Functional Ear Training
Learn to Hear Scale Degrees in Context
Call and response & practice tracks for functional ear training – sing or play along with your instrument
Basic Ideas
It's about FEELING the music
not about reading it! There is no sheet music
It's about actively MAKING music
It can’t be done academically – it’s wax on, wax off 😉
It's about CONTEXT
hear the function, not just the note
Functional Ear Training (FET) is suitable for all instruments
About Functional Ear Training
Functional Ear Training is one of the most useful approaches to ear training I’ve discovered.
Rather than focusing on recognizing isolated intervals, it helps you develop a sense of how individual notes sound and function within a tonal context — how they relate to the tonic, the underlying harmony, and the notes around them.
On FunctionalEarTraining.com, I share my own Call-and-Response Tracks designed to explore these musical relationships.
The exercises range from easy-peasy sets using just three scale degrees to more challenging ones that introduce a wider variety of notes and harmonic relationships.
Each exercise comes in three versions:
- Instrumental: The notes are played by an instrument, leaving you to recognize and reproduce them by ear.
- Nashville Numbers: A singer performs the notes using their scale-degree numbers, such as “One”, “Two”, or “Three”.
- Movable-Do Solfège: A singer performs the same notes using solfège syllables, such as “Do”, “Re”, or “Mi”.
Whichever version you choose, the idea is simple: Listen, recognize, and respond — and gradually become more familiar with the musical functions of the notes you hear.
Want to know more about the idea behind these materials and how they came about?