Ear Training
Weekly. Test your ears and discuss — music, mixing, and more. Included with residency.
Test your ears and discuss — music, mixing, and more. Interactive listening exercises with fellow residents to sharpen your critical listening skills.
Upcoming Sessions
Recent Sessions
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We covered how to analyze a reference track as a mixing and production tool — what to listen for, how to level-match before comparing, and how to use EQ sweeps and high/low-pass filtering to isolate frequency ranges. We worked through two reference tracks in detail (Brandi Carlile and Massive Attack's Mezzanine) and discussed loudness measurement via LUFS, perceived loudness, dynamics, vocal clarity, stereo placement, and how to translate a client's reference into actionable mix decisions.
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Listened to 3 chord progressions blocked and arpeggiated. Students to identify which chords contained 7ths. Followed by aural breakdown of each chord—strategies for hearing 7ths in chords vertically AND horizontally through chord progressions. Interesting notes, triads and open 5ths sounds clearer than 7th chords which tend to add bits of heaviness. Explored different colors achieved through various voicings.
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Today's class focused on drum ear training using a deceptively simple premise: five songs from the '80s — Rebel Yell (Billy Idol), Kids in America (Kim Wilde), Never Say Never (Romeo Void), Turbo Lover (Judas Priest), and Maniac (Michael Sembello) — all built around the same basic drum beat at similar tempos. By holding the pattern and tempo constant, students could focus entirely on how the drums sounded rather than what they were playing — specifically drum tuning and mix balance within the kit. The real ear-opener came when we muted the Romeo Void drums and swapped in the drum tracks from each of the other four songs. Hearing a different kit and mix drop into the same song made it immediately obvious how much the drum sound shapes the feel and identity of a track — sometimes the swap sounded jarring and wrong, other times surprisingly natural. The takeaway: even when drummers are playing identical patterns, the sound of the kit is a creative decision with enormous impact on the finished record.
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We worked on multi-note chord ear training using a stack-of-fourths voicing, exploring why certain interval relationships make individual pitches difficult to isolate — particularly when notes share harmonic content with each other. We used sine waves and an EQ solo technique to strip away competing overtones and focus attention on individual pitches, then connected those listening skills to a frequency-identification exercise using EQ curve matching on a live mix.
All resident events are included with your Beat Kitchen Residency.
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