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…

Mix ear training with music production in Apple’s simple music software Garageband. Record fun music tracks, export them to iTunes, and load them onto your iPod to practice ear training skills like intervals, chords, note recognition, and rhythm.

One of the fundamental skills in ear training involves recognizing different music intervals. An interval essentially involves two notes in a scale played simultaneously. For example, in the C scale, playing the note C and the note E at the same time consists of an interval of a third (see image). You can explore basic music interval theory at Theory On The Web.

Practice interval training in Garageband in three easy steps: Click to read the rest…

My last post featured a forum thread about training absolute pitch by meditating on single tones. Thinking some more about learning absolute pitch and this particular ‘experiment’, I realised there were three reasons it appealed to me:

1. The do-it-yourself mentality.
2. The desire to work with and learn from other people.
3. The ‘purity’ of the training.

These are all fundamental parts of a good sustainable ear training routine, and the 21st century brings new meaning to each of them. I’m going to talk about the first two in more detail below, and cover the third in a separate post on Monday.

Do it yourself

This site was started to explore the notion that Click to read the rest…