Our passion is helping you improve as a musician

Our brains are amazingly well equipped to make sense of what we hear, including music.  As a listener, we can recognise a tune, even if we hear it in a different key, and we can hum it.  We can also latch on to the beat, and track it, even when there is no sound for a short while.   Our brains fundamentally deal with relationships (musical distances) between sounds, and especially between each sound in a tune, and one sound that stands out to our ears.  While Western music deals with twelve notes per octave, it is extremely common for a particular set of musical distances (which we call intervals)  to be used, that are found in the seven notes of the major scale, laid out at specific musical distances (and octaves of these) from an arbitrary chosen start note.  A non-musician listener doesn’t care about note names or consciously identify the musical distances involved.

Each of these notes forms an interval with that chosen start note and has a sound flavour unique to that distance.   If a different start note is chosen, we still hear these distance-specific unique sound flavours, just higher or lower overall.  Because of the way these notes are used over a tune, a listener can usually easily detect what the start note is.  With ear training, we can identify which of the seven notes we are hearing relative to that start note.  A non-musician wouldn’t be concerned with this, but with ear training could do this.

If your “instrument” is your voice, then you can imagine these notes in a melody say, and just sing them.  But, as a guitarist or pianist, say, an extra step is required, to figure out where to place your finger to produce each note, or for chords, where to place your fingers.  This is where visualisation comes in.  With this, you are then equipped to improvise against music based on the major scale.  In a similar manner, you can learn to improvise over the minor scale (natural minor) or a blues scale.  None of this involves music theory.

However, this level of improvisation can be built upon, to take advantage of many musical concepts that result in wonderful sounds, that are described in theory books (using tab and/or music notation, and a lot of jargon).

We want to help you understand these concepts for generating new ideas.  We also know that for many, theory is an anathema.  So we present the musical concepts that theory deals with in a non-academic visual manner, with no notation, and minimum jargon. that you interact with on virtual “guitar” (“bass”, “piano”).  Rhythm is also presented and learned using a simple visual representation that you interact with.  So you can be self-sufficient creating your own music and improvise confidently live or on recordings.

An abstract way of learning about these musical distances is carried out on an interactive “clock instrument”, that collapses the 12 notes of Western music, in all octaves, down onto twelve clock times, from midnight (0 AM) to 11 AM.  The same colouring and labelling is used.  The beauty of this is it makes very easy to recognise musical distances between any two “occupied” clock times, and hence visually recognise music constructs, made up of multiple occupied times.  This “visual language” can be learned very quickly, for example to see what chords are present in a scale.  The actual layout of notes on the “guitar” is immediately visually obvious on any one string (but the chord would physically have to be played one note at a time, a la Eddie Van Halen, and his tapping technique)  On “piano”, the layout is always visually obvious.

This knowledge can also let you play ideas that you can’t accurately imagine in your mind.

Emuso also comes with an interactive ear trainer that lets you hone in on areas you may have weakenesses in, including you specifying problem melodies.  You can work with melodies, chords, chord progressions, and test yourself with singing.

What are the problems related to learning guitar?

We’ve been researching this for many years.  We talk with guitarists all the time on music forums, and on social media, about their problems learning guitar.  We’ve surveyed guitarists for their wants and needs to help them become better and their thoughts about using digital technogy to this end.  We follow on-going research into music psychology and neuroscience relating to music, and the research into effective learning over the last several decades.  Their combined learnings point out potentially signifcant issues with traditional teaching methods. We’ve also been through all the same negative learning experiences, and wanted to create something that we wish we had when we were developing as guitarists.

Emuso/PracticeSuite PRO is our response to the learnings from all the above.

The core problems reported to us

Many guitarists eventually hit a brick wall when only learning songs from TAB, along with scale and chord shapes. They can’t create their own solos, or more interesting chord progressions.They can’t workout the reasons for note choice presented indirectly by the TAB.

Many guitarists find learning theory a painful experience and give up, or haven’t the amount of time it seems is required.  It’s primarily those with an intent to be professional musicans where working with notation is required, that are prepared to put the effort in.  Significantly reducing the amount to be learned, understood, and easily recalled from memory, is essential to improve the chances of success.

Issues with guitar TAB

One issue we encountered time and again occurred with people learning from guitar TAB. They could play songs, even very challenging solos, but they had no clue what they were doing, other than where to put their fingers on the fretboard.  Sooner or later, with no other form of learning, other than maybe scale and chord shapes, they ran into a brick wall, where their progress stopped.  They had no idea how to create their own melodies, and solos.  Their frustration was evident as they didn’t know how to use scale notes or chord tones, nor apply rhythmic ideas including phrasing.

