You want to play by ear.

With the right practice most everyone can develop a set of reliable, confident ears.

Are you making any of these eight eartraining errors?

Imagine being able to...

WELCOME TO

Ear Confidence:
Six Paths to Fearless Ears

This online class is your comprehensive guide to eartraining for the bass player, designed for aspiring players of all levels.

Whether you think you are completely tone deaf or are starting out with a pretty good ear and looking to improve it, the skills you will learn in this class will make your bass playing shine

Because with our strategies at your fingertips – even for challenging situations on stage – your ear confidence will soar. With discerning ears comes relaxation so you will even notice an improvement in your timing and tone. 

Hear from our students

What exactly is in this course?

89 videos (7 hours) • 10 quizzes • 22 jamtracks • Bonus materials

Welcome – What this course is about and how it’s structured
Vital info about your ears as a musician!
Various tests such as a tone-deafness test and a test of your voice (pitch test)
Quiz
Tips for tools 

The concept of sound classes is incredibly helpful for all who feel simply “lost” and don’t know where to start. Ari will help you discover that your emotional reaction to sounds will sharpen your ears. 

Once you grasped the big picture and can reliably distinguish the sound classes, Ari goes into more detail. This progression from overview to hearing small details creates a much more effective learning experience because you don’t get stuck with individual difficulties.

And look forward to the bluesy sound class – as it is a particularly fun one that will get you improvising and grooving to blues progressions with ease!

Quizzes, golden ear nuggets and tips are sprinkled throughout!

8 lessons in this section will teach you how to react to and copy (ie imitate) musical phrases on the spot. This not only sharpens your ear, it also speeds up your aural recognition powers.

And, Ari’s drills have you training ear skills as you need them – in a rhythmic context!

Ari then expands the call & imitate drills to get you to start improvising. You learn how to play what you hear in your mind. This is done with rhythmic templates and restricted tonal material.

Then you learn how to hear it inside your mind and you are practicing inner hearing! You learn a new way to “think music” and deepen something you undoubtedly have done before without knowing how you were doing it.

If you are more on the beginner side of things, Ari’s rhythmic templates will get you ready for those kinds of breakthroughs!

Quizzes, “golden ear nuggets” and lifeline tips in challenging situations are sprinkled throughout!

44 lessons on how theory knowledge turns into ear superpowers.  This is very practical for learning songs and identifying and memorizing chord progressions!

Ari starts with the smallest units of how music is put together – intervals – and she  immediately uses them in the context you need them in, namely in grooves and improvisations. (This is way more useful than using apps or the trick of using song beginnings to identify isolated intervals! It will improve not just your ears but your playing.)

When sounds turn into a story, an emotion… they become relatable. Ari shows you how to use this to improve your ear.
Ari discusses some special sounds like the tritone in the dominant and the lydian #11 in the major seventh context. That’s just one example where the same interval has a different effect based on context.

Ari then goes into modal and functional harmony (sounds dry but is actually fascinating, and very useful). Ari has some very easy shortcuts to grasp modes – to hear them, to use them, to simply “own them“.  
You will do lots of applicable drills and explore songs that use those modes. Modal moods will get dark and heavy and bright and beautiful. Modes are all about colors! 

Learning theory and eartraining the “Ari Way” turns the entire project into a Sonic Sudoku. By the process of elimination you will start to hear the modes and understand how to use them. And once again, the emotional impact of these sounds will help you own them.  

The next part of this section covers important chord progressions. Must-know ones and how to recognize them, drills you can do using iRealPro (use Ari’s playlist!)… super useful. 

Ari covers triads and inversions, which again are put into the contexts in which you as a bassist will need them. The power of the bass player when it comes to inversions becomes apparent.  

You’ll explore diminished and augmented chords, cadences and turnarounds… the most applicable versions, from easy to more advanced. 

Chord progressions are rounded out with the diatonic cycle, which is so prevalent in music! Really, once you hear snippets of it, you already covered a lot of ground just with that!

Learn about challenges in transcribing chord progressions and why you need to know a bit about voicings and extensions!

