Why I Switched from Intervals to Scale Degrees

I spent a couple years, off and on, working on interval recognition using an app called Functional Ear Trainer. It was excellent, honestly -- well-designed, methodical, exactly what you'd want from ear training software. I got better at identifying intervals in isolation. The problem was I never got fast enough at recognizing notes in a real song to actually play it by ear.

I'd hear a melody and think "is that a fourth or a fifth?" By the time I'd figure out the first interval, the song had moved on without me. I could nail the exercises in the app, but put on an actual piece of music and I was lost.

Here's what I finally understood: when you're trying to identify intervals, your brain has to hold two different notes in your mind simultaneously and compare them. You're tracking the movement from one note to the next, naming the distance between them. That's a lot of mental work happening all at once.

Scale degrees work differently. You're comparing individual notes to one constant reference point -- the tonic. Instead of juggling two moving targets, you have one stable anchor and you're just naming each tone as it relates to that anchor. Do, re, mi, fa, sol. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Whatever system you use, you're identifying single notes, not the spaces between them.

It's the difference between describing a road trip as "three miles north, then two miles east, then one mile south" versus just giving someone the address of where you ended up. Both get you there, but one requires a lot less mental gymnastics.

The other thing that happened when I switched to scale degrees -- I started recognizing patterns. You hear certain scale degree combinations over and over in music. 1-3-5 is just the major triad. 5-3-1 coming down happens constantly at the end of phrases. 5-6-5-4-3-2-1 is that descending pattern that shows up in hundreds of songs.

Once I'd heard these patterns enough times, I could recognize them as chunks instead of individual notes. I didn't have to analyze every single tone anymore. My brain would go "oh, that's the 1-3-5 thing again" and I'd already be three notes ahead.

I'm not saying interval training is useless. Functional Ear Trainer was genuinely helpful -- it trained my ear in ways I hadn't been able to do before. But it wasn't getting me where I wanted to be. I needed a different approach.

These days when I try to play what I hear, I'm faster and I don't make as many mistakes. I'm still not fast enough to join in with a song while it's playing, but at least I can make quicker work of playing it back after I've heard it. For someone who used to stare at the piano in confusion while a melody evaporated from my memory, that's real progress.

Another change is, I can hear intervals better now than I could when I was actively drilling them. When you know the scale degrees, you already know the intervals -- you just arrived at them through a different door. I'll think 7 or ti first, and semitone second.

If interval training isn't getting you where you want to be, give scale degrees a shot. Worst case, you'll have spent worthwhile time on a different kind of ear training that didn't work for the play-what-you-hear purpose. Best case, you'll finally start making sense of the melodies that have been floating past you all this time.