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F(OS)S for Learning a Musical Instrument ?
Anonymous Musician asks: "Recently I took up learning to play the violin (at age 37) and it is great fun. I found two little software tools to be of good help: Wired Metronome (Windows binary, free to download) to keep a steady beat, and TS-AudioToMIDI (Windows binary, shareware, 30 days free trial), using a microphone and built-in sound-card to detect in real time the note I am playing (I admit, sometimes it is more like a noise) and have it displayed on a piano keyboard to check and train my tuning.
What tools, freeware or FOSS, are you using to assist you with learning to play an instrument?"
I'm learning to play bass guitar at the moment, and I've found Hydrogen (Free, Open Source) to be of great help. It's a drum machine, which lets me quickly setup simple or more advanced drum-loops, even layout the drum patterns for an entire song. Granted, this is probably not quite as important for a violin player - although it can be used as a simple metronome as well.
^]:wq!^M
For stringed instruments, I've found it really really helpful to have a hardware tuner, and most of them run about $20-30, and they're pocket-sized and last forever on a battery and fit in the accessories pockets of instrument cases or music folders. You _can_ also use them to find your note on a continuous-pitch instrument. The Korg model that I use has a meter (well, an LCD simulation of one) that shows how far above or below the nearest note you are, as well as red and green LEDs that tell you if you're sharp or flat. There are other shapes of tuners that clamp onto instruments, and some of them have backlights which can be helpful.
I've used PC software versions in the past, mostly with names like "Guitar Tuner" or whatever, but dragging a laptop around was more trouble than spending the $20 for the tuner - your mileage may vary. On the other hand, with a dulcimer you tune it once and it stays in tune for a whole session until you want retune to change modes, and with a uke you tune it once and it stays only slightly out of tune for at least a little while, so either way you're not trying to get the feedback while you're actually playing, so you may need something different.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Tuning software/gadets I'm against. I've known lots of people that learnt with them and I think they harm not help.
Tuners are going to be the death of string playing, particularly with regards to traditional and baroque music.
I've started to see electric fiddles with frets on them. People, there's a bloody damned good reason that violins don't have frets on them in the first place; and it isn't just to annoy you.
It's so you can play the right pitch, whatever that pitch is; and it often isn't the one that the tuner tells you it is.
Learn to hear intervals, not notes; and learn to tune by fifths. Then go out and get yourself a shitload of the oldest recordings of solo Irish and Old Time fiddle music you can find and learn to hear the microtones.
This may rankle at first, but that's only because your ear has already been corrupted by the tuner/equal tempered piano. There's a whole lot more, even in western music, than the over rigidly defined 12 notes of the equal tempered chromatic scale.
Like consonant intervals that are actually consonant and not merely almost consonant. When I've been playing solo violin for a few hours and then move to piano the piano actally hurts my musical ear. It takes some time to be able to not hear it as slightly out of tune.
This doesn't, of course, mean that you shouldn't learn to play along with a piano and match its musical tones, but you should be aware of the fact that when you do so you are making a compromise with the music.
And the best way to learn to play along with a piano is to play along with a piano, not using a tuner. In fact you should learn to play along with several different pianos, as in practice they'll actually all be in slightly different states of tune and you should be able to hear that and adjust for it.
Music is sound and thus about hearing.
KFG
While it's true that the entire band must stay together, it's usually the drummer who's relied upon to keep a STEADY beat. After all, they're almost always playing a constant stream of eights or sixteenths, and when that's going on it's really easy to tell if the tempo is varying. When playing together, though, try to both keep a steady beat AND keep that same beat synchronized with everyone else. Otherwise you'll probably fall prey to russian dragon syndrome (rushing/dragging), and when that happens, it's usually everyone BUT the band members who can tell that it's going on.
That's only an issue for instruments with fixed intonations
No it's not. (?)...I remember that if you keep playing perfect fifths you end up half a note sharp when you get back to your starting note.
The trick is to spread that difference out without it becoming too annoying (granted: this way you are always playing slightly out of key).
Does it matter if you do this by ear on your fretless or leave it to mr. piano tuner? (BTW, on a bass it ain't all that critical, but on the high notes you'll notice immediately)
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
frankly, just plain can't hear that shit.
Because they haven't learned. You learn things by doing.
I'm lucky I hear anything higher than 10,000 Hz anymore
You are speaking here of range, not pitch sense. The two are unrelated.
Ironic that you cite "folk music". What you call "folk music" plainly has it's origins and style in actual folk music, taken over by virtuosos.
I did not cite "folk music." I cited field recordings of actual traditional muscians who learned to play music before the advent of such recording. Myself I'm just old enough that in my youth I was able to hear, live, a few people who learned to play in the late 19th century.
After one of my concerts a year or so ago a gentleman came up to me and said, "Incredible! I didn't even know anyone still played like that." Some of us who learned traditional music traditionally still do.
To hear one of the starker contrasts between traditional music and virtuoso "folk" music listen to a modern recording of of Scotish "traditional" music and an older recording of Cape Breton music (which is very close to what Scottish music sounded like before the virtuosos "improved" it).
Nothing wrong with virtuosos, mind you.
But not everyone can be one.
Most people don't even have the ability to appreciate one when they hear it.
This gets back to some statements I made a couple of weeks ago (and took a fair amount of heat over), that anyone who does not have any actual physical or neurological disability can learn to play within a few percent of the abililty of a virtuoso, i.e., not so well that an "expert" cannot hear the difference, but so well that the average listener cannot tell the difference.
All it takes is a certain amount of properly applied dedication, over the course of about a decade.
A story is told that after a concert a woman once walked up to Isaac Stern and said, "I'd give my life to be able to play like you."
Stern replied, "Madam, that's exactly what I did."
There is a lesson to be learned in that reply.
KFG
It doesn't quite work like that. Musicians adjust intonation to slow down and/or eliminate the audible "beats" that occur when an interval is out of tune. All equal-tempered intervals, apart from the octave, create audible beats. We tend to resist playing them.