🏫 Welcome — watch this first, then read the plan below it
Watch this first. Then do this.
It's the whole method in one sitting. When it's done, you're ready to start.
Your first week
Days 1 and 2: Week 1, Lesson 1. Sing along today. Sing it again tomorrow.
Day 3: the Drone Warm-Up.
Days 4 and 5: Week 1, Lesson 2.
Day 6: Drone Warm-Up again.
Day 7: listen to Colorless Light. No singing. Count the fifths you hear.
That's your week. Next week, next lesson. Each lesson tells you which days it's for.
How the course is built
A new session unlocks every 28 days, one interval each. Session 1 is the introduction, so it has two lessons a week. From Session 2 on it's one lesson a week, and the tempo climbs: 60, 72, 96, then 120. Four lessons fill the 28 days exactly. If it looks like there isn't much there, that's the design.
The Drone Warm-Up and Colorless Light never expire. Home is C in every session, so keep using the ones from Session 1 for as long as you're here.
Three things to keep handy
The Score Booklet. Every session's Daily Routine and Mirror Exercise, in order. Print it or keep it open.
The Tonal Trainer App. Optional. A quick way to test the sounds you're singing, any day you like.
Two short reads at the bottom of this section, if they apply to you: if the warm-ups look too easy, and if you're worried about your voice.
There's no such thing as being behind. Miss a day, pick up where you left off. Ask in the community if you're stuck. I read everything.
Transcript
Welcome, I'm Kevin Ure. I'm going to be guiding you through this little membership that you've joined here.
There are a few things I want to talk to you about. The first thing is how to actually use this. The main feature of this entire membership is that you get access to the Technique Builder audio and the workbook, and I want to show you how to use that today. Additionally, twice a week—typically on Tuesdays and Fridays—I'm going to post a video that will walk you through fundamentals.
These fundamentals are going to be very basic. You're just going to be working on intervals and chords.
You should start from the beginning, because I start with the perfect fifth and gradually work my way through until we've covered all 12 intervals and chords—but we're doing it in a way that makes sense logically. So we're not just teaching you a perfect fifth.
I'm going to introduce you to the perfect fifth. We're going to make it really solid. We're going to make sure that you don't confuse it with other intervals.
Then we'll add the major third. Now, this is a little different from the Flawless course, but what we're doing here is teaching the materials of the triad.
Once you have the perfect fifth and the major third, and then the minor third, we start to work on major and minor triads.
You're going to learn a lot from this course, but it's all basic fundamental stuff. This is not the work that's going to get you to analyze and transcribe Bach chorales quickly—that’s the Flawless course. But if you want warmups that take you through these fundamentals and get you ready for the Flawless course or Composing Hour, this is where you want to be.
This is also useful for people who are taking the Flawless course but feel like they want a little more work. They want something more than the course offers. They want to dive deeper into some of these fundamental concepts that are important for all ear training.
That's what we're working on today. I want to show you how to use everything. When you first log into your studio, you're going to be greeted with whatever products you have.
Let me show you exactly how this works. If I go to the home page, this is typically where you arrive first.
You'll see your recent products here on the right-hand side, top contributors by week—you can adjust it by month or all time if you're interested in that kind of thing. Then you can scroll down and see any questions for any courses you're enrolled in.
This is kind of like the central hub. It's just a stream that allows you to see everything you're working on.
Over here on the side, if you want to chat with me privately, click the chat button. I'm going to hide that. If you want to look at products, this is everything you own. It's going to show every course I have because I own them all. But what you want to do is find the Practice Room—that's where you're going to find these exercises every week. If you click on it, you'll see a list of exercises, and it's going to continually update.
It's going to be sequential. So start at the beginning. When you finish an exercise, go ahead and mark it as complete.
If I go here and click on “Using the Routines,” the rules are simple: start at the beginning. Practice an exercise daily as a warm-up to your musicianship training. That means you practice whatever exercise is available to you until it's complete, and then you do your training.
