Have you ever slogged away at an ear training exercise day after day and found your improvement lessening and lessening, progress just getting slower and slower?
It’s not unusual. And it can be maddening when you’re trying to ace a quiz or you’re trying to make your skills rock solid, but you just can’t seem to hit that 100% mark.
Today, I want to share with you a simple rule that is a highly effective antidote to this common frustration.
Watch the episode:
Subscribe For Future Episodes!
Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!
Links and Resources
- Musicality Now: Rhythm and Soul, with Lorin Cohen
- Musicality Now: The 3 Pillars Of Improv, with Lorin Cohen
- The Musicality Book
Enjoying Musicality Now? Please support the show by rating and reviewing it!
Have you ever slogged away at an ear training exercise day after day and found your improvement lessening and lessening, progress just getting slower and slower?
It’s not unusual. And it can be maddening when you’re trying to ace a quiz or you’re trying to make your skills rock solid, but you just can’t seem to hit that 100% mark.
Today, I want to share with you a simple rule that is a highly effective antidote to this common frustration.
Watch the episode:
Subscribe For Future Episodes!
Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!
Links and Resources
- Musicality Now: Rhythm and Soul, with Lorin Cohen
- Musicality Now: The 3 Pillars Of Improv, with Lorin Cohen
- The Musicality Book
Enjoying Musicality Now? Please support the show by rating and reviewing it!
Transcript
How do you know when to move on in ear training? This can be one of the most frustrating areas of learning for musicians. So much so that a lot of musicians don’t even do any ear training, which is heartbreaking!
Let me ask you, have you ever slogged away at an ear training exercise day after day and found your improvement lessening and lessening, progress just getting slower and slower?
It’s not unusual, and it can be maddening when you’re trying to ace a quiz or you’re trying to make your skills rock solid, but you just can’t seem to hit that 100% mark.
Today, I want to share with you a simple rule that is a highly effective antidote to this common frustration.
I’m really looking forward to diving into this today because I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this publicly. And it’s maybe because it’s something we take so much for granted inside Musical U.
And if you don’t know, Musical U, we focus on musicality, developing your natural musicianship, your natural instinct for music, your natural ability to bring music out from inside you.
And a big part of that is what’s traditionally called “ear training”. So just developing your ear to be able to recognise notes, chords, rhythms and empower you to do things like playing by ear and improvising and writing music and jamming.
And it’s a topic where even the name… it’s funny, we had Lorin Cohen in as a Guest Expert recently, and one comment he made was that that phrase “ear training” can be triggering for people. Ear training and music theory, they come with so much baggage.
And so we actually talk a lot less about ear training these days, partly for that reason. But the activity of developing your musical ear is still core to almost everything we do at Musical U.
And in ear training, there are two really big risks. One is completionism and the other is perfectionism.
Completionism means I need to do every bit of a topic, and I can’t move on until I’ve covered every part of it.
So in online learning, for example, that means I need to have covered every lesson, passed every quiz, done every module before I can consider myself a success. Perfectionism is about not making mistakes. It’s “I need to get everything correct or it’s not good enough”.
And with completionism, the antidote is something we call Convergent Learning at Musical U. And I’ll talk more about that another time because it’s its own whole topic. For perfectionism, the antidote is something I’ve come to call “the 80% rule”.
And like I said, it’s central to everything we do inside Musical U. But I was realising this week as I was revising some of the part two material in the musicality book, part two is all about ear training. And I kept coming back to this point and realised I hadn’t actually explained the 80% rule anywhere, and it made me realise I should really do an episode about that.
So the 80% rule is a rule in the sense of “rule of thumb”, not a law. It’s not like a hard, fast rule you must obey. It’s more just a rule of thumb, but it’s a really powerful one.
And simply put, it means once you can do something 80% correctly, it’s probably time to move on.
And I do want to say at the outset, this is just about ear training. So when it comes to playing music, you often hear people talk about how unforgiving music is as an activity!
Because in a lot of disciplines, 80% correct or 90% correct is really good. You know, if you take an exam in pretty much any topic and you get 95% on that exam, you’re like “amazing, nailed it!”
