Hi, and welcome to the new Easy Ear Training website!
If you’ve found your way here, there’s a fair chance you know what ear training is – but perhaps not. We’ll be discussing that subject and all the various areas of ear training in the weeks to come, but for now we’ll just say:
Ear training helps you hear more, and more accurately,
and should be a core part of
any musician or audio professional’s training.
If you spend your life immersed in sound – be it classical, rock, or electronic music, dramatic recordings, sound effects for film, or any other sonic creation – you deserve to get the most from your ears. With a little bit of training, you’ll be able to discern minute details in sound which you never knew were there. Imagine having blurry vision and then putting on a pair of glasses and seeing things snap into focus. That’s what ear training can do for your hearing!
It might not be as immediate as putting on a pair of glasses, but the degree of change is just as significant. Training does take effort, but here at Easy Ear Training we’re devoted to finding new ways to make that training easy, effective and fun.
As a first step, we developed an app for iPhone and iPod Touch, called ‘RelativePitch‘, which teaches musical intervals with simple lessons and fun interactive testing to improve your skills. The feedback we’ve had is overwhelming evidence that musicians around the world have been experiencing the same thing: Spend a bit of time training your ears and the benefits will surprise and delight you!
A sax player finally learning to play by ear after years of trying, a studio engineer helped to arrange vocals, a flute player better able to ‘connect with the world of music’ – and this is just from one app in one area of ear training! We’re working hard now on several other apps to build on the foundation of RelativePitch, but our main focus has been launching this site: to provide information, ideas, inspiration, and a platform for discussion and support for all those interested in ear training.
There’s a lot of great information online about ear training, and a lot of useful resources out there. We’ll be covering those here at EasyEarTraining.com to make sure you find all the information you need. We’ve just started rooting through our bookmarks to gather together our Resources section. We’ll also be providing all-new articles, tutorials, reviews and ear training resources to help you – whatever area of ear training you’re interested in, and whatever level you’ve reached so far.
We have some fantastic authors joining us here on the site. Arriving tomorrow to help kick off launch week is Sabrina Peña Young, an internationally recognised avant-garde composer, whose CD “Origins” has been keeping my late nights wonderfully haunted for the last month. She’s joined on Tuesday by Thomas Evdokimoff, a classically trained guitarist with a background teaching ear training for the University of British Columbia who’ll be providing a course of lessons in pitch and harmony. Taking things in more of an audio direction, we have Fotios Koulakos, a mastering engineer from Ohio who owns and runs a studio, and will be taking us through the fundamentals of frequency training in the weeks ahead. Joseph DuBose will be rounding off the team for launch week, with his insights from the point of view of a professional composer.
I won’t say any more for now, as they’ll all be introducing themselves over the course of the week, and explaining their areas of expertise. We’d like to invite you to do the same! Come visit our forums, where you can register and introduce yourself. Whether you’re new to the idea of ear training, an expert composer with a mastery of pitch and rhythm, or a wizened studio ‘Golden Ears’, come say ‘Hi’ and let us know where you’re coming from!
Finally, I’d like to welcome you again to the site, and encourage you to get involved… You can leave a comment below, speak up in our forums, or email us directly.
However you choose to, please make sure you let us know your thoughts and help us make this the premier source for easy ear training information. If there are areas you want to see covered, topics you’d like to read articles on, or a person or product you’d like to see interviewed or reviewed – let us know!
