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.
