Play By Ear - Ear Training

Would be nice if you could sign in and save all your practice.

Needs marketing

After using the online version, this iPhone app is a real surprise.

The basic idea of offering you a sequence of notes to play, and telling you whether you have played them back correctly is great. The app has some rough edges, but it works pretty well. Most of the time it detects what note I play on my tenor sax (less reliable with my baritone … I guess it's just trickier on low notes), especially if I remember to spend ten seconds going through the calibration process (et does a decent job even without calibration). I've given it a 4 star rating … ignoring the issue of price … considering that it's free, it might really deserve five stars.

I've been using this app for a while and like it. Firstly, you can use your instrument to input, though I've been singing along with it to provide the pitch input. Lets me use my solfege training! Pitch detection to voice is about 50% accurate, but if you mess up it moves on automatically to the next interval/triad/etc. As long as I mentally note my problem areas, it works well for practicing. I can use this app on the go in the car (with caution, obviously). This is the only app for ear training where this is possible, as far as I'm aware. Excellent for free, but if it added inversions for triads/chords and also added more chord types it would be absolutely astonishing. Has already improved my ear and I will continue to use.

Do not buy!

I like this app a lot, and it fills a need, but it’s a little tough for beginners (or people learning a new instrument, like me). A couple of things would make it easier: 1. Provide a “repeat” option: play the phrase, wait, play it again, wait, then give answer. Gives the student two tries. (Could even give a three-tries option.) 2. Allow limiting the scale patterns to a selected set of scales/keys. Maybe the jazz licks one, too. You can fudge this with the random notes by selecting notes to fit a scale, which is what I’ve ended up doing, for now, but it would be nice to have something more melodic. I have not tried anything with chords, yet, because I’m using this with trumpet. Which gives me another suggestion: maybe you could provide profiles for multi-instrumentalists (it would only affect pitch recognition, I suppose, so might not be worth the effort).

Fantastic app for ear training. I am a piano teacher and I am using it personally and giving it to my students. I have not found anything better.

Excellent. Random root notes good. Would like to test from the same root note sometimes.

Use it