Asheville Music Lessons

First off, in College Ear training (Aural Skills…) was my favorite, maybe because it was something that was easy to quantify. You could work with software or on your on and you could tell when you missed and you could tell when you got it and you could mark your progress. Now, I do kind of miss ear straining… ummm training and from time to time I look at software to practice keeping at least a good sense of relative pitch. I’ve found THE software to do it. What’s even better is that it’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux so most anyone with a PC can use it.

GNU Solfege is the software that I’m talking about and what I’m blown away by is the thoroughness of it’s training/testing content. It could be excellent for a beginner, but still give an advanced musician some challenges.

This is one of the first programs I’ve run in quite a while that I was saying “oh cool” “that’s excellent” and laughing like a mad scientist when I first tried it out. That’s because it’s THAT good. There is a full complement of possibilities to practice and test your ability to hear and distinguish music.

Here’s an example. Under the Chords menu, you can either test root position, or inverted chords, or sing the parts of the chords or a single part of the chord. when you choose one of the options the menu branches and so for chords in root position you can practice identifying major/minor chords, or minor 7/major 7 chords, or augmented/diminished chords, or minor 9/9 chords, or 7b9/maj79 chords, or maj7/dim7/halfdim7, or chords with 9 in their name, or chords with 7 in their name, or altered chords, or ALL of the above. The inverted chord menu doesn’t get quite as fancy, but that gives you an idea of what you can practice here.

In addition to just chords, you can practice identifying and singing intervals, various kinds of scales. (All the modes are there!!!) In fact… in the scales area they have major scales and all their modes, melodic minor and all their modes, harmonic minor and all their modes, double harmonic scale/modes/neopolitan neopolitan minor, hungarian scale, pentatonic, bebop, symmetric, and a collection of advanced scales that includes ancient greek modes…. The scales section alone had my head spinning a bit.

There are rhythms to transcribe and there’s some easy click on the note patterns to fill in what you hear. There’s a miscellaneous section which let’s you work on chord progressions, intonation (tuning), figure beats per minute, sight sing random pitches, identify tones (given the first), practice dictation and another area that you can configure some of the training drills (for instance maybe you want to mix just 2nd, 3rd, 4ths…

There’s also a theory section that let’s you name the intervals and scales you see, as well as a section for just testing the aforementioned drills where you move straight to another example after you answer to identify what you’ve heard.

I found some of the more advanced chord and scale/modes a bit challenging.

So, for beginners? Yes, a beginner can get some good out of it. I do kind of wish there was a “beginner/expert” mode so that a beginner wouldn’t be OVERWHELMED at the huge array of possibilities. I mean, I’m thinking some beginners might get a “deer in headlights” look at their initial session.

I may need to strike that last thought…. it does look like it might be possible to customize it for a student and give them a limited view of the possibilities. It’s also possible to customize with your own lesson files. (*At the moment I’m trying to think what could possibly be missing…) You CAN simplify things down by “editing the learning tree” The learning tree is the menubar of options, intervals/chords/scales/etc. You can customize those further to include whatever you want/need to. So, if you were setting up an install for someone to use, you might prune some of the deeper features so they could focus on simple interval training for instance.

Another interesting feature that I’ve not mentioned is the ability to use an exercise to create a “training set”. So, this creates either a WAV/MID/MP3 or OGG file based on the exercise you select and an answer key, so you can to do your interval training on an ipod, or pda or some other media than the pc. (It is possible to mix exercises in creating a training set.)

I’ve gone through all of this without mentioning how much this excellent program costs. This will be hard for some people to swallow, but it is absolutely free to use and redistribute. That’s right it’s gnu licensed and you are free to download and redistribute. I highly encourage you to try it out if not for yourself, maybe for your students. I’ve found that ear training exercises are among the most fun.

Have fun!

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