EarMaster Pro 5

I love this software. I'm a pretty crappy guitarist who decided to go back to the basics and learn some music theory (which I'm doing via the "absolutely understand guitar" DVD set by Scotty West -- I recommend that product as well -- the presenter has a tendency to ramble and excessively repeat himself but ultimately the material is solid and a lot of things are starting to click so it was worth hanging in there). Anyway, this software is a perfect complement to your music theory studies. I think that unless you're just lucky to be born with a natural talent, you're going to need some dictation of intervals, chords, scales, and rhythm to atune your ear to how they sound. Playing it on your own instrument isn't as effective because you can't help using your eyes and fingers as a crutch. With this software, you have nothing but your ears to find the answer.

Some small nits to pick, which I'm writing here hoping that emedia will read this and include in its next upgrade: (1) the sounds are pretty crappy and hardly like the instruments they're supposed to represent. I'd rather get a choice of three instruments (say, piano, violin and steel string acoustic guitar) that sound realistic than 60+ crappy MIDI ones. (2) I wish an exercise were included that helps you train absolute pitch. For this, I think the Deburgh method is good. It starts by playing two notes (Eb and F#) and you have to listen in to the character of each and once you can distinguish them you progress to other/additional notes. (3) Another thing that I would find extremely useful is if the scale identification (which is what I'm working on now) could be expanded beyond ascending/descending. My hunch is that a program could be written to pick out notes from a scale in a sequence that still sounds relatively musical (following some musical rules). Or alternatively, plenty of examples (a couple of hundred, so you can't rely on memory) could be stored of existing music pieces in those scales. Ultimately, I would like to be able to hear something on the radio and be able to pick up by the character of the music that it's in this or that scale/mode (even if I can't tell the pitch) and the included exercise (just ascending/descending) is a bit too easy.

I think it says something that Apple sells this music software at their San Francisco Apple store. That indicates EarMaster Pro has gone through some serious vetting, as Apple does not sell junk. Apple's shelf space for selling software is small.

Except for those days when there isn't enough time or I'm too busy, I use the EarMaster Pro software every day for about a half hour. I've been using Ear Master Pro for about four months and am nearly half way through the exercises. EarMaster Pro has an online forum which has been helpful and responsive when I've had questions.

In a good way, I have found the EarMaster Pro exercises beyond the starting "easy" ones to be brutally hard. I consider EarMaster Pro to be a program for music majors or for serious musical hobbyists such as myself who are highly motivated and have a strong background in musical harmony and musical theory. The more advanced exercises are so subtle that I ended up (with the help of someone on the Ear Master Pro forum) installing some additional "open source " software on my PC so that the musical tones of the chords generated by Ear Master Pro are easier to hear. For example, hearing the minor seventh of a four note V chord versus a V chord triad can be difficult if the tones are generated by the mediocre tone generator that comes standard on a WinXP computer. (EarMaster Pro works on both MAC and Windows).

If you (like myself) are a jazz pianist wanna-be, then Ear Master Pro is definitely a good purchase for you. You will most likely conclude, as I did, that first you have to go through Ear Master Pro's entire classical training program and only then tackle the (even more) difficult jazz exercises.

The flexibility of this product is fantastic when learning to recognize intervals, chord qualities and inversions. However, when it comes to using the dictation portion, be it rhythm or melodic, it is a challenge. I am using only a computer and not a keyboard attached so perhaps it is better with that. It is difficult to toggle between the duration of the note and the place to put it. If you place the note in the wrong spot, you have to start all over again. For someone learning to dictate melodies, a pen a paper might be a better way to go than to fight with the program.