There’s never been a better time to take up ear training. More than ever before, it’s possible to train your ears when you’re on the go – giving you one less excuse for not practicing, and helping develop your ears even faster. Now you can use those 5 minutes at the bus stop or 20 minutes stuck on a train to push your ear training forward another notch.

In a previous post, “Ear training all the time” I talked about the importance of regular practice when trying to develop your ears. The suggestions in that post are mostly based around active listening. An important skill, but it makes for quite passive training: because you’re grabbing ear training opportunities wherever you hear them, there’s not generally any feedback on whether your judgements are right or wrong. Nowadays though, this needn’t be the case.

Okay, you can’t lug a Steinway around with you at all times, but you can grab an app for your iPhone that lets you check pitches and intervals at any moment. You may not have a mixing desk with you for checking audio band judgements, but you can load up some band-limited pink noise onto your MP3 player and check your memory of what each band sounds like. When you think you’ve figured out that drum beat you just heard on the radio and have the urge to rush home to your drumkit, you can pull out the electronic drumkit toy on your keyring or record a snippet of the track on your phone to check when you get home.

Here at Easy Ear Training we’re hugely excited about the power and efficiency technology can bring to ear training. We’re just beginning to discover the ways we can learn more effectively using technology, and the incredible variety of amazing electronic musical and audio gizmos is just making it easier and easier to train wherever you are.

In this post I want to focus on a particular gadget that can be your best friend when you’re developing your ears: Click to read the rest…

It’s important to find time for ear training – regular practice is essential to develop and maintain your skills. Setting aside time for focused training is vital, but there are a lot of other ways to keep your training progressing…

Whatever area of ear training you’re focused on, you’ll find there are recommended exercises and training techniques for you to concentrate on and repeat, in order to develop new hearing skills. In this kind of concentrated practice, you’re often going through a process of:

1. Familiarisation and training
2. Testing yourself
3. Checking your answers, to reinforce correct instincts and squash the bad ones.

This type of training is key at the beginning, as you need a strong basis to work from when approaching a new area. For example, if you want to train audio EQ, it’s important to start by learning the standard frequency bands and getting a sense of their sounds. Likewise, somebody just starting off with interval training should spend some time learning the names of the intervals, memorising their order, and getting to know their characteristic sounds.

(Click here for more about ear training and how we learn)

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Whether you want to pick up a new musical instrument, impress your date with some serious dance moves, or simply clap in time, learning about rhythm will give you the tools you need to get your groove on and make some serious music.

To understand rhythm, you first have to understand the beat. The beat is the glue that holds the orchestra together during a symphony, gives a heartfelt pulse to the the hip hop artist’s rap, and keeps the marching band in perfect unison with a pulsing right-left-right-left.

Hold your hand to your chest and feel the steady rhythm of your heart beat. The constant pulse gives life-giving oxygen to your body in the same way that the beat  keeps the music exciting and alive.

Count how many times your heart beats per minute. The number of times your heart beats each minute is called the tempo. Tempo refers to the overall speed of music. For example, if your heart beats seventy times per minute, then the tempo of your heart has a relatively slow musical tempo of seventy bpm (beats per minute). During a workout, your heart may beat 140 times per minute, a very quick tempo.

In sheet music, songwriters and composers use terms like moderato and allegro to describe moderate and fast tempos, respectively. If you are reading music for the first time, you may encounter other terms like adagio or vivace.
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