MelodEar: Perfect Ear Training

MelodEar is a brilliant and incredibly important ear training tool. It teaches you to connect melody and harmony in any type of music. MelodEar works very simply. You enter a chord progression and choose a scale for each chord. It displays the scales and let you play or sing over them. As you play or sing, it listens to you and highlights your note within the current scale. That’s all ! Using MelodEar, you can approach a chord progression in many ways. You can sing scales, arpeggios, or interval patterns. You can focus on one chord at a time, or loop a few chords within the progression. There is really no limit !

Memorizing two or three volumes of jazz standards is not in the stars for me. And I am sick of the fake books. So, I’ve stopped trying to memorize one abstract series of chord changes after another and started working on my ear - working on my understanding of harmony and expanding sensual experience of structure. I started ear training by swapping chord names with the Nashville number system. This was huge. I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner. And Melodear is clearly the next step to fake book freedom. The graphic illustration of music this application generates is stunningly clear and mentally manageable. Using it is so effortless, It seems I could wander through this colorful harmonic landscape without a single thought in my head and the nature of music would gradually reveal itself to me anyway. And it seems to be teaching me how to sing as well (I play upright bass). So, wow! Many thanks for this beautiful and extraordinarily useful application. —— Addtional comment : After using the app for a number of months, I do wish the developer would draw mic sensitivity down into the bass range so that I might use the app with my upright bass. I understand singing is an excellent way to internalize harmony. Nevertheless, I feel testing one’s inner/silent voice with this app has it’s merits too. 2.0?

I honestly see a lot going for this app. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to verify the note degree that I’m playing to a chord, and this idea really does save a lot of time in that regard. With that said, I do think this needs some work, as sometimes I feel like I don’t always need a scale to accompany a certain chord. It’s nice to have them available, but for beginners to intermediate players it can be a little intimidating when you don’t know what scales to use. Another thing I wish this app had is the ability to be more modular with your chord and scale definitions. I like the library, but I also think that it would just be much easier if I could create a chord with the notes defined by me. It allows for people to get different voicings, and also state chords which aren’t really in this list, like sus chords or chords with omitted notes and such. Overall though, I will definitely be using this in the future. Chords can be substituted, and it’s really just a tool. That being said, I would love to see something done about the things I mentioned, but regardless, thank you for putting this out!