But if you play a piece of music and get 95% of the notes right, you’re getting one in 20 notes wrong. That could be like a wrong note every couple of measures. That’s not going to sound great!
And of course, you know, a “wrong note”, we have a whole philosophy on it, Musical U, and we don’t want to get into that very hardcore mentality about never making mistakes. But the point remains that if you’re trying to play a piece of music a certain way, you really need it close to 100%, and 95% isn’t good enough. 80% certainly isn’t going to make you happy.
Fortunately, we’ve got all of these superlearning techniques to help you on the repertoire side. If you’re trying to “get the notes right”, there’s a whole wealth of techniques and interestingly, some of them are a little bit like the 80% rule I’m about to talk about, but it is its own thing.
So just to say at the outset, we’re not talking about playing music and getting 80% correct – just for ear training.
And ear training is tricky for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s a very fuzzy skill, and it’s a vast skill.
So fuzzy in the sense that a lot of it happens subconsciously or instinctively. And even though you’re consciously working to develop your musical ear, it’s not like a quiz where you get facts right or wrong. And it is vast. So, you know, all of the wide world of music in terms of styles and instruments and arrangements, you want to bring your musical ear to all of that, but it’s kind of an endless journey to develop your musical ear for that reason.
And the other thing that makes it tricky is that it’s often presented as some kind of a quiz. So when you approach ear training from a music theory perspective, or you go to an online ear training quiz, or you get an ear training app, it’s presented a bit like a factual quiz. Here is a question, do you get it right or wrong?
But ear training isn’t like learning facts. And quizzes and apps are valuable. We make use of them. You know, we have ear training quizzes throughout Musical U, and they can be highly effective.
But the tricky part is supposing you’re working on interval recognition. For example, you’re trying to distinguish perfect fourth from perfect fifth.
You can take a quiz and get the answers right, and you feel like you’ve got that skill. But then what about if it’s played on a different instrument? Or what about if it’s played in a really high or a really low register? What about if it’s part of a flurry of notes that make up a melody, or it’s part of the harmony? If it’s, you know, an interval within a chord. What about when you hear a song on the radio? Can you still tell if it’s a perfect fourth or a perfect fifth?
And again, that’s a whole topic in itself. And we have an Integrated Ear Training method that helps with a lot of that. But the bottom line is, ear training is not a factual quiz.
And at the same time, there’s always some way we’re measuring ourselves, right? Whether it’s in a quiz and you get a number, a percentage, right or wrong, or it’s just the broader idea of, like “I’m trying to do this ear based task. Most of the time I get it right” or “I almost never get it right”, we’re always evaluating ourselves.
And of course, we need to, to learn and to know when to move on. But this is where the 80% rule comes in, because naturally, we do want to get the answers right.
And it’s good to aim for 100%.
You know, we talk a lot at Musical U about aiming for… “shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land among the stars”, right? You want to aim high, but it’s not good to require it of yourself. That perfectionism, that requiring yourself to hit 100% before moving on, that’s what gets people stuck and frustrated.
And so this principle is: once you can get it about 80% right, it’s probably time to move on.
And you might wonder, like, where does that number 80 come from? Why is it 80% and not 76% or 50%? And I didn’t just pull that number out of thin air. Actually, I kind of did! But it’s since been validated by tens of thousands of musicians over the last 15 years.
And just to give you a bit of the origin story, you may or may not know any of my backstory, but I started ear training very late. I’d been doing music for probably 20 years before I really discovered ear training was possible. And as a hobby project, I started making these iPhone apps to help me with my ear training. And then I released them for other people to use.
And so when I was making that app, I had to decide, if we’re going to move on from level one to level two, what should be the pass mark? What do you need to accomplish before we allow you to move on to the next difficulty level or the next level of the app. And I picked 80% because that was what I had found in my own experience was helpful.
I had started out very perfectionist, and I had realised over the months that actually, I didn’t need to be rock-solid on a certain set of interval types or chord types. Actually, it was much more helpful to allow myself a bit of leniency and move on and then come back to that thing.
