Knowing what to teach was never the hard part. The hard part is that ear training has to happen one voice at a time, and a rehearsal has forty of them and a clock.
The trade nobody wants to make
Ear skills need to be practiced out loud, individually, with feedback. That is close to the opposite of what a full ensemble rehearsal does well. So most of us end up choosing between skipping the ear work and hoping, or spending rehearsal on the six auditioners while thirty four students stand there. Both choices cost something real.
What changed in my program
I direct a program of sixty students. We audition for CCDA regional and All-State honor choirs and for CMEA, and we take the program out to Music in the Parks and WorldStrides Heritage Festivals. For years we would place five to eight singers in honor choir in a given season. The year I started assigning daily practice, that moved to ten to fifteen, and it has stayed there. Same director, same rehearsal minutes, same size program. The one variable I changed was that the ear work happened every day instead of whenever the calendar allowed it.
The split that actually works
Drill in rehearsal what genuinely benefits from a room full of people. Assign individually what requires a singer to hear their own pitch. Tonality, rhythm counting, and audition nerves are group work. Tonal memory and sight-reading are not.
Keep in rehearsal
- Establishing tonality fast. Play a chord, sing the tonic triad, sing the scale. Sixty seconds, every single day. If I could keep only one habit, it would be this one, because it shows up in sight-reading scores more than anything else.
- Counting out loud. Rhythm errors cost more than pitch errors on most sight-reading rubrics, and counting aloud is one of the few ear-adjacent things a group does better than an individual.
- Audition choreography. Walking in, standing, starting without being asked twice. Nerves are much cheaper to burn off in a familiar room.
Send home
- Tonal memory, five to ten minutes daily. Every singer has to hear their own voice graded, which simply cannot happen in a room of forty.
- Sight-reading, one new line a day, never repeated.
- Scales and triads as the warm up before both.
Four weeks, if you are short on time
| Week | Rehearsal, 10 minutes | Home, 15 minutes daily |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tonality drill, count rhythms aloud | Tonal memory, chapters 1 and 2 |
| 2 | Tonality drill, sight-read one line together | Tonal memory plus scales |
| 3 | One singer sight-reads, the rest follow silently | Sight-reading, a new line daily |
| 4 | Mock auditions in front of the section | Full run throughs, recorded |
Seeing whether it happened
Assigned ear training usually dies for one boring reason: you cannot tell who did it. That is a large part of why this site exists. Students join a class with a code, practice at home, and the dashboard shows accuracy, streaks, and assignment progress with nothing for you to grade by hand. The live class game is also a quick, low stakes way to check note, key, and rhythm recognition across the whole room.
Set up a class in a few minutes
Create the class, add your roster, share the code. They practice at home, you see the results. Chapter 1 of every course is free for every student.
Create a class