Description:
Learning how to recognize and sing different chord qualities has a number of benefits. It will help you improve your intonation, harmony, and overall musicianship skills. It’s essential for better improvisation and composition skills as well.
This tutorial is most helpful once you’ve already learned the major and minor scale and feel pretty confidence matching pitch for both. If you haven’t covered these topics, I'd recommend that you take some time to review some of our beginning intonation tutorials and daily warm-ups first!
In part 1, we'll learn the difference between triadic major and minor chords and some exercises to practice singing with them. In part 2, we’ll learn about singing augmented and diminished chords. In part 3, we’ll cover major, minor, and dominant 7th chords and some fun exercises that involve each one. I’ll use our conclusion section as an ear training test to help you review as well as challenge your ability to distinguish between all the different chord qualities we’ve covered.
Let's get started with a short intonation review that you can use to prime your ears and voice before we dive into some more advanced ear-training with different chord qualities.
Short Daily Warmup:
- Weyah 12171 whole 2 to half 7, then half 2 to whole 7
- Major Bungee Scale
- Minor Bungee Scale
Lessons:
Instructor: Abram Poliakoff
Abram Poliakoff is a singer, guitarist, pianist, teacher, conductor, and composer. He received a Bachelors of Music in Vocal Arts from USC’s Thornton School of Music and has been teaching music for 8 years. He is currently both the Associate Artistic Director and a tenor in the L.A. Choral Lab, which recently released its first studio album Sonic Visions in the fall of 2019. Abram teaches and performs a wide range of genres including Classical, Jazz, Folk and Popular music in the Los Angeles area. He has also sung with the San Francisco Opera and Pocket Opera in the Bay Area. His teaching mission is to help his students utilize vocal technique to find their authentic and healthy voice while maximizing genre flexibility and a naturalness of expression.