Just as before, many customized quizzes make sure you got this!

Functional Eartraining is all about context! You will learn to get a sense of how all notes relate to the tonic in any given musical situation.   

You will learn to hear chord progressions by relating them to physical reactions. For example, the I chord  feels like “home” or “gravity”.  This is how hearing chord progressions within a key becomes  intuitive!

Whether you can hold a pitch or not, your voice – being the instrument within us – can be a great asset for your hearing skills.

Use your voice to help you find key centers, discover the power of playing melodies you can sing on your bass and much more! Your internal hearing skills will grow by leaps and bounds, when you can just use your voice or your bass to sound out what you are hearing inside

Become a better all-around musician by transcribing tunes!

Ari has great tech tool recommendations to make this process much easier – you will still use your ears, though! 

Ari shows you how using technology can help you find the bass in the mix, how to decode the rhythm and the pitches and how to learn the tunes once you transcribed them – all by ear! The technology just makes it faster and helps you understand it all. 

A surprising tool for the ears – recording yourself. Ari will teach you how and why this makes you improve, and fast.  

Resources and downloads and big high fives for getting golden ears.  

Meet Your Instructor

Hi I’m Ari. Bassist, author, educator. Groove enthusiast and learning nerd.

As a bassist, I have toured/played/recorded with a variety of rock, Jazz, and funk bands, I have worked with some incredible producers (Keith Olsen) and musicians (Paul Hanson, Muriel Anderson) and I toured Brazil with Stu Hamm as a duo.

As a bass teacher, I have taught at London Bass Day, Gerald Veasley’s Bass Boot Camp, SBL, Truefire, notreble… I even ran my own music school for a few years before gigs took me back on the road.

One thing to know about me is that I teach because I am absolutely fascinated with the learning process.

When I started playing bass, I excelled very quickly because I had an amazing teacher who taught me using a powerful method. This method transformed my playing so quickly that I passed a bunch of high-level university auditions and even tested out of entire classes at university even though I had been playing for only a very short time.

That’s what, many years later turned into one of my books, co-written with Wolf Wein, called “The Pattern System for the Bass Player”. I created entire systems of learning based on some of these ideas and wrote books and created courses together with Wolf. Our bass books have sold over 30,000 copies and garnered rave reviews.

I started teaching online in 2009 and have embraced technology as a powerful learning tool since then, never losing sight of the importance of providing feedback and personalized guidance to learners.

I also utilize the power of learning in groups: our first cohort with volunteer coaches ran in 2018, and Masterclasses started in 2020. Our Live Practice Membership has been running since 2022.

Find out more about Ari as a bass player 
Find out more about Ari as an educator

How is the Ari Way
to great ears different?

With Apps, Traditional Ways

With Ari's EarConfidence

Typically you are limited to one single way of eartraining
Get real ear confidence through seven different ways
to train your ear
You'll be doing out of context, isolated interval training
Train everything in the context you actually need it in
You miss out on learning the emotional impact of sounds
Emotional awareness of sounds is a great learning and creating tool!
Sometimes your ear may play tricks on you and you won't know why
With Ari you get guidance on what to watch out for
With apps you get the "wrong" buzzer and that's the end of it
Ari shows you how wrong answers turn into awesome learning opportunities
You often are not taught "inner hearing"
Practice the powerful skill of audiation or "inner hearing" - it will improve your improvisation!
No help with crucial obstacles such as aural distraction by overtones, rhythm
Guidance for the crucial obstacles such as real life situations such as distraction, effects, rhythm, sounds, instruments...
You usually don't get help for critical on-stage situations
Ari throws you lifelines & "Golden Ear Nuggets" to have at the ready in stressful situations
Apps are often disconnected from bass playing situations, leaving you practicing in a vacuum
Enjoy your EarConfidence grow as you practice grooves and improvisations. This is eartraining, bass in hand.

