Roberto's full guide to ear training for guitarists → lays out the whole ladder: intervals, then arpeggios, then scales, all trained by voice and hearing before you ever touch a fretboard. Good ladder — but "climb the whole ladder" is exactly the kind of goal that quietly dies after day two. This post turns the same three rungs into a five-day, 10-minutes-a-day routine with one job per day, so the habit survives longer than your motivation does.
Day 1: plant one anchor note — the major scale, sung
Before you touch an interval, give your ear a home base. Pick any note, sing (or hum, no judging) a major scale up from it — "do re mi fa sol la ti do" if solfège syllables help you, plain numbers if they don't. This "movable do" habit of anchoring every note to a sung tonic is exactly how Berklee's Ear Training 1 course and musictheory.net's scale ear-training drill both start beginners off — establish the tonic first, then everything else gets measured against it. Ten repetitions, in a few different keys, is the whole day.
Day 2: one interval set against that anchor
Now compare notes to your anchor instead of to each other. Sing your scale, stop on one degree, and name the interval back to "do" — a third, a fifth, whichever you land on. If a specific interval keeps tricking your ear, borrow a familiar tune to fix it in memory rather than drilling it blind; Roberto's own interval cheat sheet lists a song for every interval from a minor second up to an octave. Ten minutes of "sing the anchor, jump to a degree, name the gap" is enough for one day — resist the urge to do all twelve intervals at once.
Day 3: one arpeggio, always from the root
Same anchor, new shape: instead of one note against the tonic, sing three or four stacked in a chord. Start with the plain major and minor triads — major = root, major third, perfect fifth (1–3–5) and minor = root, minor third, perfect fifth (1–b3–5) — then add diminished (1–b3–b5) and augmented (1–3–#5) once the first two feel automatic; the four qualities and their formulas are laid out this way in TeachGuitar.com's basic-triad chord formulas. Always start from the root and build up — root, then the third above it, then the fifth — the same order Roberto's ear-training guide uses for arpeggios. One quality a day is plenty; don't try to bolt all four onto a single 10-minute session.
Day 4: one mode, still from the same root
Scales are the same trick at a bigger scale: seven notes instead of three or four. Pick one mode — Dorian is a good one to start with, since its formula (1–2–b3–4–5–6–b7, a minor scale with a raised sixth) is well documented by teaching sites such as Hello Music Theory's guide to the Dorian mode — and sing it slowly from the root before comparing it by ear to the plain major scale from Day 1. Notice which single degree changed; that's usually the fastest way to tell two closely related scales apart by ear.
Day 5: set a bar, then re-test yourself weekly, not daily
Don't just repeat the same four days forever — check whether it actually stuck. Pick a small, fixed test (ten random items from whichever day gave you trouble) and grade yourself against it once a week rather than every session; the cognitive-science literature on the "testing effect" — summarised by Carnegie Mellon's Eberly Center on retrieval practice — finds that actively recalling an answer from memory builds longer-lasting retention than simply re-listening or re-reading ever does. Apps like EarMaster or the free drills at tonedear.com both work fine for running that weekly self-test.
For the full ladder this routine is compressed from — including a note-by-note reference for every interval — see Roberto's complete ear-training guide →; for the theory those degrees are built on, what an interval actually is and what an arpeggio is made of are good next stops.
If ten minutes a day finally got your ear ahead of your fingers, you can throw a coffee my way on Patreon — no pressure, purely for the licks.