If I had to choose just one “building block” to empower you to play by ear, improvise, write music, and more, it would be Solfa. Fortunately, we don’t need to choose just one! :) But the fact that Solfa is typically overlooked when musicians pursue Ear Training, compared with Intervals, Chords and Progressions, is quite possibly a large part of the reason most musicians struggle to see real, tangible, practical payoff from their Ear Training efforts.
Whatever your background may be, you’ve almost certainly come across Solfa before. It might have been called “solfege” (an alternative name which we’ll discuss and clarify below) or simply “the do-re-mi system”. Perhaps the only place you’ve heard of it was in the classic movie The Sound Of Music with its famous song “Do-Re-Mi” (popularly known as “Doe, a Deer”)—which, despite arguably doing some harm to music education by forever connecting Solfa with children in the minds of the public, did actually do a pretty good job of explaining and demonstrating what Solfa is all about: “When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything”. Substitute “recognise and identify” for “sing”, and you’ve pretty much got it!
In my own journey, Solfa was a late discovery which I wished someone had clued me into sooner. I’ll share a little of that story below. Suffice to say, it was an absolute game-changer for me, just as it has since proven to be for so many of our members over the years.
So whether you’re at the start of your own Ear Training journey, or you’ve been at it for years, I’m excited for you to dive into this chapter and discover everything Solfa can do to unlock your instinctive ability to recognise notes (and everything pitch-related) by ear.
Overview
We will follow the Learn, Practice, Apply approach of Integrated Ear Training. We’ll go through these one by one in this chapter, and you will probably want to read through the chapter in order to begin with—but remember that when it comes to actually doing Ear Training, these are best done as a short loop: learn a little (e.g. by re-reading part of the chapter), practice a little (doing an exercise or two from the chapter), try applying it (doing one or more of the applied activities at the end of the chapter).
Learn
In this chapter we’ll explain the basic concepts (Head) in “What Is Solfa?” and “How Solfa Works”.
Practice
Then in “Getting Started” we’ll look at how the Basic Drill can be used for practicing Solfa, and how you can start to recognise each solfa note (Hearing, Heart, Hands (in this case, Singing)).
In the “Start With Aiming For…” section we’ll identify one particular scale, a subset of the major scale, which is particularly well-suited to learning Solfa and a meaningful, useful milestone to aim for first. In “Going Further” we’ll discuss how Solfa can be used, even beyond the major scale it’s normally associated with.
Apply
Finally, in “Additional Exercises and Activities” we’ll briefly explore taking our Solfa skills to practical musical tasks (Hands: Singing and instrument), which will be covered further in Part III of the book.