Jam out with your friends and hone your music skills with Rock Band! Use Rock Band’s easy interface to practice pitch and rhythm. You don’t need to be a professional musician – even beginners can learn basic ear training using Rock Band.

1. Set up Practice Mode

Rock Band II and similar video games have an easy Practice Mode, which allows you practice a song over and over without worrying about bombing out. Be sure that your USB microphone is hooked up to your video game console. Choose Solo Player and Practice Mode.

Use the game's Practice Mode

2. Start easy

Choose Easy or Medium Rock Band difficulty levels when you first begin. These difficulty levels are much more forgiving when you sing off pitch or fudge a rhythm. You also want to choose a simple song from the Warm Up List. Choose harder songs and difficulty levels as you improve.

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In the last article we covered first and second inversions of major and minor triads. This week we’ll do some further exercises on these, and look at inversions of augmented and diminished triads.

Recap exercises

The following example simply presents a series of major and minor triads in second inversion, block form. After you hear the chord, stop the player and sing them back, first paying attention to the basic size of the intervals. On a second listening, try to figure out their quality:

Once you have spent some time with inversions of major and minor triads you can use the following example to test your skills. Click to read the rest…

Before you put the blame on your lack of singing skills to quitting high school choir, you might want to check out your hearing. Years of drumming, jamming in a rock band, or working as a sound tech can wreak havoc on your hearing. While medical hearing tests can check how well your ears compare to a specific standard, Tone Tester has the musician in mind and checks how well your ears can detect one pitch from another.

Many people don’t realize that when they play the note B flat, their right ear may detect B flat while their left ear identifies it as closer to B natural – a difference of up to one semitone! Click to read the rest…