Ear Trainer for Guitarists App

Tune Your Ear for Better Performance

Three Modules Exercise Your Ear

This powerful app will improve your improvising, composing, and transcribing skills by training your ear to quickly recognize notes, intervals and harmonies that occur in all music.

Three modules of this app are designed to train your ear so you can "speak" music as easily as you can speak your native tongue. The benefit of this skill will become apparent when you can quickly play a melody that you "hear" in your head.

One Module Teaches You the Fretboard

Guitarist are notoriously poor at knowing where notes are on their fretboard. The way a guitar is constructed allows guitarist to rely solely on shapes and patterns. A simple capo can be used to transpose from one key to another without the guitarist ever knowing what the notes are of any key. This approach can yield satisfactory results but real artistry on the guitar comes when musicians are more aware of the notes they are playing.

This module focuses on your ability to associate staff notation and/or note names with the proper fret and string on the fretboard.

This app teaches you:

Make It Fun!

Research shows that learning is enhanced when information is conveyed by a playful activity. This app is designed with this in mind. The game format the app uses challenges you to achieve higher and higher proficiency while providing evidence of your continued improvement.

Express Your Musical Ideas on Your Guitar

This app is intended to help you develop the skills you need so you can express the musical ideas swirling around in your head. If you want to compose, improvise, and transcribe music, you will need a trained ear. You will also need to quickly identify where those notes are located on the guitar. For the price of a latte, you can start developing a true musician's ear.

Hear the Patterns of Music

You practice. You have desire. But, your playing is not where you'd like it to be. You feel like other people know something you don't. What do they know that you don't? It's simple. If you are not thinking of and hearing music the right way, you will find yourself stuck, not improving like you should. The fact is, you need to understand a few fundamental musical patterns and what they sound like before you can excel at music.

What is Musical Freedom?

The height of mastery for the musical artist happens when you can create melody and harmony as fast as you can think it. This is true musical freedom and anyone with desire can achieve it.

Years ago I created a tool to help musician understand how music is put together. I beleived that if someone knew these patterns, they could achieve a satisfactory level of musical profeciency. I was right. But when you acquire this knowledge, you suddenly want more. The next step is to train the ear to discern and understand these patterns.

Knowing and Hearing the Pattern

In the beginning, I had no great talent for music. I took lessons and read books. Nothing seemed to work. I even quit a few times. It wasn't until I drew up some diagrams to help me understand the rules for playing jazz that music began to make sense to me. These diagrams enabled me to see how chords, scales, and notes all related. It made the complex very simple and easy to understand. Quickly, my playing improved and finally I could improvise and jam with others. However, with only an intellectual grasp of music, my playing lacked expressiveness and meaning.

Brain Training vs. Ear Training

The Music Theory Illustraded App which I introduced in 2018 is great for summoning facts and relationships you already know about music. It is an important tool for anyone who is seriously studing music. However, there is an even more important skill that musician's need to develop – the ear. Music teachers do not dwell on this enough in my opinion. Too often they emphasize playing songs, mainly because this is what the students come to teachers to learn. Nevertheless, every teacher will tell you if you don't have a good ear, your musicianship can only advance so far.

Hold that Idea!

Paul McCartney had a dream one night in which he heard a melody. The next day he played the melody to his bandmates wondering if they had ever heard it before. It turned out that it was nothing they had ever heard before. That song was "Yesterday." Imagine if Sir McCartney could not play what he heard in his dream.

Just like other ideas, musical ones are often fleating. A musician who cannot quickly pick out a melody he or she hears is likely to lose some great material. Again, a trained ear can play a musical idea as fast as it arrives and with a little notation skill can hold on to that idea for later development.

Beyond the Theory

The Ear Trainer for Guitarists App is designed to take you beyond the theory of music by giving you an aural experience of it. It makes music theory something you can sense and feel. When you are able to do that, there is nothing you can't accomplish musically. You'll have all the chops you need no matter what you are playing or who you are playing with.