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>>> It's hard to explain precisely how one develops this ability. I think
>>> it's different for different people, and some people don't have the
>>> capacity for it although that doesn't necessarily impede their ability
>>> to become great musicians.
>>>
>>> For me, I had piano lessons as a child and for some reason the teacher
>>> identified me as a good candidate for ear training. She would sit me in
>>> a chair in a different room and play notes and chords and ask me what
>>> they were. She started with single notes and then moved on to
>>> increasingly complex chords, and I'd just sort of intuitively know what
>>> they were.
>>>
>>> The theory nazis in alt.guitar.beginner claim that what I have isn't
>>> perfect pitch because an A4 note played at 435 Hz instead of the usual
>>> 440 Hz doesn't give me headaches. Still I can identify notes in a song
>>> without a pitch reference.
>>>
>>> But this "near perfect pitch" ability isn't a necessary part of ear
>>> training. To me, most people who can carry a tune singing you can learn
>>> to identify notes in music, and even some who can't find ways to do it.
>>> You can start by learning to distinguish major and minor chords and to
>>> recognize different musical *intervals*. Listen to songs that you're
>>> familiar with and try to do this. If you can sing or hum a melody, take
>>> a short section of a song you know and dissect it by attempting to play
>>> each note on the guitar. Then look at the guitar and see what the
>>> various intervals between the notes are.
>>>
>>> If you work at this enough, eventually your mind will learn to
>>> recognize the intervals that you hear without the necessity of your
>>> having to work through it on guitar. Use the same approach with chords;
>>> when you play chords on the guitar, start thinking about what the
>>> difference is that you hear between say a straight C chord and a C7
>>> chord. Pretty soon your mind will be telling you when it hears that
>>> seventh form. And so on.
>>>
>>> I realize that this is all sort of vague but I think there's no set
>>> recipe because we all learn in a somewhat different manner. Since I was
>>> very young, I've been able to play songs (within limits of my technical
>>> ability) by listening to them and getting them in my head. If I can hum
>>> or sing it, generally I can play it.