Issues with learning theory by notation and note names

Another very obvious issue is that guitarists we encountered typically struggle greatly trying to learn music theory by note names and notation .  There is so much information to take on-board learning like this, that it causes cognitive overload. They can’t see the wood for the trees.  Once working memory is “full”, further information won’t make it into permanent memory and is discarded.  Learning works when the brain can categorise what it perceives via the senses into mental frameworks, drawing on these frameworks to try and associate with the latest information.  If the frameworks are missing or sketchy, then the new information may get discarded or result in a the beginnings of a new framework.

As a result, individual note names typically won’t get associated with theoretical aspects of music, until that theory itself is understood. Additionally, an individual note will create very different sonic effects depending on the context it is used  in (in other words, what are the surrounding notes and rhythm).

The brain deals with (musical) frequency relationships occurring over time

Science talks about “intervals” as frequency differences.  If one frequency is double the other, these two form an interval of an octave.   The tuning system used for piano and fretted instruments then breaks down the notes that can be produced in an octave to have frequencies that are from zero to 11 semitones above the start frequency of the octave. A semitone is a mathematically-derived number.  Inetrnational standards have chosen a specific frequency (A440 Hz) for a specific named note.

The brain’s system of processing sound primarily deals with frequency relationships formed between the notes the ear hears (and other parts of the body).  It detects the differences in pitch (frequency) of the sounds present (for non-percussion instruments, including the voice).  It very easily distinguishes differences between the frequencies of the 12 pitches that Western music has chosen to divide the octave into, which it can sonically group together into 12 “Pitch classes” … all the C’s, all the C#’s, all the D’s and so on.  Each member of a pitch class is some number of octaves apart from the other members in that pitch class.  The brain easily picks up which pitch class is most apparent in the incoming music, and can pick out the frequency differences with the members of the other pitch classes.  In other words, it categorises the most apparent pitch class as the “tonal centre” and recognises the other pitch classes as forming “intervals” with the said tonal centre (as it (notionally) appears in various octaves.

 

Our approach to solve these problems

Music constructs, such as chords and scales, are demonstrated on virtual instruments (“guitar”, “bass”, “piano”) that you interact with, move around, and listen to.  This lets you literally see how the guitar tuning impacts these shapes depending where they are moved to.  Hearing the result after moving makes it crystal clear that the sound flavour has nothing to do with the specific notes used where the shape now is.  These notes appear as circles with coloured rims, labelled with the “musical distance” each note is located at relative to the chord root or scale start note.  When the shape moves, these musical distances are unaffected (unless open string notes are involved), and listening to the shape wherever it is makes it obvious that its these musical distances that create its sound flavour.

Additionally, we visualise the musical concepts that theory deals with in a non-academic manner, with no notation, and minimum jargon, and only essential information that you interact with on virtual “guitar” (“bass”, “piano”).

We strip music concepts back to the core so there’s so much less to learn and remember, compared to learning by notation, note names, or by TAB.

Music is about relationships between sounds, these being intervals.  Much theory can be explained in terms of intervals, either for showing where chords are rooted in a scale, or for showing the make-up of a chord or scale.  So intervals are always visualised, heard, and quickly associated with shapes on interactive instrument (“guitar”, “bass”, “piano”). Rhythm is also presented and learned using a simple visual representation that you interact with.  Rhythm tracks can be linked to the current virtual instrument, so that the melodic content and chords played back can also be visualised, allowing you to see chord / scale relationships.  You can even create “memos” that present a given chord or scale (fragment) shape that appear and remain on-“instrument” during playback, say, while musical concepts being practised.  Each memo remains visible until replaced by the next one, acting as a reminder of where and what you want to play.  Exploring rhythmic possibilities becomes really easy. Adding and editing the melodic content and chords is very fast, very simple.  Editing the rhythm itself is very simple.  This ease-of-use encourages in-depth exploration of rhythmic concepts, and transposing the content makes it much easier to practice in different keys.  The shapes for the melodic content and chords follow suit.

An additional massive benefit for reducing the learning effort and memorisation is that the same information applies to both scales and chords.  These are memorised by very simple shapes, the rim colour, and their sounds.  These simple shapes can be learned properly in a few minutes a few times a day, over a few days, and then recalled less frequently as needed.

You learn using a toolkit and interactive content which include auto-correcting tests taken on the above instruments.  For example, the content may ask you to create a scale and it will check the intervals are correct, and you can ask to see and hear the correct answer if you made a mistake.

BENEFITS

• Easily understand the fretboard and absorb musical concepts, resulting in steady progress, new ideas, new pathways on the fretboard.
• Grow your vocabulary and understand how to use chords, inversions, and scales, to create emotional responses, and learn to recognise their sounds by ear.
• Understand basic theory, off and on the guitar, on your first day with no previous knowledge.
• Develop the ability to understand the note choices  used by your favourite players.
• Use or rapidly create exercises and melodic studies (scale practice, arpeggios etc.) for new ideas, improved technique and timing.
• Explore all aspects of rhythm, visually, no music notation.
• Interactive content lets you test yourself “on-instrument”… we auto-correct. You see and hear the difference.