- Free Ear Training Apps
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- Train Your Ears Free
- The 3 Best Ear Training Softwares And Apps For Musicians
You need to develop many essential skills to move forward as a musician:
- good technique on your instrument
- a great rhythmic feel
- knowledge of stylistic interpretation
- improvising
- reading music, chord charts, tab
- the know-how to arrange music
- an understanding of basic recording technology
- “working” your equipment [synth(s), effects, software]
- promoting your music
- people skills (band members, managers, at venues)
MusicTheory.net's Interval Ear Trainer. Ricci Adam's MusicTheory.net is a well-respected site. With Erol Singer's Studio, we've defined a new genre of voice training software and have helped tens of thousands of users transform their singing since 2012. We are now excited to bring our technology to Windows 10 as a desktop app: - 72 voice lessons, each individually crafted to build a specific skill and with detailed instructions and audio. TrainYourEars EQ Edition is an ear training software for Mac and PC designed to help you understand equalisers and frequencies like never before. How does it work? It speeds up your learning process exposing you to hundreds of random equalizations you have to guess. Syntorial is video game-like training software, that will teach you how to program synth patches by ear. With almost 200 lessons, combining video demonstrations with interactive challenges, you’ll get hands on experience programming patches on a built-in soft synth, and learn everything you need to know to start making your own sounds with ease. Learn the Frequency Spectrum. I can remember when the frequency spectrum seemed very.
But your most prized possession as a musician is…
Your Ears!
First of all it is essential to protect your hearing at all cost. I hate to break the news to you, but no, you won’t automatically have Beethoven’s musical skills by becoming deaf like him. Use ear plugs in loud locations (concerts, gigs, rehearsals) – it’s the smart thing to do.
However, there’s more to hearing than registering sound waves via your eardrums.
You need the ability to analyze and interpret the incoming sound. That’s what ear training is for. It helps you develop the skill of understanding what your ears are hearing.
Functional Ear Training
One of the best ear training methods I’ve come across is functional ear training. Instead of learning to recognize the sound of individual intervals, with functional ear training you focus on learning the specific sound of a note in the context of tonality.
What do I mean by specific sound?
Let’s listen to a C chord followed by a C note. Notice how stable and resting the C note sounds. The identical C note is then played after a B chord.
Simply put, the C note plays a different role in the key of B major than in the key of C major. And with the different function goes a different sound quality as well. It’s your job to learn to recognize that difference in tonal character.
Now the big question is: how do you do that? Do you just listen to music and hope that those characteristics jump out at you? Should you just sit down at the piano and play individual keys over and over again trying to memorize their sound?
No, because fortunately there’s a better way.
Attention: this is an article that I originally published back in 2011. The original software still runs on my Windows 10 PC. However, it does not seem to get maintained/developed further anymore. The screenshots in this article show the legacy software. All the principles/exercises can also be transferred to the more up-to-date Functional Ear Trainer App.
Step 1 – Download the Functional Ear Training Software
Head on over to Alain Benbassat’s site, then download and install the free Functional Ear Training software.
Step 2 – Follow the Tutorial
Unlike the previous versions this new V2 software is a cross-platform Adobe Air application and there’s no additional set-up required. No MIDI sound card settings and initial options to deal with.
You can get started immediately and the built-in tutorial section explains the functional ear training method step by step. It’s interactive with concise explanations and corresponding sound examples.
For example, here’s screen #11 of the method explanation.
Free Ear Training Apps
Step 3 – Repeat
Don’t just rush through the initial explanation screens. Spend some time with the preliminary exercises. Let them sink in. Repeat them often. Especially if this is your first time practicing functional ear training exercises. Trust me, it’s an investment of your practice time that really will pay off big time.
Step 4 – Customize Your Practice Sessions
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When you feel like you have mastered Part I, it’s time to get into a practice routine using the Practice Lab. Here’s where you can fine-tune and develop your ears.
Choose what you want to focus on and tweak the settings:
- which key
- major, minor or random
- how often (if at all) the cadence gets played to help you establish the tonality
- how many questions
- which notes and chromatics to include
- the labeling of the notes – letters, numbers or solfege
- small or large tone range
Train Your Ears Free
As you can see lots of options to customize your practice sessions.
Tune Your Ears with Functional Ear Training!
I highly recommend you get started with your own ear tune-up through functional ear training. It has made a tremendous difference in how I hear music. Treat it like a game where you shoot for a result in the 90-100% range. When you score consistently in that range for a few days in a row it’s time to move on to more difficult settings.
The 3 Best Ear Training Softwares And Apps For Musicians
Just make sure that you don’t tire your ears – keep your functional ear training sessions short. 10 minutes is all you need.
P.S.: The 1st additional post is up. For more practice tips read the “2 Strategies to Master Chromatic Notes with Functional Ear Training” article.
And one more time … Here’s the link to the more relevant, up-to-date Functional Ear Trainer App article!
Where does this training method come from? Did you make it up?
No, we didn’t! The Guess Method has been used for over 40 years. There were exercises on cassettes, CD’s or it was done manually by teachers. We know it works and it has proven its efficiency over the years with thousands of successful engineers.
The new Correct Method comes from a suggestion Bob Katz (the mastering guru) made to us:
I suggest presenting a piece of recorded music which needs 'help' in some frequency range and see if the student can not only identify the problem, but also correct for it in a musically satisfying way.
So that is what we did: correct instead of guess. We tested it and we loved it. It turned out to be both funny and instructive. Both methods complement each other really well.
Besides, we have designed the software to turn these methods into a limitless tool, way better than any cassette or CD, because you can feed it with any music or sound and configure the exercises to a level of diversity and detail which wasn’t imaginable before.
We can’t place more emphasis on this way of training the ear: IT WORKS!