The "Real Easy" Ear Training Book

The bottom line

Full disclosure before anything else: I built an ear training app, so I have opinions — and skin — in this game. Read this review knowing that. With that out of the way: Roberta Radley’s book is, in my view, the best thing ever printed on the specific skill of hearing chord changes, and it’s not particularly close.

Radley was Assistant Chair of the Ear Training Department at Berklee, and the book reads like what it is: a veteran professor’s entire teaching system, organized into twelve chapters that take you from singing a major scale in solfege to recognizing modal interchange and secondary dominants by ear. The audio examples (performed by Brad Hatfield) drive constant dictation work. The word “Easy” in the title is a Sher Music brand joke — the material starts genuinely easy, but by Chapter 12 you’re doing real work that many conservatory students would sweat over.

The catch is the same one every ear training book carries, and I’ll be blunt about it below: a book with fixed audio tracks can teach you a method brilliantly, but it cannot give you the thousands of randomized, graded repetitions that actually build recognition speed. Radley gives you the map; the miles are on you.

Who it’s for — and who should skip it

Get it if you’re a self-taught jazz musician who can play tunes but transcribes by trial and error, or a student whose “ear training” so far has been naming intervals in isolation. This book teaches the skill you actually need on the bandstand: listening to a tune and knowing what the harmony is doing. Singers, horn players, guitarists, pianists — the method is instrument-agnostic (everything is sung).

Skip it if you can’t or won’t sing. I’m serious: the entire method runs through solfege singing — every chapter is built from “Activities” like Singing Bass Lines Using Numbers and Solfege or Practice Playing and Singing Major Triads. If you plan to skip the singing and just do the listening drills, you’ll get maybe 30% of the value. Also skip it if you’re already comfortable transcribing full progressions — this is explicitly a beginning/intermediate book, and it stops right where advanced chromatic harmony begins.

What’s inside

Twelve chapters, each with an introduction, concept explanations, and numbered Activities tied to the audio:

1. Hearing the Bass Line — the foundation chapter: movable-do solfege, and hearing the diatonic bass line as a melody. This framing alone fixes half of most students’ transcription problems.
2. Hearing Major Triads — the I, IV and V sounds, with a “Spotlight on the Blues Changes” and first transposition work.
3. Hearing Minor Triads — II–, III–, VI–, plus a short, wise section on the benefits of memorizing.
4. Using the Vertical Approach for Dictation — diminished and augmented triads, the VII°, and the diatonic cycle-5 pattern.
5. Introducing the Horizontal Approach — singing root-position and melodic arpeggios, voice-leading through progressions. This vertical/horizontal split is the book’s core pedagogical idea: hear chords as stacked sounds and as moving lines.
6. Using the Horizontal Approach for Dictation — guide tones (the 3rd as first guide tone), the Vsus4, and the delightfully practical “Ten Transcribing Tips from the Desk of Ms. Radley.”
7. Hearing Inversions of the I, IV and V Triads.
8. Melody and Harmony Relationship — “Melody Is Harmony”: mining a tune’s melody for harmonic information.
9. Hearing Seventh Chords — maj7, dom7 (with the tritone), m7, m7♭5.
10. More on Hearing Seventh Chords — voice-leading the 3rd-and-7th guide tone lines through progressions.
11. Hearing Minor Key Harmony — natural/harmonic minor solfege, line clichés, guide tones in minor.
12. Hearing Non-Diatonic Harmony — chromatic solfege, modal interchange, secondary dominants, and “Helping Out the Ears with Theory.”

That last chapter title is the book’s philosophy in five words: theory serves the ear, not the reverse.

Strengths

• It teaches progression hearing, not party tricks. Naming an isolated interval is a stunt; hearing that a tune went to the IV minor is a musical skill. Radley aims squarely at the second.
• Guide tones as the through-line. The 3rds-and-7ths voice-leading approach (Chapters 6 and 10) is exactly how working musicians actually track harmony, and almost no other book teaches it to beginners.
• The Activities are real assignments with clear procedures, not vague “listen and absorb” advice. There are dozens of them, listed in their own index at the front.
• Movable-do solfege done right, including the honest explanation of chromatic syllables and why the same pitch gets two names (Chapter 12).

Weaknesses

• Fixed audio ages fast. You will memorize the tracks — I mean actually memorize them, order and all — long before the recognition skill is automatic. The book can’t shuffle itself. This isn’t Radley’s fault; it’s the format’s ceiling.
• No feedback loop. Dictation with an answer key tells you that you were wrong, a day later, but not while the sound is still in your ears. Self-checking discipline makes or breaks the book.
• Production is dated. The examples are synth-y studio tracks from 2008, not exactly inspiring audio. Functional, but you won’t listen for pleasure.
• Minor-key and non-diatonic chapters feel compressed. Chapters 11–12 cover in ~40 pages what realistically needs a second volume. (There isn’t one.)

How to actually practice with this book

This book fails silently when treated as reading material. It works when treated as a daily gym program:

1. 15 minutes a day beats 2 hours on Sunday — recognition is a reflex, and reflexes are built by frequency. Do one or two Activities per session, no more.
2. Sing everything, always. Every Activity that says “sing” means it. Record yourself once a week; the recordings are humbling and diagnostic.
3. Don’t leave a chapter until the dictation is boring. Boredom is the actual completion criterion — it means recognition has gone automatic.
4. Apply each chapter to one real tune immediately. After Chapter 2, transcribe a three-chord song from a recording. After Chapter 9, take a simple standard and identify every seventh-chord quality by ear before checking a lead sheet.
5. Pair the book with randomized drilling. This is where I’m biased, so I’ll say it plainly: the method is Radley’s, but the reps want to be interactive — an app (mine, Earonman, or honestly any tool with randomized chord-quality drills) solves exactly the two weaknesses above: infinite non-memorizable examples and instant feedback. Book for the system, app for the mileage.

How it compares

• vs. Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician (Wyatt/Schroeder): also movable-do with audio, broader in scope but much shallower on harmony; Radley goes further on the one skill that matters most for jazz players.
• vs. Armen Donelian’s Training the Ear: Donelian is deeper and more demanding (and better for advanced players); Radley is far more approachable and better sequenced for self-study.
• vs. interval-drill apps and websites: different species. Isolated interval naming does not transfer to hearing progressions by itself — you need the functional, key-centered approach this book teaches, plus the drilling those tools provide.

Rating breakdown

Criterion	Score	Why
Clarity	5/5	A master teacher’s sequencing; every Activity has a clear procedure.
Depth	4/5	Definitive for diatonic + early chromatic hearing; stops before advanced harmony.
Practicality	4.5/5	Genuinely usable for self-study — if you sing and keep the daily discipline.
Value	4.5/5	A full Berklee-style course for the price of one lesson.
Overall	4.5/5	The printed gold standard for hearing changes — pair it with randomized reps.