Customer Reviews

Essential Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

My son attends Berklee and he tells me that this is not the book used at the school. He also said that the material covered in the book is more advanced than what is taught the first year and that ear training is one of the most difficult areas for most students. I understand that Berklee Press has now come out with a Basic Ear Training book. This book should be retitled Advanced Ear Training, or at least book two.

The title of this book is misleading. Apparently academics use the term "Ear Training" for the entire set of skills associated with sight reading music. The specific skills amateurs might associate with the term, hearing and recognizing intervals etc. are only a part of that and represent less that a quarter of the text of this book. I'm not qualified to judge how good this book is in the other areas it covers but as a text focused on ear training in specific it was a disappointment. What little there was wasn't very useful to me.

I have found that after reading "Essential Ear Training" I have been able to greatly improve my ability to hear what I see on paper. I never realized how much I was lacking until I read this book. This is a complete book with focuses on both rhythms and melodies.

I can see this book being very usefull as part of a university degree, in the classroom, with a teacher and classmates to help out. The theory covered on the first chapter is small but good quality overall. The exercises are interesting and well explained.

I found really hard to take advantage of this material on my own. I couldn't measure my progress and correct my mistakes properly. In the end, I found that Hearing and Writing Music: Professional Training for Today's Musician (2nd Edition) was much easier to study on my own.

The Moveable Do taught at Berklee and explained in this book is a great resourceful tool. You don't need to have absolutely pitch to hear the notes right. The book explains that the Moveable do technique helps develop recognition of notes no matter what key. It also brings great exercises to practice your ability to read in all keys. It reinforces the need to solfege in order to listen well. The rhythmic exercises cover the different time signature and common rhythmic phrases used in today's music. This great book helps you develop yourself to be a solid musician.

This book teaches the moveable do system of solfege by having the reader do sightsinging from musical notation. Solfege assigns syllables to the 12 notes of a chromatic scale. I definitely think sightsinging is a good way to train your ear, but this book is not a good introduction to ear training. There is no CD, so it's hard for you to know if you're doing it right or not, and there's also not a lot of explanatory text after the first few pages.

Everything is in musical notation. There are rhythmic exercises (clap and sing along to musical notation, but with no pitch), sight recognition exercises (naming the solfege functions with musical notation, without rhythm), sol-fa studies (singing the solfege symbols without musical notation), melodic studies (sight-singing from musical notation, with rhythm)

The workshops increase in difficulty by introducing new keys, new time signatures, and new scales. You start with major scales and then move to minor (melodic, real, harmonic), and then go into modes.

I think the useful idea of this book as that you should sightsing everything to establish your inner ear. But you don't need this book to sightsing, you can do that with any introductory book that teaches you to sight-read on your instrument, once you understand the solfege system.

A better book is Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician, which also teaches moveable do solfege (although they don't call it that), and comes with a CD of exercises where you have to transcribe scales, chord progressions, and so on. It also has a lot more explanatory text which really helps explain some basic music theory concepts.

Another book I've just come across which I like (and has two CDs) is The "Real Easy" Ear Training Book which focuses on hearing the chord changes to popular songs and is a good followup to the book by Wyatt, Schroeder, and Elliott.

I purchased these (Berklee 1 & 2; Essential Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician) for my husband, because he teaches guitar to all ages ages in the area, as a mix of a birthday present and also in the hopes that it would be one more thing to make it easier for him to teach his students with. He loves them, and says it takes a lot less time on the theory section of his lessons now so that they can concentrate on the actual music area. All three books arrived really soon after I ordered them, and he's very happy with them. So, absolutely no complaints from me.

This is the fabulous ear training method. All of the exercises are geared toward developing your inner ear in a practical and useful manner. I was a student of Steve's at Berklee and going through this book is like going through his class again. Great teacher and a great text.

The Moveable Do taught at Berklee and explained in this book is a great resourceful tool. You don't need to have absolutely pitch to hear the notes right. The book explains that the Moveable do technique helps develop recognition of notes no matter what key. It also brings great exercises to practice your ability to read in all keys. It reinforces the need to solfege in order to listen well. The rhythmic exercises cover the different time signature and common rhythmic phrases used in today's music. This great book helps you develop yourself to be a solid musician.