Want to improve your ears? It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re a singer, Solfege can improve your aural ability and make you an all around better musician.
Solfege (or solmization) is a pedagogical technique for the teaching of sight-singing in which each note of the score is sung to a special syllable, called a “solfege syllable” (or “sol-fa syllable”). The seven syllables normally used for this practice in the West are: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol (or So), La, Ti. They are derived from the major scale.
Below is a complete list of all the solfege syllables and their corresponding intervalic relationships.
How it helps:
Solfege can aid a musician by giving him or her something other then just raw pitches to reference. So just as it is much easier to remember that a tritone sounds like the opening bar in “Maria” from West Side Story or that a an ascending major sixth sounds like the first two notes of the NBC theme, a musician can internalize solfege so that when he hears the root of a chord going to the fifth he can say, “Oh, that just sounds like Do - Sol”
The best part is you don’t have to be a first rate singer in order to benefit from singing solfege. Remember, what you are really trying to do is internalize the pitch relationships, and the best way to do that is to see if you can replicate the pitch with your natural instrument- your voice.
Practicing:
The best way to practice solfege is to sit down in front of a piano, or whatever your instrument of choice is (just make sure it’s well tuned!), pull out some sheet music, play the root note of the key, and start trying to sing what’s on the page in front of you in relationship to that one note.
It is important that you make sure you attempt to sing a note before you try correcting yourself on the piano.
And be critical of yourself. Try to rehearse a piece of music up to performance level (even if it is simplistic, and your singing stinks!) The better you get at singing intervals, the easier it will be for you to lay back and just let the music flow.
Keep in mind that the ultimate goal as a musician is to be able to play what you hear in your head. Solfege is just another stepping stone that can help you to reach this goal faster if you’re willing to work at it.
more articles by Tyler Oakleaf
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- The Big Picture
- Chord Soloing & Chordal Embelishment 1
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- “Making It” In Music
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