Reel Ear: A Music Theory / Ear Training application for “Reel Space”,
an Irish music school in Valencia, Spain.
For more information and to download the trial version, visit:
Reel Ear is designed to generate melodies based upon user-settable parameters such as pitch selection, note duration, melody length, instrument choice, "dual transposition", scale filtering, and so on. An accompaniment track, a multi-layer metronome, and keyboards (virtual and real) add many more possibilities for learning and music-making. Target users are musicians of all levels, as well as those who claim to be “non-musicians”... we ALL have that intelligence and ability!
While there are many functions available, "Dual transposition", available for the on-screen and external keyboards, is particularly helpful for hearing and practicing scales in various keys. It allows one to set pre- and post-transposition amounts, which gives more flexibility when playing:
-- Use only the Post transposition to change your sounding pitches: you keep playing the same scale, but you'll follow the melody's transposition.
-- Use both Pre and Post transposition to change the scale you need to play in order to match the melody. This is a very important skill for keyboarding and theory, and allows you to practice any combination of keys, including mashing different scales together to see how they blend. (With the scale filter on, you automatically play only scale notes, so if you don't know F-sharp Phrygian off the top of your head, there's no need to panic.)
Once you get the hang of the controls and how things work, I hope you'll see a wealth of possibilities for practice, ear training, improvisation, and performance. I encourage you to start simple: click the "Reset" button to set everything to the basic default settings, then try all the different controls one at a time to see what they do--nearly every control has a pop-up hint explaining what it does. Also check out the Help section for more information. But most importantly, have fun ... it's a musical instrument, so start playing!
