We are excited to announce our new ear training app for iPhone and iPod Touch:

Step and a Half: Melody Training

Step and a Half will be released on the App Store this Thursday, 8th July, and we wanted to give EasyEarTraining.com readers a sneak peak of the new app in advance!

What’s it for?

One of the most common requests we’ve heard from RelativePitch users has been to provide training of more than one interval in a row. It’s the natural progression – once you can recognise each interval correctly, you want to start using that to figure out tunes, chord progressions, new improvisations, and so on. But it can be a bit of a stretch from identifying an interval in isolation to identifying it in among other notes of a melody, especially if it’s a long melody or you’re trying to work it out live.
Step and a Half iPhone app
Step and a Half was designed to bridge that gap. You don’t need to have done core interval training beforehand, but if you’ve been training with RelativePitch you’ll be off to a flying start!

As you spend time with Step and a Half, you’ll find your ear is more and more able to pick apart melodies into their underlying intervals. Eventually you’ll find this increased accuracy of hearing will also help you judge harmonies, and you’ll be able to make the leap directly from hearing something to playing it on your instrument, without thinking through the intervals beforehand.

How it works

Our first app, RelativePitch, was designed for fairly relaxed usage. Testing Mode will give you tough interval quizzes, but you’re free to take your time and listen as much as you like before answering. This is a good approach for tuning in the ear, but anyone who’s tried to play by ear or improvise live (or just in front of friends) will know that performing under pressure can be a completely different challenge…

With this in mind, we designed Step and a Half to be more of a game – you have to complete challenges under pressure of a time limit, and you get more points for getting things right first time.

So how does it work? The game is this:

Hear a melody, re-create it.

Simple as that!

Each level starts by playing you a melody. Then the timer starts ticking down, and your task is to drag the right interval blocks from your toolbox into the squares in the center of the screen, to construct the melody you heard.

Recreate what you heard, by dragging the right blocks

Hit ‘Guess’ and you’ll hear the melody you’ve made – and find out whether you were right!

There are over 35 levels designed to take you from the same one-interval “same or different” exercise which RelativePitch begins with, to challenges of long melodies, played quickly, with a choice of any interval and not much time to do it in!

Challenges become increasingly difficult as you progress!

Step and a Half is out this Thursday!

We won’t reveal any more details for now, but if you have questions, please feel free to ask in the comments below or in the new forum for the app.

I’ll be back on Thursday to show you the app in action, and announce a very special launch offer!

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