Rapid Eartraining Required

[AlAqsaMarytr]

Hey,

My friend wants to start jamming with me in late January: just my guitar, his guitar or bass and a drum machine... we're interested in making extremely slow Metallic music (e.g. 30bpm and lower) and fairly slow pentatonic power-chord stoner music.

I'm fairly competent at technique, especially since we shan't be playing anything fast, but I'd like to develop my ear so that I can start practising writing riffs (using my imagination rather than my fingers), so that once I get to the start of our jamming, I can actually play a creative role in the process. I was wondering if this is possible is the 6 or 7 week time bracket and how I would go about training my ear so rapidly... I've never done any didicated eartraining before, although I've been playing for about 9 months so I have some rough ideas of how, say, root-fifth intervals sound and can work out very easy ascending pentatonic riffs.

Any comments or advice would be greatly welcomed.

[Wudluv2sweep]

Try and work out songs or riffs by ear without using tab or whatever. Also try and be aware of what certain shapes/or intervlas look/sound like on the fretboard, this helps to breakdown barriers between your mind and your fingers:p

[fortymile]

yeah you can prolly do it.

maybe start with recognizing pure intervals from the major scale and other common scales like blues. root-->interval x

first learn the ones that stand out for you. for me minor third is the most obvious place to start. it's all over the place in rock. you can learn the sound of root--minor third, then spend a day listening to the radio and just count the times you hear it. just get the intervals to where they each take on a personality of thier own, spend some time listening to radio or cd's and maybe duplicating as best you can what you hear on the guitar.

some will disagree with my tactic, but if it's a progression i'm figuring, i just listen to the root by ear and then figure out if the chords built on them are major or minor.