Learning to play saxophone can be an extremely rewarding experience. Whether you’re learning soprano, tenor, alto or baritone – the saxophone is widely considered to be the most accessible of all the woodwinds.
How you can use it: perfect for learning songs by ear or for transcribing. This is an excellent app for any teacher or student to implement into practice routines. It allows users to manipulate the tempo and pitch independently of one another. This app won ‘Best Mac Music App of 2013’ – so you know it must be something special! Ear training free download - Ear Training, Play By Ear - Ear Training, Dolce Ear Training, and many more programs. Enter to Search. My Profile Logout. CNET News Best Apps. Besides this one, two other excellent ear training apps are Good Ear Pro for the iPhone and Perfect Ear for Android – which will help you work more closely on intervals, hearing chord qualities (maj7, Minor, etc), identifying different scales, and other essential building blocks of a great ear.
With new technology constantly being developed to make our lives easier, it has never been a better time to refine your skills on the sax! I’ve done some research and have found a few apps that has the potential to make your life much easier! Here are 5 Apps you can use to improve your saxophone playing:
Fingering
How you can use it: this app will be perfect for beginners or those who have trouble remember any obscure fingerings.
https://radicalnew830.weebly.com/simple-spreadsheet-app-mac.html. This is an amazingly useful app – learning correct fingerings is a core aspect of improving your playing and will undoubtedly give your skills an upgrade!
The app provides in-depth fingering charts for both brass and woodwind instruments. The app includes trill fingerings for minor and major 2nd intervals, as well as additional fingerings for minor and major 3rd trills.
If alternate fingerings are available for notes or trills – you can navigate through them to find the right one for you. Visual guides are also included for key names and locations to further understand the fingering charts.
Personally, I think the user interface is a little clunky – but you can tell the developer has done their best to pack all the information onto the screen without too much crowding.
Available to buy on the Apple store, this app is exclusively for iOs devices. At $4.99, it’s a reasonable price for a tool packed full of features. There’s also an additional Fingering app optimized for iPad.
Anytune Pro+
How you can use it: perfect for learning songs by ear or for transcribing.
This is an excellent app for any teacher or student to implement into practice routines. It allows users to manipulate the tempo and pitch independently of one another. This app won ‘Best Mac Music App of 2013’ – so you know it must be something special!
With the touch of a button you can speed up or slow the tempo down – this is great for transcription or learning a new tune. Adjusting the pitch is also incredibly simple and allows a 24 semitone (two octaves) shift up or down.
The interface is pretty intuitive and focuses on the visualisation of the audio. This is great for multiple reasons. Scanning through the song to find the section you need is easy with the waveform represented so clearly.
The app also provides infinite markers – so you can place a marker on a verse, chorus or solo section you need. You can also loop between markers so you can keep practicing one section over as many times as you need!
This app is also portable – meaning you can use it on your iPad, iPhone, or even your desktop! Anytune Pro+ has a free trial available for Mac OS, so if you’re curious to try it out – give it a go! However, if you’re a music teacher, the developers have kindly made the upgrade to Pro+ completely free!
Reframe (bundled with Anytune Pro+)
How you can use it: use this app to remove other instruments from the track. This way you can isolate the saxophone to learn the piece and play along to the backing track when you’re finished.
Reframe is created by the same developers of Anytune and comes bundled with Anytune Pro+. Reframe displays frequencies across the spectrum in a funky and colorful interface, and allows you to crop, edit, mute or isolate these sections, much like cropping or editing an image.
Along with customised user control, there are also a list of presets, such as ‘Remove Vocals’ or ‘Solo Bass’; the app detects these instruments automatically and completes the job with the touch of a button.
This is incredibly useful if you want to remove your instrument from a recording so you can practice the part in your session, but still have the band to play along with so you can get immersed!
Or, you may want to remove the rest of the parts playing and focus on your own so you can learn or transcribe it.
Whatever the case, Reframe’s algorithm is excellent and does a great job at detecting and isolating the different instruments in a song.