Or actually, often what happened in this touches on Convergent Learning, I would switch to another topic or another set of whatever I was working on, and actually my brain or my ear would develop for the thing I’d been stuck on in the meantime.
And so it was clear to me that you didn’t need to hit 100%. And I had found that, you know, 80%, getting things right four times out of five, or, I think in the first app I made, it was 16 out of 20 was the pass mark.
That was the sweet spot. And that’s the spirit of this rule, this rule of thumb of the 80%. It’s that sweet spot where you’ve got it reliable enough that you can kind of set it aside and move on, but you’re not getting into the diminishing returns of 81%, 82%, Oh, I finally got 83%, which can lead to a lot of frustration and a lot of musicians giving up on ear training, to be honest.
So I had to make some decision. I made that decision, and the feedback from those apps really validated it. People loved how they could kind of zigzag their way forwards, and they were often coming from other apps or other quizzes where they had to hit 100% before they could move on, or the app didn’t require anything. And so they were just assuming they needed 100% before they moved on.
And so it felt like a very straight line, and they would get stuck and blocked and not be able to move forwards. And the 80% rule in those apps meant they could kind of do a bit of this and then move on to the next thing and then come back to that thing, and it just allowed that leniency in a really powerful way.
And so that then informed the design of Musical U. When we launched the membership site in 2015, all of our quizzes took that same pass mark of 16 out of 20 or 80%. And it was really core to how we built everything since, the idea that you can’t put everyone on a fixed straight line, assuming that one size fits all and you must perfect each thing before moving on.
We had that same 80% principle going throughout. And over the years, this has proven to be so effective, and members are often really relieved when they realise it’s not just acceptable, it’s actually good to move on once they hit that 80% spot.
And it is a sweet spot. Like, it’s not a cop-out. It’s not that we’re saying “oh, don’t worry about perfection. Don’t worry about hitting 100%”.
It’s because going beyond 80% tends to waste your time, because you will actually make much faster progress overall if you move on to the next thing.
And if you don’t get as far as 80%, like, if you cop out of 50%, you can still move on, and sometimes that’s the right choice. But for the most part, that 80% is a sweet spot where it’s kind of firm. Like you’ve pretty much got it. And you may not nail it every single time, but you’ve pretty much got it, and it’s kind of safe to let your brain move on to a new challenge.
So, again, that 80%, it could be a pass mark in a quiz, a very tangible numerical thing, but it also just represents I I pretty much get it right. You know, “when I try and do this thing, whether it’s recognising a chord progression or spotting a certain type of interval, or singing a solfa note and hitting the right pitch, I pretty much always get it right. Not always, but pretty much”.
So it’s not a precise scientific thing. And if you want to roll with 75% or 85% or 90%, that’s okay, too.
The real principle here is to allow yourself a little bit of leniency and to recognise that that’s not a cop-out, that’s not being good enough to get 100%. It’s just that the fastest route forwards often is a zigzagging route, and you need that flexibility to make fastest progress.
Now, the really powerful part comes when you combine it with Convergent Learning. And that’s what I was talking about in that chapter of the book was how the two together become really powerful, because then any time you get stuck with an ear training topic or an exercise or a lesson or an activity, you can either relax your target – so, okay, I’m not quite at 80%, but maybe for now I’ll just go with 70% on this one and move on – or you can switch topic to something else that’s complementary.
So, for example, going from some interval stuff to some solfa stuff, or from harmonic intervals to ascending intervals, or from I-IV-V chord progressions to I-IV-V-vi chord progressions. Switching a little bit differently to another topic that’s still building the same sense of relative pitch is a really reliable way to make sure you can always keep moving forwards fast.
Again, I’ll talk more about convergent learning on another episode because it’s a whole topic, but hopefully that kind of gives you a sense of how this zigzagging forwards is the fastest line between two points. We think it should be a straight line, but with ear training, it’s so fuzzy, it’s so vast, and it can vary even day to day, let alone instrument to instrument or music to music. You have to allow yourself that wiggle room to be able to zigzag forwards and move quickly towards your goal.
