The Order I Recommend: A Training Sequence for Musicians

People ask me what order to do things in. Here is the honest answer, which is shorter than you would expect and has one part that surprises everyone.

First, can you read music comfortably?

If reading slows you down, start there. Ear training that assumes you can read will just teach you to be frustrated faster.

That is what The Staff Speaks is for. Over a hundred short lessons on the staff, the clefs, and the notes, plus your first taste of audiation. If you read fine already, skip it.

Second, find out whether this way of working suits you

The free course, Audiation – Inner Ear Training, is sixteen lessons. No card, no call. It exists so you can find out what audiation is and whether working this way appeals to you before you spend anything.

If it does nothing for you, you have spent about a week listening. That is the whole risk.

Third, the main road

Flawless Ear Training is the course everything else is built around. Sixteen audio units, from intervals through to advanced harmony. One focused lesson a day. It is not fast and it is not meant to be.

Give it about a month before you add anything else. Not because the next thing is harder, but because you need the rhythm of daily work to settle before you complicate it.

Fourth, and this is the part people get wrong

The Composing Hour does not come after Flawless. It runs alongside it.

Do one without the other and you get half of it. The Composing Hour on its own leaves you hearing music clearly in your head with no reliable way to write it down. Flawless on its own leaves you able to identify what you are listening to, which is genuinely useful, but your inner hearing stays thin, so less of the music is coming from you.

So: get into the rhythm of Flawless for about a month, then add The Composing Hour on top and run them together.

If the daily habit is the problem

The Practice Room exists for one reason. Most people know ear training is daily work and cannot make themselves do it alone. Sixteen minutes a day, the same warm-ups, other people doing them at the same time, and me paying attention to how you are getting on.

Later, once the ear is working

Counterpoint for Composers and

Form and Analysis are downstream of all of this. They are not ear training. They are what you do with an ear once you have one. Coming to them early is not dangerous, it is just slower, because you will be reading about relationships you cannot hear yet.

The short version

Read music first if you cannot. Try the free course. Then Flawless, daily, for a month. Then add The Composing Hour and run them together. Counterpoint and form after that.

That is the sequence. The only part that matters more than the order is that you keep showing up.