About Course

Ear Training and Sight Singing for Singers is a comprehensive vocal course designed to help singers build confidence, accuracy, and independence in every musical setting. Whether you sing in choirs, vocal groups, musical theater productions, worship teams, recording sessions, or as a solo artist, the ability to read music and hear it internally is one of the most valuable skills you can develop.

This course takes a practical, step-by-step approach to ear training, sight singing, rhythm development, harmonic understanding, and melodic dictation. Beginning with foundational pitch relationships, you’ll learn how to navigate sheet music, identify key signatures, understand scales, and accurately sing melodies across multiple keys. As you progress, you’ll develop stronger rhythmic precision through work in simple and compound meter, strengthen your understanding of intervals and chord structures, and learn how harmony influences melodic interpretation.

Throughout the course, you’ll train both your musical eye and ear through guided drills, call-and-response exercises, sight-singing challenges, harmonic analysis, and dictation practice. You’ll explore major and minor scales, chromatic solfege, modes, chord extensions, non-chord tones, and real-world applications of vocal harmony. By the end of the program, you’ll have the tools to confidently read unfamiliar music, identify pitches and rhythms by ear, understand your role within harmonic textures, and even begin harmonizing, transcribing, and improvising without relying on an instrument.

If you’ve ever wanted to stop guessing notes, improve rehearsal efficiency, strengthen your musicianship, and become a more versatile singer, this course provides the roadmap.

What You’ll Learn

Master moveable-Do solfege for major and minor keys
Read notes fluently in treble and bass clef
Develop accurate pitch recognition and sight-singing skills
Sing confidently in multiple key centers
Strengthen rhythmic accuracy in 4/4, 3/4, and 6/8 meter
Recognize and sing intervals by ear
Understand triads, seventh chords, suspended chords, and chord extensions
Use chromatic solfege and accidentals confidently
Create harmonies and improvise over chord progressions
Build the confidence to sight-read unfamiliar music independently

Meet Your Instructor

Joel Esher is an accomplished musician, educator, and teaching artist with extensive experience helping students develop deeper musical understanding and practical performance skills. His teaching philosophy combines experiential learning, creativity, improvisation, and musical storytelling to make complex concepts accessible and engaging for learners at all levels.

Throughout his career, Joel has worked with respected arts organizations including Carnegie Hall, Trinity Wall Street, Boston Lyric Opera, The Metropolitan Opera Guild, The Little Orchestra Society, and numerous educational initiatives focused on developing musical excellence. His ability to connect theory, performance, and ear training makes him uniquely qualified to guide singers through the process of building true musical fluency. His instruction emphasizes understanding music from the inside out, helping students develop skills they can apply in rehearsals, performances, auditions, and personal artistic growth.

Is This Course for You?

This course is ideal for singers who want to strengthen their overall musicianship and gain greater confidence when working with written music. Whether you’re a beginner looking to develop foundational skills or an experienced vocalist seeking to sharpen your ear and improve reading ability, the lessons are designed to provide practical tools that translate directly into performance situations.

It is especially valuable for choir singers, musical theater performers, vocal students, worship leaders, singer-songwriters, music educators, and anyone preparing for auditions or advanced music study. If you’ve ever struggled with pitch accuracy, reading rhythms, understanding harmony, or learning music quickly, this course will help bridge those gaps with a structured and approachable training system.

What’s Included

19 in-depth lessons covering ear training and sight singing
Progressive pitch and rhythm development exercises
Solfege and sight-singing drills
Interval recognition training
Harmony and chord analysis instruction
Melodic and rhythmic dictation exercises
Practical real-world music reading applications
Harmonization and improvisation training

Master Linear Navigation (Horizontal Musicality): Develop the mental speed and aural precision required to sight-sing unfamiliar, single melodic lines smoothly from left to right using steps, skips, and large structural leaps.
Internalize Scale Structures via Solfege: Fluidly navigate the Moveable-Do solfege system across major, natural minor, harmonic minor, and melodic minor scales to maintain a permanent musical anchor.
Decode Complex Key Signatures Instantly: Apply rapid visual shorthand rules to locate "Do" on a grand staff using either sharps or flats, reverse-engineering your vocal starting pitch in any key configuration.
Command Time and Metric Subdivisions: Train an internal rhythm clock to accurately trace note and rest parameters across variable time signatures, alternating between standard and triple-time pulses (4/4, 3/4, and 6/8).
Analyze Vertical Chord Architecture: Freeze time to dissect three-dimensional music spaces, identifying the precise musical intervals and emotional qualities of major, minor, diminished, and augmented triads.
Navigate Extended Harmony & Fakebook Charts: Interpret dense lead sheet symbols—including 6ths, altered 7ths, suspensions, slash chords, and upper tertiary extensions (9ths, 11ths, 13ths)—to map a vocalist's exact role within an arrangement.
Execute Auditory Rhythm & Melodic Dictation: Move beyond passive score reading to actively transcribe acoustic musical fields, transforming unseen vocal motifs and time structures accurately onto blank staff paper.
Cultivate Performance Autonomy & Creative Expression: Build real-world musicality by holding long-form a cappella harmonies against competing lines, improvising over complex instrumental loops, and confidently executing vocal arrangements entirely unassisted by a piano.