You play your instrument, you play your scales, you play your music, go through repertoire, go perform with a band—but this is your warmup for the day. It's a little different from Flawless because we are just drilling intervals and chords, and we're not doing it forever. Once we get past the initial stage where you've done all the intervals and all the basic chords, then we start to do dictations. So there will always be something for you to work on.
If you're ever waiting for a new lesson to appear, just continue working on the previous lesson daily, and you can post your questions, experiences, and network with other musicians.
You could comment here, but I'd recommend saving this area for questions specifically about using the routines. And when you're done, go ahead and click “Complete.” I can't make progress on courses because I'm not a student, but you'd be able to select this. It lets you know that you've already looked at something.
It'll make it easier when we have multiple files here. You don't have to keep looking for where you are currently. You can just click that checkbox.
If you go in here, this is your community. This is where I recommend you post things. Just come in here, create a post, and I'm going to communicate with you.
As this community grows—over the months and years—we're going to have more people in here, and they’ll be able to respond as well. We can use this as an area where we collaborate with other musicians. You can learn from other musicians, and you can network a little bit.
If you want to sort this, you can sort by the newest posts (the most recently created), or “Recent,” which shows posts that were most recently commented on, or the top posts—the ones getting the most likes and comments.
Now, if you go over to Products in your particular course, you get a few products free. You get the Technique Builder Workbook, the Technique Builder audio, and that includes the daily routines and the mirror exercise that I talk about quite a bit. Here's the Technique Builder audio. There's a mirror exercise workbook, a daily routine workbook, and an Aural Technique Builder PDF. This is the actual textbook. And then here are some audio files you can download and install on your phone or your computer. When you do that, it's going to show up as an album where you can select what you want to work on.
We're going to talk about each one of these. When you download the Technique Builder audio and double-click everything, you install it in your library, and you should have an album that looks like this. You'll see Disc One, Disc Two, and Disc Three, and it's all organized.
The way I recommend you go through this: when I started in the university, I'd always start with the daily routines—that’s Disc One. But for your purposes, I'd recommend you pick the interval you're currently working on.
In this case, it's going to be Mirror Exercise Number One: the perfect fifth. Mine's doubled because I accidentally imported this twice—don’t do that. You can just delete and start over if that happens.
You can press play on this and then go over to the mirror exercise and follow along singing the lyrics. So if I press play on this and start going, I'd be singing: “Seven half steps, seven half steps, perfect fifth… seven half steps…” and then you just keep going up by half step. You complete the entire mirror exercise. It takes one minute and 23 seconds.
I also guide you through this in the videos that correlate to the particular interval we're working on.
If you follow the practice routine and follow the sequence, you can open this up for a visual because I will literally be walking you through the mirror exercise. The next thing you can do is the daily routine. The first one deals with the perfect fifth and the perfect fourth. We don't introduce this until I introduce the perfect fifth and the perfect fourth, but if you'd like to get a head start, you can start working on this. What you do is sing this. You sing the note names at first: C, D, E, D, C.
Then here you'll sing: C, G, C, G, G, C, C, G… C, G, G, C, D, A. You don't have to sing C-sharp or D-flat. You can just sing the note name, because as long as you're looking at the page, you'll know what note you're actually singing. You can go through this daily routine. There are a total of seven of them right now to help reinforce concepts that we're going to be working on in the practice routines.
This is all optional. You can just press play on the practice routines—that's how it's designed. But if you want a little more extra support, or you're taking the Flawless course right now and feel like it's not quite enough, the mirror exercise based on the current interval you're working on, followed by the daily routine based on the current interval you're working on, can help. You'll notice Daily Routine Number Two is the major third and the minor third.
You practice that once the major third and the minor third have been introduced.
I would wait until I introduce the minor third to start this. Just keep using Number One until that's been completed.
That's basically it. You just follow along with these practice routines. You ask questions. You talk to me about what you're doing.
This is a community designed for ear training, so keep it focused on ear training. But if you have any other questions related to musicianship in general, feel free to post them and I will comment. I'm in there Monday through Thursday between about 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Generally, I'll respond by the end of the day if it's Monday through Thursday.
I'm pretty quick about that. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm looking forward to seeing you in this new course we have here.