So, more on Convergent Learning another day. For now, I hope this idea of 80% correct resonates with you. I hope the 80% rule is something you can take and run with.
And again, just remember, it’s not about saying I’m not good enough to hit 100% or I shouldn’t aim for 100%. It’s just about recognising that actually getting a certain thing 80% right and then moving on to the next thing is actually often the optimal thing to aim for. It’s what’s going to produce fastest results for you and eventually get to you being 100% in everything, just not in a 1-2-3 straight line sequence.
Hopefully that’s helpful. Let me know in the comments.
That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!
Subscribe For Future Episodes!
Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!
Transcript
How do you know when to move on in ear training? This can be one of the most frustrating areas of learning for musicians. So much so that a lot of musicians don’t even do any ear training, which is heartbreaking!
Let me ask you, have you ever slogged away at an ear training exercise day after day and found your improvement lessening and lessening, progress just getting slower and slower?
It’s not unusual, and it can be maddening when you’re trying to ace a quiz or you’re trying to make your skills rock solid, but you just can’t seem to hit that 100% mark.
Today, I want to share with you a simple rule that is a highly effective antidote to this common frustration.
I’m really looking forward to diving into this today because I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this publicly. And it’s maybe because it’s something we take so much for granted inside Musical U.
And if you don’t know, Musical U, we focus on musicality, developing your natural musicianship, your natural instinct for music, your natural ability to bring music out from inside you.
And a big part of that is what’s traditionally called “ear training”. So just developing your ear to be able to recognise notes, chords, rhythms and empower you to do things like playing by ear and improvising and writing music and jamming.
And it’s a topic where even the name… it’s funny, we had Lorin Cohen in as a Guest Expert recently, and one comment he made was that that phrase “ear training” can be triggering for people. Ear training and music theory, they come with so much baggage.
And so we actually talk a lot less about ear training these days, partly for that reason. But the activity of developing your musical ear is still core to almost everything we do at Musical U.
And in ear training, there are two really big risks. One is completionism and the other is perfectionism.
Completionism means I need to do every bit of a topic, and I can’t move on until I’ve covered every part of it.
So in online learning, for example, that means I need to have covered every lesson, passed every quiz, done every module before I can consider myself a success. Perfectionism is about not making mistakes. It’s “I need to get everything correct or it’s not good enough”.
And with completionism, the antidote is something we call Convergent Learning at Musical U. And I’ll talk more about that another time because it’s its own whole topic. For perfectionism, the antidote is something I’ve come to call “the 80% rule”.
And like I said, it’s central to everything we do inside Musical U. But I was realising this week as I was revising some of the part two material in the musicality book, part two is all about ear training. And I kept coming back to this point and realised I hadn’t actually explained the 80% rule anywhere, and it made me realise I should really do an episode about that.
So the 80% rule is a rule in the sense of “rule of thumb”, not a law. It’s not like a hard, fast rule you must obey. It’s more just a rule of thumb, but it’s a really powerful one.
And simply put, it means once you can do something 80% correctly, it’s probably time to move on.
And I do want to say at the outset, this is just about ear training. So when it comes to playing music, you often hear people talk about how unforgiving music is as an activity!
Because in a lot of disciplines, 80% correct or 90% correct is really good. You know, if you take an exam in pretty much any topic and you get 95% on that exam, you’re like “amazing, nailed it!”
But if you play a piece of music and get 95% of the notes right, you’re getting one in 20 notes wrong. That could be like a wrong note every couple of measures. That’s not going to sound great!
And of course, you know, a “wrong note”, we have a whole philosophy on it, Musical U, and we don’t want to get into that very hardcore mentality about never making mistakes. But the point remains that if you’re trying to play a piece of music a certain way, you really need it close to 100%, and 95% isn’t good enough. 80% certainly isn’t going to make you happy.
Fortunately, we’ve got all of these superlearning techniques to help you on the repertoire side. If you’re trying to “get the notes right”, there’s a whole wealth of techniques and interestingly, some of them are a little bit like the 80% rule I’m about to talk about, but it is its own thing.
