Introduction

Ear training is really important so you can associate the music you hear (in your mind’s ear, or on a song, or in a jam) with chord and scale and interval shapes, and reproduce these on your instrument.

Emuso comes with a powerful interactive ear trainer for practicing melodic content, from one to several intervals with different rhythms, and chords and chord progressions.   The ear trainer lets you set up tests at different levels of difficulty, from which ear training examples are generated, with and without visual feedback.  You either work in “Learn” mode, or “Sing” mode, or “Test” mode.

It helps you learn to recognise sounds relative to a key centre (which is how we hear music).

 

What you will learn

You will learn how to start up the ear trainer, and use Learn mode to set up a test of three intervals (major 3rd, minor 3rd, and fifth), and test yourself.  You respond by  clicking on interval buttons built into the ear trainer.  In learn mode, you’ll see on-instrument what you’re hearing.  You’ll then try “Test mode” with this setup.  This time you won’t get visual feedback.

 

To start, please watch the help video …  this is around 9 minutes long.

1. If needed, exit the toolkit.
2. Split the screen (select ” instr and lesson fullscreen” from the dropdown currently showing “instrument full screen”)
3. Enter the toolkit.
4. Click on the “Help” menu, top left of emuso.  Select “Toolkit User Guides…”.  Select “Ear Training User Guide (Melody)”.  The user guide appears.
5. At the top of the guide, you’ll see “Videos” and underneath that, “Help video”.  Click on the text “Help video”.  The video appears.
6. Drag the horizontal border above the video up to the top of emuso.
7. Drag the vertical border between the quick start and the user guide fully-left.
8. Drag the vertical border between the user guide and the video fully-left
9. The video is now full-screen in emuso.
10. Press play.
11. When done, click the “Assistant” button at top left of emuso to turn off help (which dismisses this video at the same time)
12. Click “Toolkit” to exit the toolkit.  Split-screen reappears.

Now split the screen.

1. Click “Toolkit” to enter the toolkit.
2. From the “emuso menu (top left of emuso), select”Ear trainer…”
3. Drag the vertical border between the quick start and the ear trainer to the left, so you can see all of the ear trainer
4. Drag the ear trainer by its top left, down below the guitar.
5. Click on the ear trainer “Setup…” button at the its left hand side
6. Ctrl-left click at fret 3, 5th string to set the anchor there.  Notice th “Datum pitch” changes to C3 (underneath the Set Highest button).  You will be setting up intervals with this note, in a moment
7. Click “Set Highest”, and left click (NOT Ctrl-left), at the 1st fret on the 2nd string (C4).  The highest note that the ear trainer might generate is this note.
8. Click “same tonal centre” … the generated intervals will all be relative to datum pitch you set.
9. Click “Back” and the setup screen goes away.
10. Click the buttons labelled “b3”, “3” and “5” at the bottom left of the ear trainer. Notice the “Current Interval Set” above the buttons shows “b3, 3, 5”.  (If needed, type “=” until you see the labels on instrument showing these)
11. Click “Content choice completed” at the bottom right of the ear trainer.
12. Click “Play datum”  couple of times, and listen closely.  You’ll be using you ears to determine the interval each sound you hear makes with this datum sound.
13. When you’re ready, click “Start” .  You’ll see the note (in all possible places) on guitar, showing its interval.
14. Click “Repeat” to hear it again.  Sing the datum note (use “Play datum” to hear it again).
15. “Answer” by clicking on the interval button with the same label at the bottom left of the ear trainer.
16. The score (at the right of the ear trainer) shows a correct answer in the corresponding column
17. Click “Next” and so on.
18. You’ll quickly start to get it right without looking at the visual feedback on the guitar.
19. (If you get one wrong, click “Tell Me” followed by “Hear Mine” to compare)
20. Click “Setup” and click on “include tonal centre”.  This will add the datum with whatever note is being generated.
21. Click “Next” and so on.
22. If you feel confident, use “Setup” and click on “Auto-next on correct answer”.
23. Click the “x” at the top right of the ear trainer to dismiss it.

 

Next

That’s your tour over.  Hope you enjoyed it!  Now explore, and check out the lessons and blog if you like.  They will continue growing over time.