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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?"
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
Nice, the comments provide tools I didn't know before :-) Here's another one:
http://www.musictheory.net/
It's a free bunch of good flash-based music trainers (downloadable for offline use).
Animoog.org