Instead of keeping up, music academia are decades behind our understanding of the brain, how we learn, how we respond to music.

Music notation arose from necessity.  It was cutting-edge, there was no recording.  There was no understanding of the inner-workings of the brain then.  Fast forward to the 21st century, and we know much more about how our brain’s process sounds, how we learn, how we memorise, what causes cognitive overload, how best to approach practice.

Steady and constant improvement requires practice.  Practice isn’t just technique.  It’s certainly not copying or reading tab, without understanding the note choices made.  It involves focused practice in several areas: applied music theory for note choice, visualisation, fretboard awareness, chord, scale and lick vocabulary (needed for your genre(s)), rhythm, phrasing, timing, dynamics, note articulation, aural recognition.  Your chosen areas depend on your goals.  Advancement builds on foundations, growing mental frameworks.  It’s not a competition. 

Ideally, you need a teacher with much greater skills than your own, who can recognise mistakes, suggest several ways of viewing approaches to improvisation, and guide you in the order of topics to be practiced.

Improvisation

You can learn to improvise without knowing theory, but you need to develop your aural recognition, fretboard awareness, and technique so what you play sounds good (clean, no unwanted strings ringing and so on, and heartfelt).  Adding theory can only help, as does building your vocabulary, rhythm, phrasing, timing, dynamics, and articulation.  Theory does not ruin creativity, so long as you don’t avoid playing something that sounds good because you can’t explain in theoretically.

A revolutionary approach to guitar practice and learning music

Emuso Xplorer v3 lets you work on the above areas, alone, or with a teacher. It uses a revolutionary approach for amazing results that you’ll love. This can take your skills to the next level and beyond, all the way to advanced guitarist, if you apply yourself and want that.  V3 isn’t released yet, as we are still trialling until we are happy you are happy!  Gareth Dylan Smith and Evangelos Himonides, Professors of Music and Music Education Technology, are very happy with it.  V3 has been presented at a conference on Music Education Technology, held at the University of Hull, this June 2024.  Evangelos’ testimonial …

“I am very impressed with the features, design, ethos and incredible potential that emuso/Xplorer v3 has in supporting the learning journeys of guitarists, at all levels and ages. From the very first interactions with the platform, you can feel that emuso is a product of love and dedication to the guitar and its intricacies and the result of countless hours of design, programming, musical and performative thinking, but also structured understanding of the complexities of learning to master this wonderful musical instrument. As a guitarist, technologist, educational researcher and teacher, I have absolutely no reservation to recommend emuso.”

Gareth’s testimonial …

“emuso is uniquely excellent in its combination of intuitive interactivity and applicable music theoretical and listening skills. For guitarists, this is a one-stop shop for many aspects of music learning that can be missed from working with instructional books and in bands. Something to really take your musicianship chops to the next level!”

This was after demo’ing it to Gareth for around an hour and a half. Unofficially, Gareth said emuso was one of the most amazing pieces of music education software he’s ever seen.

Several teachers are also using the v3 trial with the free perpetual licenses they got for their detailed, and much welcomed, feedback using v3.

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”).

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 (provided you work with the quick start guides offered).
• 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.

Click any image below to enlarge it.  Here’s what emuso Explorer comes with…

 

Interactive Lessons

• With visual theory
• tasks
• tests
• auto-correction

 

Example rhythm lesson

 

Example scale lesson

 

 

 

Toolkit

Instruments

Include virtual guitar, virtual bass, virtual piano, with note transfer across instruments.

MIDI

Aspects of the toolkit can be controlled by MIDI IN.  You can map from MIDI IN (Guitar or keyboard) to a toolkit command

Tuner

• Several guitar tunings
• Create your own

 

 

Scales

Scale library provides wide range of scales.  These can be layed out on the fretboard in many ways.  Or create your own scales. Hover mouse over scale note to see/hear tertian/quartal chord rooted at the scale note or pentatonic with tonic at the scale note. Relocate scale anywhere with mouse.

• By region
• By box (1 string to all strings)
• 3 notes per string
• entire fretboard
• Horizontal scale-aware pattern translations (with chromatics)
• Vertical scale-aware pattern translations (with chromatics) constrained within initial scale shape
• Assign new tonic within scale shape (modes)

 

 

 

 

Chords

Chord library provides wide range of editable chords or create your own. Relocate chord anywhere with mouse. Hover over chord note with mouse to hear individual note. This helps pick out inner voices when chord is then listened to.

• CAGED: naming indicates which  (below, C-shape, rooted at E, on 5th string.  (open C chord roots on 5th string)
• Automatic: Click on scale note and current chord quality from scale is generated
• Chord quality: From triads to thirteenths and quartal triads and sevenths
• Horizontal (along string) inversions
• Vertical (across strings) inversions

 

 

 

Clock instrument

Visualises theory (scale/chord, scale/scale, and chord/chord relationships)

 

Additionally

• interval library
• same pitch tool
• string hiding
• labelling choices
• colour choices
• decorations

Ear training

• Melody
• Problem melodies (create own for comparisons)
• Harmony (own chords or scale-based)
• Interactive tests including “see then sing”
• Navigate along a melody or progression to compare correct answer with response

 

 

Rhythm-X

• Technique
• Timing (off-beats etc)
• Simple rhythm through to polyrhythms
• Time displacement from “behind the beat” to shifting melodies
• Transposition, especially for technique regimes
• Music sketches
• Chord progressions
• Dynamic (semantic) tab with changeable labelling
• Import and export

 

 

Interactive quick start guides

Emuso takes a little while to learn, as any full-fledged software does.  We provide a series of guides to get you going, the fastest way to familiarise yourself, where you will create a mutlitrack music sketch, that uses chords, scales, Rhythm-X.

 

 

 

Interactive help system

• Touch-of-a-button help videos and user guides
• Help suspension to allow interactions with toolkit