How transferrable is ear training across different instruments?
Okay so my primary instrument for the last 10 years has been the guitar. and when i say primary i mean it’s pretty much the only instrument I spend any significant amount of time playing. Recently I decided I want to play keyboard too but I was wondering how much it benefits my guitar playing when I do ear training exercises on the keyboard (99% of the time this will be melodic dictation, not even writing anything down just listening and copying).
It feels like kind of a stupid question because any ear training is obviously going to transfer over to other instruments. But I was thinking if I can do melodic dictation on a keyboard it would help me become familiar with the layout of the keys compared to a fretboard and help my hands become accustomed playing keys too, but if it will help out my ability to play melodies in my head on the guitar as well while improvising that would be a huge added benefit. The only problem is, navigating a fretboard while improvising is very different to keys so I thought maybe my ear training on a keyboard would not be as effective for guitar as it would be, well, on a guitar.
I think my end goal here is that I want to be able to improvise on both these instruments and I still want to maintain my shredding skills on guitar but I’m not as bothered about shredding on keyboard. I don’t know how easy it will be to improve my technique on keyboard actually given that I spent so much time doing that on guitar so if anyone has experience with this please let me know too.
Anyway sorry for the long post and thanks for reading if you made it this far