Is EarMaster really the best ear training app out there?

[SerenaKuvalis]

I’m a bit frustrated by the seeming lack of decent ear training apps. Ear master is always always the one people bring up. Don’t get me wrong, it has some really great exercises, but there are so many other things a computer could be great for that it doesn’t do. And how long have they been making music software of this nature? 30 years?

Also there are a zillion other apps, but 99% of them seem to be the same stuff. Sing this interval. Transcribe these scale tones.

Here are some things I would like to be able to do that I can’t in ear master:

• transcribe random chords with my answer being in the format of chord names and not Roman numerals.

• transcribe four voice choral style arrangements

• transcribe melodies with chromaticism that aren’t nonsense. In ear master you can select a scale that melodies are generated from, including the chromatic scale, but these will be random notes, not very musical. Why not just be able to select the scale degrees you want?

sing an arpeggio of the given note (with inversions).

I’ve had many other ideas, but these are just the ones that come to mind. I’m really disappointed in the progress that’s been made in this area. Anyone else have some recommendations?

[manedwolf]

Hopefully, in the future, there will be smarter platforms that allow us to freely customize musical notation exercises to our own liking.

[Bunstya]

I’m a bit frustrated by the seeming lack of decent ear training apps. Ear master is always always the one people bring up. Don’t get me wrong, it has some really great exercises, but there are so many other things a computer could be great for that it doesn’t do. And how long have they been making music software of this nature? 30 years?

Also there are a zillion other apps, but 99% of them seem to be the same stuff. Sing this interval. Transcribe these scale tones.

Here are some things I would like to be able to do that I can’t in ear master:

• transcribe random chords with my answer being in the format of chord names and not Roman numerals.

• transcribe four voice choral style arrangements

• transcribe melodies with chromaticism that aren’t nonsense. In ear master you can select a scale that melodies are generated from, including the chromatic scale, but these will be random notes, not very musical. Why not just be able to select the scale degrees you want?

sing an arpeggio of the given note (with inversions).

I’ve had many other ideas, but these are just the ones that come to mind. I’m really disappointed in the progress that’s been made in this area. Anyone else have some recommendations?

I feel the same — most ear training apps seem stuck on basic drills and don’t really cover practical skills like real chord transcription or four-part harmony. Hopefully there’s something more advanced out there.

[precisesha]

I get what you mean. A lot of ear training apps feel a bit stuck in the same old format. EarMaster is solid for fundamentals, but once you want more musical or realistic exercises it can start to feel limited.

For chord transcription with actual chord names, you might want to try TonedEar or Teoria. They let you customize exercises a bit more, especially with chords and harmonic recognition. It’s still not perfect, but it’s a step up from the basic interval drills.

For more “musical” ear training (less random notes), I’ve actually found it helpful to work with short excerpts from real music. Tools like Transcribe! or even slowing things down in a DAW can be surprisingly effective. It forces you to deal with real harmony and voice leading rather than isolated sounds.

For four-voice harmony specifically, I honestly haven’t seen an app that does that well yet. That’s one area where analyzing Bach chorales or similar material might still be the best training method.

If anyone knows a tool that generates proper four-part harmony exercises, I’d be really interested too.