Kevin Ure (UreMusic.com)

Overlistening is listening at a volume higher than the material needs. It is a term I use in my ear training courses, and it is why I prefer that you do the lessons on speakers instead of headphones.

Learn more:

www.uremusic.org/2026/10/what-is-overlistening-in-…

1 week ago | [YT] | 2

Kevin Ure (UreMusic.com)

If you're training your ear on your own, you're also the teacher, and the teacher half is where most people go wrong.

You grade yourself. You repeat a lesson until the score looks right. Then you wonder why the months of effort didn't turn into hearing.

A 60% on the first pass beats a 100% after two months on the same lesson. The sequence is doing the work, not the score.

I wrote this one for teachers, but if you're teaching yourself it's the same job. It covers the first lesson, why the silence in the middle of a drill is the drill, and the honest limit on who this works for.

www.uremusic.com/blog/how-to-teach-audiation

1 week ago | [YT] | 5

Kevin Ure (UreMusic.com)

I have some updates that will massively simplify grading and ensure you have the best version of the Flawless course I am capable of creating. It's a few things.

Grading is the big change, and it's simpler now.

The app at FlawlessEar.com is the source of truth. Pass the check at about 80% and move on. No lesson should take more than three days, and a final no more than a week. If you're still stuck after that, move on anyway. It won't hold you back.

If you've been chasing 100% because an older recording told you to, stop. That rule is gone.

Two deliveries behind that.

The audio version of Flawless is finished and I'm finalizing the editing and packaging now. It goes up at UreMusic.com this week, I hope.

Here on YouTube I'm uploading edited versions of anything past the first quiz. YouTube doesn't let me replace a video, so the older ones stay where they are rather than being swapped out. This will
be an October project.

And the entire edited video course goes on the website as a bonus inside the current Flawless audio course. www.uremusic.com/flawless-ear-training-audio-video

For those of you who were here at the beginning, you know how many revisions this has taken. A lot of them came from your reports.

1 week ago (edited) | [YT] | 7

Kevin Ure (UreMusic.com)

In April 1784 Mozart wrote to his father about a clavier-player named Richter.

Richter had watched Mozart play, and he kept saying the same thing. How hard I work and sweat, and I win no applause, and to you it's all child's play.

Mozart answered him in one line: "I too had to work hard, so as not to have to work hard any longer." (1)

Richter wasn't lazy. Mozart said he played well, and also that he was rough and labored. He was working as hard as anyone and getting nowhere.

I think about Richter more than I think about Mozart.

He was missing the order.

The order you learn things in determines how hard you have to work to get to the easy part.

Drills done in no particular order build skills that don't connect.

You get good at an interval quiz and stay lost in a real piece, because nothing linked the interval to the chord, or the chord to the progression, or the progression to the melody you're trying to hold in your head.

Or worse: you did every lesson in the same exact environment, so you never learned to hear outside the "lab."

Order builds the ear.

The habit that works against order hardest is the one that feels most like progress: drilling a single skill until you score 100% every time.

(1) Mozart to his father, Vienna, 28 April 1784. Emily Anderson, The Letters of Mozart and His Family, letter 511. The clavier-player is Georg Friedrich Richter, then touring back to his native Holland by way of Salzburg. Mozart's words:

He plays well so far as execution goes, but, as you will discover when you hear him, he is too rough and laboured and entirely devoid of taste and feeling. Otherwise he is the best fellow in the world and is not the slightest bit conceited. When I played to him he stared all the time at my fingers and kept on saying: "Good God! How hard I work and sweat — and yet win no applause — and to you, my friend, it is all child's play." "Yes," I replied, "I too had to work hard, so as not to have to work hard any longer."

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 5

Kevin Ure (UreMusic.com)

I'm thinking about posting a lecture on invertible counterpoint. About ten minutes, one example the whole way through. You take a first species line, drop it an octave under the cantus, and count what happens to the intervals. You discover the one rule instead of being told it.

There's no piano in it. You audiate the examples, and I show you how to start if you can't yet.

After the lecture there are six members workshops, one per species, on a site where every example plays and you check your own work.

I don't know of another video that teaches counterpoint this way. If you want it, vote.

1 month ago | [YT] | 9

Kevin Ure (UreMusic.com)

Right or wrong doesn’t matter much in Flawless. Students hear that and assume I’m being nice. I’m not.

Here’s what happens. Somewhere in the back half of the course, you start hearing things while you’re cooking. You pick out a bass line in a song you’ve heard a hundred times. There is no effort involved; your ear just started doing it on its own.

That’s what the course is for. It points your ear in the right direction. Your ear takes it from there.

So the drills aren’t there to be mastered. They are there to change how you perceive sound. Once that shift happens, it keeps running with or without the lesson open. Miss a few answers along the way and nothing breaks.

You’re not building a score.

You’re building a foundation, and the foundation enhances your perception. Once the ear knows what to look for, you no longer need ear training because it’s happening all the time.

This is why the old advice of “just play” is good. Yes, you can get better just playing. But just playing without the right framework for hearing will never produce a good ear. Ear training fixes that.

Not everyone who starts gets that far. But the ones who keep showing up, one lesson a day, do.

1 month ago | [YT] | 8

Kevin Ure (UreMusic.com)

A suspension isn't just a moment of tension that needs resolution. It's three steps, and you can learn to hear them.

The technique starts with a consonance. It holds while the harmony shifts underneath. Then it resolves down by step. 

Without the consonance holding from the first step, it sounds wrong in tonal music. My new post breaks down 4-3, 7-6, and 9-8 suspensions. It also discusses what to call it when a “suspension” resolves up.

www.uremusic.org/2026/08/a-note-that-refuses-to-mo…

1 month ago (edited) | [YT] | 5

Kevin Ure (UreMusic.com)

By the way, I read all initial comments, but I tend to lose replies to comments. If I missed something you want me to respond to, start a new comment on a new thread. I'll see it and respond.

1 month ago | [YT] | 6

Kevin Ure (UreMusic.com)

New post on the blog, for anyone who's been working through the audiation videos here: why theory can't fix a hearing problem. It lays out the whole ladder — from holding one stable tone to hearing two voices at once — and how to practice it in fifteen calm minutes a day.

www.uremusic.org/2026/08/audiation-skill-that-sepa…

1 month ago | [YT] | 5