I got a really nice comment about the retro posts the other day:
these posts bring me back to the early-aughts-blogspot days, I think they’re great!
It’s probably no surprise that that’s exactly the vibe I’m going for here. Very pleased to learn that it’s working!
I was lucky enough to be able to take a little time off around the holidays so last week was my first full work week in a while. (Five days? Every week??) Things have been pretty chaotic at work but today we regained two people from parental leave, on a six-person engineering team, which will be huge. I’m in the middle of testing a large feature that I scoped and built basically all by myself, in a system (and a language) I didn’t really know, since I’m still fairly new. I’m proud of getting that working! (Sharp contrast to a previous manager’s comments that I am terrible at anything ambiguous.)
Outside of my job, I’ve been working on my ear training again. I have a music degree and spent a lot of time in formal music instruction of some kind, and my ear was pretty decent when it came to melodic lines—I play a melodic instrument, so that’s a lot of what I spent time on. But my ear for harmonies and chord progressions is not as good, and even the melodic intervals have fallen by the wayside. I have been incredibly humbled going back to the very basic two-note interval identification (I have been using the trainer at I Was Doing All Right, which is a fantastic tool).
I was really struggling with 5ths and 6ths – something about the size of those intervals really confused themselves in my ears and I couldn’t reliably identify them. Eventually I thought that maybe it was the lack of context that was difficult. (This problem has reared its head before; recently I kept confusing diminished triads for rootless dominant 7ths, which is not something you’d really do in the context of a chord progression or a piece you’re listening to, but it’s easy to do when all you’re hearing is one chord in isolation.) So I switched from “melodic” on the ear trainer (which is when it plays note 1 and note 2 separately, in succession) to “stepped,” which is when it will play note 1, wait a beat, then play note 1 and note 2 in succession. This allows your ear to adjust to a new key centre, which is just a little more context than before.
Turns out this was the problem. I went from absolutely falling on my face every time to being pretty good—today I did 100 intervals (just perfect 5ths and major & minor 6ths) and I managed an 88%.
More than anything else, of course, it’s just consistent practice that’s helping. I hate that consistency can win out over basically anything else: effort, talent, desire, etc. If you just do something a lot, every day or something like it, you get better. How annoying.