37 Learning In Bite-Sized Chunks
Research suggests that everyone can copy notes by ear. But your success is going to depend on how well you can work within your limits. If you push yourself too hard—by working too quickly, or not recognizing that a note is too hard to hear—then you will struggle.
So the key strategy while learning is to work in small segments that you can manage comfortably. Even if you can tackle entire phrases, you might encounter sections that you need to decode note by note. Everybody needs to adjust their pace to suit the material, no matter how long they have been learning by ear.
37.1 Note-By-Note Learning
If you are new to ear learning, or you are trying to find a hard-to-identify note in a dense mix, you want to hear one (and only one) note from the recording at a time. These are the strategies you can use to work this way.
Stopping Immediately
Using the Transcription Playhead, you want to place the playhead just before the note you’re chasing. On the Mac, you can click and drag the playhead in the timeline area to scrub the audio, and listen for the start of the note. Using the spacebar, you can very quickly start and stop playback after the note. If it’s played really quickly, use the Speed Controls to drop the speed to a point where you feel like you can consistently stop playback.
Singing/Humming Notes
After you stop playback, try to sing or hum (or whistle!) the note. This is going to help you retain the note in your mind, because our memory for pitches is tied to the same system that allows us to produce notes using our voice. If possible, keep singing or humming while you go searching on your instrument for the matching note.
Use The Freezer
If you struggle to reproduce the notes you hear with your voice, then we have you covered! When you use the scrubbing functionality in Capo, it will continue playing the note(s) under the playhead indefinitely, so you can leave it playing while you go hunting for the note on your instrument. If you’re on the Mac, you can add the Freezer toggle button to your toolbar to make this easier to activate.
Confirming The Correct Note
As much as possible, you should try to exercise your tonal working memory to verify correctness: play the note in the recording, stop playback, and then play the note on your instrument. You should be able to say confidently that you played the right thing.
But if you’re struggling with that—don’t worry. Sing, hum, or whistle the note continuously. Or, use the audio freezer to hold the note while you play it on your instrument. As the two sounds play together, you can listen for the difference between them.
Moving To The Next Note
Once you figured out the note, it’s time to find the next one. Reposition the transcription playhead, and repeat this process for each note. However, as you learn new notes, we recommend that you keep “checking in” with the previous notes you learned, playing them again before the note you just figured out.
For example, after learning the second note, play the first and second notes. After learning the third note, play the first three you learned in sequence, and so on. By gradually building up the phrase that you’re working on, you can reinforce the memory of those notes you learned previously.
37.2 Phrase-by-Phrase Learning
As you grow more comfortable with the process of copying notes by ear, you might work through a solo in individual phrases. The process is largely the same as Section 37.1—use the Transcription Playhead and reposition it as you move on. Instead of learning and moving between notes, you learn and move between phrases.