Grewing up in Germany (I’m not a native speaker as you problably have figured out already 😉 ) my musical education started in nursery school and ear training meant intervall training.

I was told that learning to play Jazz or improvising meant, I need to learn to identify chords first. If I’d recognize say an Asus(#11) chord I’d then think about the matching scale notes and would then improvise with over this chord until the next chord appears.
I always wondered how on earth I would be able to to do this.

In the meantime I somehow magically learned to play melodies by ear, even chord-melody on guitar. How was that possible without thinking about intervalls or chords at all?

I somehow just FELT the right notes. No thinking at all. Everything seemed to come naturally to me. This way I might be able to improvise freely???

I did some research. Having a Master’s degree in educational science and psychology might have helped.

I was able to FEEL relationships between notes – without beeing able to identify the intervall, without even thinking about it.

And there was my epiphany: At least for me it’s not about how notes relate to one other note but how they relate to “their surroundings” aka the chord or scale they are living in. For me it doesn’t matter if two notes are a third apart, but if they are 1 and 3 or 4 and 6 or 5 and 7 in a chord. Its all about the FUNCTION of the note! I can FELL the FUNCTION and just sing or play it!

I was flabbergasted! All that hard work on intervalls wasn’t for me. I needed to do some FUNCTIONAL ear training instead. My time would be much better spend this way! All I needed were some learning materials, some call and response tracks, some practice tracks.

And because I couldn’t find what I was looking for I started making the tracks myself.

Still curious about the person behind all this? Read more.