Sign up now

EarConfidence Course includes:

• 7 hours of video instruction
• Quizzes
• Jamtracks
• Tools, songlists, playlists
• 1.5 hours of bonus sessions
• "Golden Ear Nuggets" - tips and lifelines

Installment Plan

$ 135
00
3 Monthly Installments
  • Lifetime Access
  • 30-day Money Back guarantee

One-time Payment

$ 350
00
One time (save $55.00)
  • Lifetime Access
  • 30-day money back guarantee
Save
30 day money back guarantee

We offer a no-questions-asked money back guarantee for 30 days so your commitment is risk-free.

Try it on for size and if you’re not completely convinced that this course will help get you to your goals, I will promptly refund your money.

We use Stripe for check out which is safe and secure. 

As seen on

Featured by leading bass websites and publications

Myth Busters

Myth: You either have good ears or you don’t!
Truth: With the right practice, most everyone can develop a set of reliable, confident ears!
Most everyone? Very few do have a medical condition called Amusia – the inability to hear music and pitches. It’s likely not you since you are drawn to music and love it! 
Do the test in my course, and then you’ll know for sure.
I have met a lot of people who declared themselves beyond hope and tone deaf, but what they really were suffering from was simply a lack of the right training! 

Myth: Eartraining is interval training.
Truth: Eartraining that you can use when you need it goes far beyond interval training and needs to happen in the context of the music you play and the situation you play it in.
The musical context of the chords, rhythmic figures, overtones, distortion, voicings… these are just a few of the things that can make trying to figure out sounds in the moment vastly different from isolated interval training. We need to train our ears in the situations we need ear confidence in. We do this in this course and I throw you several lifelines and “Golden Ear Nuggets” you can count on to help you!

Myth: If you can’t sing you have bad ears.
Truth: You can have great ears without being able to hold a tune.
Whether you can sing or not is just an expression of whether you know how to operate your voice box. If you learn to “hear internally” you can use your bass to play what you hear inside. Or your voice, if your vocal cords cooperate.

Myth: Learning song beginnings is a great way to train your ears.
Truth: Song beginnings may help you ace your interval app stats, but they won’t help you in the moment, when you are trying to figure out a bass line or follow a fellow musician’s chord progression. 
Because in such moments you are operating in a musical context. And the song beginning has its own musical context that is usually different. What you need in such situations is a reliable gut reaction to kick in, a strong intuition. And yes, you can develop this intuition! 

 

Questions & Answers About This Course

Your bass and an internet connection. 
I do recommend a few optional tools in this class, such as the program Transcribe! or the app iRealPro. I also point you to free versions of these tools where available. 

While tone-deafness is a real condition – called amusia – it is quite unlikely that you have this. Most people with true tone-deafness are not drawn to music at all. In the first chapter I have you test for it, so you know. 

What is more likely than a true medical condition is just that nobody showed you what to properly listen for and how to learn to distinguish pitches step by step. That’s what this course does!

Yes. Many drills involve your instrument. 

Theory and Ear training are related, but the EarTraining course is geared towards ear training, not primarily theory.

I will explain a lot in this EarTraining course, but not systematically and comprehensively like in my theory book and course. If you have no experience at all with theory, I recommend to get these resources now. You can learn more about my way of teaching theory here. You can train your ears parallel to the theory course.

Yes. Start anytime and go at your own pace. You have lifetime access to the material. 

Yes. I am so confident that you will improve your ears with this course that I offer our 30-day money-back guarantee from day of purchase. Buy risk-free!

30 day

EarTraining Mondays are offered for members of our Live Practice Membership. They are an excellent optional add-on to this EarConfidence course – an opportunity for more practice, live with Ari.

For you, as a bonus, we have included three archived sessions with your EarConfidence Course.
If you are interested in practicing live with Ari, click on “Live Practice with Ari” here

 

Eartraining-wise it starts from zero.
Bass playing level is low intermediate and up. 
If you have trouble with the basics of hearing, go for it.
If you are already a good player and are looking to refine your ears, go for it. 

If you are looking for a beginner bass course or a course on bass theory click here

Get EarConfident

This is EarTraining, bass in hand: