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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What if Axl and Slash had hung out with Fats Domino? Or Metallica met Miles Davis? A new music processor called The Swinger is looking to find out, by adding a swing to any song you throw at it. Get ready to hear those classics in a whole new way – and as the Duke once put it: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!”

Music Hack Day

At the cutting edge of digital music research, young developers get together periodically for a ‘Music Hack Day‘ – an intense 24 hour hackathon to create a new, cool music technology project, and show it off to everyone. There are always some incredible and fascinating demos which emerge, and last week’s hack day in San Francisco was no exception.

This blog post over at the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog gives a great overview of several of the projects. One which stood out for me was The Swinger – simple concept, fantastic demonstration of how far music tech has come in the last 10 years, and a wonderful way to illustrate the concept of swung beats to all you ear trainers out there!

First a quick reminder of what it means to have that swing… Click to read the rest…

Welcome back to our frequency training series. If you’re new to the series, you may want to go back and start from the introductory overview to frequency training. If you aren’t really familiar with the parts of a standard drum kit, check out this overview before you read on.

Ahh….metallic percussion! (Cymbals, hi-hats, rides, bells, etc.) They can be the final seasoning to the overall rhythm sound of our drum kit. Or….they can be the most annoying assortment of clanging cacophonous racket that can only find an equal among banging and clanging trash can lids!

And what is the deciding factor? Click to read the rest…