Feel free to give Absolute Pitch a try, but whether AP is your bag or not, you absolutely must invest your precious time and energy understanding and developing Relative Pitch…
Why? Because Relative Pitch it is the way that the overwhelming majority of we humans hear and enjoy music!
Solfege or Interval Ear Training?
This is a trick question. Solfege and Interval Training are not antagonists. Solfege and Interval ear training are both important and complement each other:
- Solfege ear training is useful when an enduring sense of key center Do provides the melodic-harmonic context.
- Interval ear training is useful in any context, but especially when the tonal center is ambiguous or undefined… or when a change of key center occurs.
Five Minutes a Day
Ear training in the form of sight singing and playing by ear should be an integral part of our music making each and every day. Regular exposure and conscious attention will refine and fine-tune our pitch perception in an ever-expanding sphere of awareness… slowly and steadily building a library of sound memories and practical performance skills.
To that end, Piano-ology always integrates ear-training with the theoretical study of scales, chords, chord progressions, transposition, improvisation, and more. In doing so, we are going to align the way we think about the music with the way we experience the music in context.
Context is Everything
Please don’t overdo ear training as offered by most ear training apps. Once you understand the concepts of how music works, get all your ear training material from the music your are adding to your repertoire!