Learn ear training to play melodies by ear in four months
Four months of short daily drills — about 15 minutes a day, plus one longer transcription session a week — takes a musician who can already play an instrument a little to hearing scale degrees in context and working out simple melodies without sheet music. Roughly 60 hours total. You will not develop perfect pitch. You will stop needing tabs for every tune.
4 months · ~60 hours · pick out a nursery-rhyme or pop melody on your instrument by ear in a few minutes
1.Functional Ear Trainer
A free app built on Alain Benbassat's method: it plays a chord progression to set the key, then a single note, and you name its scale degree — do, re, mi — by the way it feels against the key, not by measuring the distance from the previous note. That is how musicians who play by ear actually hear. Work through the levels in order and don't advance until you're at 90 percent. The first week feels like guessing. Around week three, notes start to have personalities.
Free (iOS and Android)
Functional Ear Trainer →2.musictheory.net — interval and chord ear trainers
Ricci Adams' site has been the free standard for music theory drills for two decades. Use the Interval Ear Training exercise, starting with only the perfect fourth, perfect fifth and octave, then add one interval a week. Add the Chord Ear Training exercise once you can tell major from minor without hesitating. Five minutes a day, after the Functional Ear Trainer, is enough. Intervals are the secondary skill here — useful for harmony and for jumping between notes — not the main event.
Free in the browser; the Tenuto app version is $4.99 on iOS
musictheory.net exercises →3.Transcribe real melodies with Transcribe!
Drills only matter if they transfer. Once a week, pick a melody you can sing — "Happy Birthday", a Beatles vocal line, a TV theme — and work it out on your instrument, one phrase at a time. Seventh String's Transcribe! loops a few seconds of audio and slows it down without changing the pitch, which is the whole trick. Sing the phrase first, find the first note, then name the rest as scale degrees. Write them down. By month four you should be doing a simple tune in one sitting.
$39 one-time; 30-day free trial
Transcribe! →If this doesn't fit you
If you don't play an instrument yet, don't start here. Ear training without an instrument or a trained voice has nowhere to land — spend three months on the instrument first, then come back. If you are a singer, do steps 1 and 2 as written but replace step 3 with singing the melody back on solfège syllables, no instrument at all.
Why this path
Most people start ear training with interval drills, get good at naming isolated intervals, and still can't play a song by ear — because music isn't heard as a chain of intervals, it's heard in a key. Functional training fixes the foundation; interval and chord drills fill in the gaps; transcription is the only test that counts. Short daily sessions beat long weekly ones because this is perception, not knowledge. Skip a week and you'll feel it.