The ability to use it in conjunction with Anytune Pro+ gives you access to so many features that are sure to make your practice sessions fruitful!
Tuner & Metronome
How you can use it: an easy to use all-in-one tuner, metronome and recording app.
Available on the Google Play store – for a very sweet price of nothing! For a free app, it’s had excellent feedback from the community.
With a 4.5/5 star rating by a whopping 47,129 users – it’s obvious this app is satisfying a lot of musicians.
The interface for this app is incredibly streamlined and simple; looking very user friendly and slick. With a touch of a button you can toggle the metronome on and off, access the tuner, select a rhythmic pattern and even record your playing!
There are some amazing additional features available for purchase within the app as well.
If you’re practicing in a noisy environment or the volume limit of your phone isn’t sufficient to hear the beats on your metronome, this app offers a fantastic solution – visual beats. The flashlight on your camera serves as your metronome!
Saxophone All-in-one
Ear Training Mac
How you can use it: use it for checking scales, referencing fingering, and transposing songs.
Saxophone All-in-one aims to provide you with everything you’d want as a saxophone player. It provides you with a collection of the most popular Blues scales as well as providing you with the common Major and Minor scales.
This app is well suited for beginner players. More advanced players may find a few features lacking – such as fingerings for the altissimo notes.
However, it’s a great app to have if you find yourself transposing songs from one key to the next. Keep in mind that it only offers transpositions for alto saxs.
The app also offers a select number of tutorials for beginners. Again, more experienced players will find little value in these tutorials except for maybe a quick refresher.
The app also offers a select number of tutorials for beginners. Again, more experienced players will find little value in these tutorials except for maybe a quick refresher.
ForScore
How you can use it: use it to organize and keep track of your sheet music.
ForScore is an excellent organisational tool developed exclusively for iOs devices. The interface is stunning and simple; sorting and accessing your sheet music is going to be an absolute breeze with this app.
ForScore can import pretty much any PDF score, as well as connect to various cloud based servers such as Dropbox.
You can keep your scores organised by tagging them – it could be the name of a composer, period or genre. ForScore will categorise and sort everything for ease of access!
Adding annotations to your scores is a simple process – you can use or edit presets to add notes, markings or symbols to any score.
Sharing scores is also simple; through email, Bluetooth and even Airdrop.
For $9.99, this is an easily justifiable purchase that will completely transform your sheet music collection!
Conclusion
The saxophone is a beautiful instrument, with so many benefits from playing. It’s a social instrument that thrives in the context of a band, and has a beautifully unique and distinct tone with a relaxing and smooth feel that characterizes jazz!
Musicians need tools to refine, practice and ultimately improve their craft. With so many apps available to musicians these days, it’s easy to get a little lost in all the noise.
This list will give you more tools that are genuinely useful at your disposal – while helping you get more out of your sessions!
About the author: Glen Parry has been a musician for over 15 years. He’s done everything the hard way so you don’t have to. You can find more musical advice and audio gear buying guides, such as this guide for selecting pianos, over at AudioMastered.com.
To check out more great info on the best electric and electronic gear to help take your sax playing to the next level, check out Glen’s site at http://www.AudioMastered.com.
Related
Ear training is a valuable skill to learn that can help you grow as a musician. In this guide, I will give you an overview of the best ear training apps worth checking out.
I’ll explain why these are the best ear training apps available today and how to use them as part of your ear training. Mac slideshow software.
To find out what ear training is and why it’s worth learning, read my Ultimate Guide on Ear Training here.
Best Ear Training Apps
There are a lot of ear training apps available and most of them do more or less the same thing. I’ve spent quite a lot of time with each one and there are three apps that stand out.
Here are the 3 best Ear Training Apps worth using:
- Complete Ear Trainer (Android and iOS)
- Perfect Ear Trainer (Android)
- EarMaster (PC/Mac and iOS)
The above apps aren’t in any particular order. They all have pros and cons and each one may suit different people.
https://radicalnew830.weebly.com/photos-from-camera-app-for-mac.html. There are plenty of alternatives, but using one or more of the above three ear training apps will give you all the ear training exercises you will ever need.
