particular piece or whatever. And that works great too if that's it for that scenario. But I find that self-a works across so many different scenarios and lets us really give a language to a way to speak about these concepts which can be very abstract to a young student or to any student, really. So in most of our lessons, we do some form of singing in Salfa. We use the Salfa Railroad Series from the MT or Salfa singing exercises. Or we just sing one of their pieces, a new one, one they're practicing, anything in Salfa. As we go through the lesson, I'm kind of thinking about that as an option of a way to work on all of their pieces. And if I know it is singable at their level of singing, I'll be able to suggest that. So I don't do it for any piece because I don't want it to be really challenging for wherever they're up to with their Salfa training. But there's plenty of pieces where it's actually quite doable for them to sing it first in Salfa. And then they're thinking about the intervals, they're thinking about the tune, they're getting it in their head before they start playing. So those are some of the things that I think teachers often miss when it comes to ear training, opposites, pitch matching, echoes, rope pieces, and Salfa work. Let me know what you think teachers miss, what you've missed in the past, or what your favorite ear training exercises are to do. I would love to hear about them in the comments. (upbeat music) vibrant music teaching membership costs less than the price of one lesson each month. That is totally worth it for all of the courses, games, resources, downloadables, printables that you can get access to as a member, as well as a fabulous community support you'll find inside. Go to vmt.ninder and become part of the revolution.