Around this time last week we held the EasyEarTraining.com launch party, upstairs at the Union Chapel in London. The Union Chapel is one of the most incredible music venues in London – a beautiful old church with fantastic acoustics – so there couldn’t be a better place to launch a new site dedicated to helping musicians reach new heights!

We had guests from across the musical spectrum – Music lovers, hobbyist musicians, professional musicians (like the wonderful Annalie Wilson; if you haven’t heard her album, go listen now), Gilbert & Sullivan fans, experts in digital music and ground-breaking audio technologies, backstage concert crew, audio software developers, music-loving journalists, and primary school teachers – all gathered together to learn more about ear training, and how new technology can help make developing your ear easy and fun. It was fascinating to hear different people’s thoughts on ear training, and learn about their own experiences in developing their musical ear.

There were some demos set up, so people could experience easy ear training first hand. Naturally we brought along our iPhone app, RelativePitch!

RelativePitch demo at launch party

The app lets you customise the timing of intervals, so you can adjust things to suit you. It wasn’t until the end of the evening that I found out we’d left it on super-slow speed by mistake! Luckily people seemed to enjoy it anyway…

We had a frequency training demonstration set up on an iPod, to show how easy it can be to train your ears, wherever you are and whatever else you’re doing. (If you don’t know what frequency training is, this post by Fotios is a great place to start.) The demo introduced each of the ten standard frequency bands by playing examples, and then used some pop and rock tracks to demonstrate the sound of boosting different frequency bands. Some of these are hard to hear (especially in a party environment!) but people I spoke to had heard enough to get a good taste of frequency training. Click on the image to see the instructions sheet and learn more!

Frequency Training iPod Demo

As Rebecca wrote in her article on Friday, there are some superb ear training games hidden away in Nintendo’s ‘Wii Music’. We encouraged our guests to give these a go, and it didn’t take much persuasion!

Ear Training with Wii Music at the EasyEarTraining.com launch party

Handbell Harmony seemed to be particularly popular, but there was a lot of time spent with Pitch Perfect too. I think there was even a band performance or two snuck in for good measure! If you want to know more using Wii Music to improve your musicianship, make sure you check out our article “Wii Music: Ear Training Through Play!”

That’s it for part 1 – Come back tomorrow to hear how our guests did on the Intro to Ear Training Quiz, and get a sneak peek at the new iPhone app from Easy Ear Training!