I’ll go through each app so you can see why they’re the best options and which one might suit you best.
1. Complete Ear Trainer (Android and iOS)
Complete Ear Trainer is possibly the most polished ear training app on this list. The interface is easy to use and looks great.
It includes a wide range of drills that progressively get harder in a way that feels challenging, but not overwhelming (important for effective learning).
What I really like about this app is that you can go through the drills in different ways depending on how you want to practice.
As shown below, the app gives you a choice of different learning modes including easy, classic, arcade, or custom.
This is a great way to ease you into ear training as you can start in easy mode. Then when you feel confident, you can work through the classic mode.
The drills are split into chapters and you can create custom drills if you want to work on specific areas.
In the above screenshot, you can see that in easy mode, the app starts you off by learning to compare minor third intervals against octaves.
This is a great way to ease you into relative pitch and ear training because it’s quite easy to hear the difference between these two intervals.
By starting you off on drills like this, you’ll quickly see that it is possible to learn to identify different intervals by ear.
Eventually, you’ll reach some drills that seriously challenge you. But if you continue to consistently practice, these drills will also gradually become easier.
The drills are presented in a simple way with a circle showing possible answers. Once you hear the example, you tap what you think is the right answer.
Swipe the screen to move between drills or hit the repeat option to hear it again (great for reviewing incorrect answers).
The makers of this app have done a great job of making the app encourage you to keep trying and push yourself. From a learning point of view, this plays a massive role in your development.
I found that I kept coming back to this app over and over to progress through the chapters.
I like that each drill gives you a score and a star rating. Simply seeing three or four stars on a drill was more than enough to motivate me to continue working on it until I reached five stars.
As a guitar teacher, I spend a lot of time studying teaching methods and strategies.
One important strategy to understand is how repetition reinforces your learning.
The simple drills in any of these ear training apps only work when you repeat them enough. If you were to run through the drills once and think you’ve mastered the skill because you got a lot of them right, that’s not good enough.
Repeating the drills over and over across multiple days and weeks will help reinforce your learning and strengthen your aural skills.
Even if you get five stars in one of the drills, I highly recommend you continue to practice the drill to make sure the learning sinks in.
I also like the sound quality of the drills. The app uses sound banks and you can download between different instruments for the drills (for free).
I recommend starting with the electric guitar option (the only guitar option). Once you feel confident with your aural skills, I recommend trying a few different instruments or setting it to random for an extra challenge.
Complete Ear Trainer Pros:
- Well polished app
- Good sound quality
- Good progression of drills
- Available for Android and iOS
Complete Ear Trainer Cons:
- Limited number of drills without paying for full version
- Other ear training skills such as rhythm are on separate apps
Complete Ear Trainer is available on Android and iOS. It is free but has a one-time in-app purchase to unlock the full range of features.
2. Perfect Ear Trainer (Android)
Perfect Ear Trainer is an easy to use ear training app that gives you a surprisingly wide range of exercises without needing to pay to unlock extra features.
While I hit the limit of free content in Complete Ear Trainer very quickly, I was able to use Perfect Ear Trainer for months without getting close to the limit of free content.
For most guitarists wanting to learn aural skills, Perfect Ear Trainer will give you more than enough exercises without having to pay to unlock extra.
To say that this app offers a lot for free is an understatement. Here are the main types of exercises and drills you can work on:
- Interval Comparison
- Interval Identification
- Interval Singing
- Interval Reading
- Scale Identification
- Scale Reading
- Melodic Dictation
- Chord Identification
- Chord Inversions
- Chord Reading
- Chord Progressions
- Rhythm Tapping
- Rhythm Input
- Rhythm Imitation
- Sight Reading Trainer
- Absolute Pitch Trainer
- Note Singing Trainer
- Fretboard Trainer
- Circle of Fifths Trainer
You can pick and choose what exercises to work on and within each of the above points, you can progress through different levels.
