Auditory skills are the main focus of learning to perform through Audiation. Establishing fluent auditory skills will pave the way to creating musical sounds on your instrument.

Auditory skills can be divided into 5 catagories that can be mastered. The first is relative pitch. Not to be confused with perfect pitch, relative pitch can be learned starting with the ability to match a pitch and growing in the complexity until the relationss between all pitches can be understood.

Following closely behind relative pitch is the understanding of tone and timbre. Often overlooked, every note that is played is a mix of many different vibrations. If you sing a note and change the vowel you are singing, you'll notice that the sound changes even when the pitch stays the same. Musicians must learn to understand the vibrations that combine to create notes and learn to balance them to create an attractive tone.

Time continues to be one of the biggest challenges to producing an effective performance. Time in music is expressed in a relation to a steady beat. Once the steady beat can be internalized, then more complex rhythms can be related to that beat. While written rhythms can be very confusing, they are very logical. With an aural understanding of rhythm in place, written rhythms can be understood.

Harmonic Structure provides a foundation and gives direction to melodies. It can be as simple as a single chord, and as complex as your imagination can create. A melody can express a completely different emotion depending on the harmonic structure that complements that melody .