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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Enjoy singing your favorite tune at the top of your lungs in the privacy of your own car? Having such wonderful self-confidence in a less-than-stellar vocal performance can be exhilarating, but developing accurate pitch is an essential part of ear training. You can practice pitch by recording your voice. Recording your voice allows you to be the Simon Cowell of your own personal American Idol.

You can easily record your voice with Audacity, a free sound editor available at Sourceforge. Audacity is currently available in two flavors, the original Audacity ‘1.2.6a’ and the new beta version Audacity ‘1.3.12 (Beta)’. Audacity is available for both Macs and PCs, as well as other operating systems like GNU/Linux. To record your voice or an instrument in Audacity, you will need:

• a computer
• a microphone (a built-in microphone or a USB mic will do)
• and preferably a pair of headphones

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