The below screenshot shows the main screen where you can select the type of exercises to work on.
It’s a quick and easy interface to jump into whatever aspect of ear training you want.
Let’s say you want to work on identifying intervals. Tap on the ‘Interval Comparison’ circle and you are presented with a range of exercises as shown below:
You can see that each interval exercise is split into ascending, descending, harmonic, and with or without common tones.
This is a great way to really hone in on what type of exercises you want to work on. As you master each exercise, more exercises unlock.
Once you get into the exercises, the interval or chord will play and you need to tap the correct answer. Then you are shown a lot of details about what you just heard as shown below:
Unlike Complete Ear Trainer, you can actually see what you just heard after answering the exercise. You can even pick your guitar up and play the interval or chord to reinforce the exercise.
This makes Perfect Ear Trainer far more useful than the circle used in Complete Ear Trainer.
Best Ear Training Mac App Store
Perfect Ear Trainer Pros:
- Huge range of exercises without needing to pay
- Easy to use interface
- Wide range of topics to work on
- Includes theory lessons for each topic
- Quick and easy to jump in and work on different skills
- Plenty of options under settings to customize speed and flow of exercises
- Statistics are great to analyze your progress and find weak areas to work on
Perfect Ear Trainer Cons:
- Only available on Android
Perfect Ear Trainer is my go-to Ear Training app and I highly recommend it if you have an Android device.
3. EarMaster (PC/Mac and iOS)
EarMaster is a classic ear training app that started off long before smartphones. I learned aural skills as a teenager thanks to an early version of EarMaster.
While I don’t have an iOS device, I have used EarMaster on PC and I’m currently trying out their latest version (version 7.2 as of February 2020).
Their earlier version provided me with every possible exercise I needed to develop my relative pitch skills and from what I’ve seen, the latest version has come a long way.
While EarMaster has the usual interval, chords, and scales exercises you can see in the other apps, the exercises I found most useful when I was developing my ear skills were the rhythm exercises as shown below:
Other apps such as Perfect Ear Trainer have rhythm exercises, but EarMaster’s rhythm exercises are fantastic. In the sight-reading exercises, the app shows you a rhythm and you need to tap the screen in time with the notes.
In the above screenshot, you can see exactly whether you were early, late, or in time with the rhythm. Being able to learn how to exactly time triplets or unusual subdivisions quickly became easy after practicing with EarMaster.
If you’re interested in developing sight-reading skills as well as aural skills, I highly recommend EarMaster. It’s what helped me develop my music reading ability.
My experience with EarMaster was positive enough that I can confidently place it as one of the best ear training apps available today.
I’m currently working on a detailed review of EarMaster 7, so subscribe to updates here to be notified of new reviews, guides, and lessons.
In the meantime, check out EarMaster here to learn about their ear training software (if you purchase EarMaster through this link, I earn a small commission at no cost to you).
Ear Training App Tips
Read this guide on Ear Training for effective ear training practice advice.
Here are some quick tips on how to make the most of any ear training app you use:
- Set a reminder to encourage you to practice every day. Once you build up the habit of practicing daily, you’ll see better progress
- Use headphones/earbuds. While your smartphone’s speakers are fine, you’ll find it much easier to hear the examples with headphones or earbuds. They will also allow you to practice while out in public. Check out this guide on Headphones for Electric Guitar for headphones you can also use when practicing guitar
- Don’t push yourself too hard. Take it slow and build up from the easier exercises. Don’t try to rush ahead as it will make it harder for you to develop your skills
- Sing the exercises. This will feel weird, but if you sing the intervals in the exercises, you’ll develop stronger aural skills
- Short and regular practice sessions are best. Long practice sessions aren’t as effective as a few short sessions with breaks
Ear training is a great way to develop your musical skills when you’re away from your guitar. Check out this guide for more things you can practice without having a guitar with you.
Ear Training Apps Video
To give you a closer look at two of the above apps, I’ve created a video where I walk through the apps.
If you can’t see the above video, watch it on YouTube here.