So just to say at the outset, we’re not talking about playing music and getting 80% correct – just for ear training.
And ear training is tricky for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s a very fuzzy skill, and it’s a vast skill.
So fuzzy in the sense that a lot of it happens subconsciously or instinctively. And even though you’re consciously working to develop your musical ear, it’s not like a quiz where you get facts right or wrong. And it is vast. So, you know, all of the wide world of music in terms of styles and instruments and arrangements, you want to bring your musical ear to all of that, but it’s kind of an endless journey to develop your musical ear for that reason.
And the other thing that makes it tricky is that it’s often presented as some kind of a quiz. So when you approach ear training from a music theory perspective, or you go to an online ear training quiz, or you get an ear training app, it’s presented a bit like a factual quiz. Here is a question, do you get it right or wrong?
But ear training isn’t like learning facts. And quizzes and apps are valuable. We make use of them. You know, we have ear training quizzes throughout Musical U, and they can be highly effective.
But the tricky part is supposing you’re working on interval recognition. For example, you’re trying to distinguish perfect fourth from perfect fifth.
You can take a quiz and get the answers right, and you feel like you’ve got that skill. But then what about if it’s played on a different instrument? Or what about if it’s played in a really high or a really low register? What about if it’s part of a flurry of notes that make up a melody, or it’s part of the harmony? If it’s, you know, an interval within a chord. What about when you hear a song on the radio? Can you still tell if it’s a perfect fourth or a perfect fifth?
And again, that’s a whole topic in itself. And we have an Integrated Ear Training method that helps with a lot of that. But the bottom line is, ear training is not a factual quiz.
And at the same time, there’s always some way we’re measuring ourselves, right? Whether it’s in a quiz and you get a number, a percentage, right or wrong, or it’s just the broader idea of, like “I’m trying to do this ear based task. Most of the time I get it right” or “I almost never get it right”, we’re always evaluating ourselves.
And of course, we need to, to learn and to know when to move on. But this is where the 80% rule comes in, because naturally, we do want to get the answers right.
And it’s good to aim for 100%.
You know, we talk a lot at Musical U about aiming for… “shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land among the stars”, right? You want to aim high, but it’s not good to require it of yourself. That perfectionism, that requiring yourself to hit 100% before moving on, that’s what gets people stuck and frustrated.
And so this principle is: once you can get it about 80% right, it’s probably time to move on.
And you might wonder, like, where does that number 80 come from? Why is it 80% and not 76% or 50%? And I didn’t just pull that number out of thin air. Actually, I kind of did! But it’s since been validated by tens of thousands of musicians over the last 15 years.
And just to give you a bit of the origin story, you may or may not know any of my backstory, but I started ear training very late. I’d been doing music for probably 20 years before I really discovered ear training was possible. And as a hobby project, I started making these iPhone apps to help me with my ear training. And then I released them for other people to use.
And so when I was making that app, I had to decide, if we’re going to move on from level one to level two, what should be the pass mark? What do you need to accomplish before we allow you to move on to the next difficulty level or the next level of the app. And I picked 80% because that was what I had found in my own experience was helpful.
I had started out very perfectionist, and I had realised over the months that actually, I didn’t need to be rock-solid on a certain set of interval types or chord types. Actually, it was much more helpful to allow myself a bit of leniency and move on and then come back to that thing.
Or actually, often what happened in this touches on Convergent Learning, I would switch to another topic or another set of whatever I was working on, and actually my brain or my ear would develop for the thing I’d been stuck on in the meantime.
And so it was clear to me that you didn’t need to hit 100%. And I had found that, you know, 80%, getting things right four times out of five, or, I think in the first app I made, it was 16 out of 20 was the pass mark.
That was the sweet spot. And that’s the spirit of this rule, this rule of thumb of the 80%. It’s that sweet spot where you’ve got it reliable enough that you can kind of set it aside and move on, but you’re not getting into the diminishing returns of 81%, 82%, Oh, I finally got 83%, which can lead to a lot of frustration and a lot of musicians giving up on ear training, to be honest.
