Oorgo

Ear training, Theory and 12 tone oh my!

For all of you with no interest in learning music, you may want to skip this post. Ok so sometimes I'm a music geek, but I see no issue with reinforcing fundamentals if you feel they are lacking, or just for the sheer fun of it. I recently found a couple of great ear training / theory sites, one called Ricci Adams' Musictheory.net and the other called Good-ear.com. Worthwhile references if you are looking to sharpen your ear and expand your aural vocabulary.

The epiphany of free and open, Ricci Adams' Musictheory.net actually has a link to download the entire site and run it offline. That's the coolest thing I've seen so far, and the lessons/trainers/utilities are all in friendly easy to use flash programs (if your Firefox will run Flash, mine doesn't right now for some effing reason). I did find the ear training lacked any advanced chords, scales etc., but it sounds pretty good and keeps a running tally w/ scoring.

Good-ear is a nice site, I ran across it about 2 weeks ago, it's only focused on ear training, but it goes much farther than Ricci's, into Jazz chords and funky scales etc. It's powered by quicktime and ads, so it tends to be a little slow sometimes, and I noticed the clickthru on the ads almost never works. I was in contact with the developer and he was quick to respond which was pretty refreshing. I like the fact there's a section in the Chord recognition that I will have to work at for awhile before I can get it: it merely says "All", meaning you have to specify what is being played based on every chord in the site, and that's pretty extensive.

I studied all of this stuff back back in college and university, but memory wanes and wax builds up in the cornes of the ear that used to be finely tuned instruments.

Posted by Oorgo at November 25, 2005 07:09 PM Permalink - Category: Music | TrackBack