Finding home
Before you can hear a note as ^3 or ^6, there has to be a home for it to be ^3 or ^6 of. Establishing that home — planting the tonic in your ear — is the first move of every listening task, and it's a move you already know from choosing Sa.
Set the key, then everything has a place
Two ways to put "home" in your ear before a drill:
- A drone on the tonic. Hold ^1 underneath (the practice bar now has G, D, A, E, B and C). Every note you then hear is measured against that constant — its distance and its pull. This is the sargam/tanpura method exactly.
- A short I–IV–V–I. Four chords, or even just ^1 ^4 ^5 ^1 played as single notes, tells your ear where home is by going away from it and coming back. Useful when you can't keep a drone running — it "tunes" your ear to the key in two seconds.
Once home is set, a melody stops being a string of unrelated pitches. It becomes a set of distances from one known point — which is a thing the ear can actually hold and repeat.
The "is this home?" drill
The most basic functional judgement: a note sounds — is it ^1, or not? Home has a particular feeling of arrival, of the tension going slack. Everything else is, to some degree, away.
Try it
Try
Set a G drone. Play, at random, either G (^1) or one of A / B / e (^2 / ^3 / ^6). Each time, before you look at your hand, ask: was that home? Home feels settled; the others each pull somewhere. Do ten. You'll be near-perfect on ^1-or-not within a few sessions — it's the easiest functional call there is.
The usual mistake
Starting a listening drill cold, with no key set — then you're hearing intervals in a vacuum and every note is ambiguous. Always plant home first: a drone, or a quick ^1–^4–^5–^1. The other mistake: confusing ^5 with ^1. ^5 is stable too, and it can feel like a resting place — but it's a lit, open kind of stable, not the "we're done" of ^1. Sing down from it and you'll feel it wants one more step home.