So I had to make some decision. I made that decision, and the feedback from those apps really validated it. People loved how they could kind of zigzag their way forwards, and they were often coming from other apps or other quizzes where they had to hit 100% before they could move on, or the app didn’t require anything. And so they were just assuming they needed 100% before they moved on.
And so it felt like a very straight line, and they would get stuck and blocked and not be able to move forwards. And the 80% rule in those apps meant they could kind of do a bit of this and then move on to the next thing and then come back to that thing, and it just allowed that leniency in a really powerful way.
And so that then informed the design of Musical U. When we launched the membership site in 2015, all of our quizzes took that same pass mark of 16 out of 20 or 80%. And it was really core to how we built everything since, the idea that you can’t put everyone on a fixed straight line, assuming that one size fits all and you must perfect each thing before moving on.
We had that same 80% principle going throughout. And over the years, this has proven to be so effective, and members are often really relieved when they realise it’s not just acceptable, it’s actually good to move on once they hit that 80% spot.
And it is a sweet spot. Like, it’s not a cop-out. It’s not that we’re saying “oh, don’t worry about perfection. Don’t worry about hitting 100%”.
It’s because going beyond 80% tends to waste your time, because you will actually make much faster progress overall if you move on to the next thing.
And if you don’t get as far as 80%, like, if you cop out of 50%, you can still move on, and sometimes that’s the right choice. But for the most part, that 80% is a sweet spot where it’s kind of firm. Like you’ve pretty much got it. And you may not nail it every single time, but you’ve pretty much got it, and it’s kind of safe to let your brain move on to a new challenge.
So, again, that 80%, it could be a pass mark in a quiz, a very tangible numerical thing, but it also just represents I I pretty much get it right. You know, “when I try and do this thing, whether it’s recognising a chord progression or spotting a certain type of interval, or singing a solfa note and hitting the right pitch, I pretty much always get it right. Not always, but pretty much”.
So it’s not a precise scientific thing. And if you want to roll with 75% or 85% or 90%, that’s okay, too.
The real principle here is to allow yourself a little bit of leniency and to recognise that that’s not a cop-out, that’s not being good enough to get 100%. It’s just that the fastest route forwards often is a zigzagging route, and you need that flexibility to make fastest progress.
Now, the really powerful part comes when you combine it with Convergent Learning. And that’s what I was talking about in that chapter of the book was how the two together become really powerful, because then any time you get stuck with an ear training topic or an exercise or a lesson or an activity, you can either relax your target – so, okay, I’m not quite at 80%, but maybe for now I’ll just go with 70% on this one and move on – or you can switch topic to something else that’s complementary.
So, for example, going from some interval stuff to some solfa stuff, or from harmonic intervals to ascending intervals, or from I-IV-V chord progressions to I-IV-V-vi chord progressions. Switching a little bit differently to another topic that’s still building the same sense of relative pitch is a really reliable way to make sure you can always keep moving forwards fast.
Again, I’ll talk more about convergent learning on another episode because it’s a whole topic, but hopefully that kind of gives you a sense of how this zigzagging forwards is the fastest line between two points. We think it should be a straight line, but with ear training, it’s so fuzzy, it’s so vast, and it can vary even day to day, let alone instrument to instrument or music to music. You have to allow yourself that wiggle room to be able to zigzag forwards and move quickly towards your goal.
So, more on Convergent Learning another day. For now, I hope this idea of 80% correct resonates with you. I hope the 80% rule is something you can take and run with.
And again, just remember, it’s not about saying I’m not good enough to hit 100% or I shouldn’t aim for 100%. It’s just about recognising that actually getting a certain thing 80% right and then moving on to the next thing is actually often the optimal thing to aim for. It’s what’s going to produce fastest results for you and eventually get to you being 100% in everything, just not in a 1-2-3 straight line sequence.
Hopefully that’s helpful. Let me know in the comments.
That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!
Subscribe For Future Episodes!
Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!
