Article can be found here: https://www.guitarnoise.com/lessons/happy-new-ear/ .
Okay, pick up your guitar and play the open (low) E on the sixth string.
Strike the string again, get the sound firmly in your mind and then strike the A, or fifth string. Listen to the "spacing" between the notes, the distance from the one note to the next, as if they were parts of a scale.
This is a fourth. Now repeat this exercise, but this time use the D and G strings. This is also a fourth (you already knew that). The intervals are the same even though the notes are not. Can you hear the interval? When I first started developing my ear, picking out intervals seemed very hard. I would actually sing "do, re, mi" aloud in order to figure it out. Now when I tune my guitar, I'm still actually "singing" the intervals in my head.
The tricky thing to remember is that wherever you decide to start is "do." The point is not to recognize what note it is, but what the interval between the notes is. This is a significant difference and I cannot stress it enough. Few people have perfect pitch but just about anybody can sing a scale well enough to figure out the interval from "do" to "la," "fa" or "te."
That part confuses me. Is the open sixth string supposed to sound like "do" and the open fifth string supposed to sound like "fa"? I'm getting so frustrated learning how to pick stuff up by ear. :cry:
