EarMaster 5

by eMedia

Product Features

• Ear-training software with instant interactive feedback on answers
• Standard and Jazz tutors with over 650 lessons; customizable exercises
• On-screen guitar, piano, violin, bass, and others; variable tone range--from soprano to bass
• Sing, play, or clap answers into a microphone; automatic guitar tuner and metronome
• Plays in any of 128 instrument sounds; progress reports; designed for all musicians

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B001DF3OOU
• Item model number: EM11086
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 29, 2008
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #776 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #5 in Software > Video & Music > Software > Notation & Composition

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

If you want to sing, improvise, or jam with complete confidence, you need to recognize all the sounds around you. Ear training can make this possible. Making music with others will become easy and fun!

EarMaster is your personal teacher. It is easy to use and provides instant feedback. EarMaster includes a Standard Tutor with over 400 lessons, as well as a Jazz Tutor with over 200 lessons. Both will guide you and automatically increase in difficulty as your ear improves. You can even create your own customized exercises!

A better ear will help you play, sing, improvise, compose, and notate any style of music. Ear training will give you insight into any musical performance, including your own. You will hear music as you never have before!

Ear training will help you:

• Memorize songs faster
• Play and sing music exactly as you hear it
• Read sheet music and hear it "in your head" instantly
• Perform with confidence in any musical situation
• Understand music at a deeper level

"EarMaster is a patient and non-judgmental teacher."
--Dr. David Ehrke, Professor of Music, University of Nevada, Reno

Ear training for all musicians!
EarMaster will challenge all trained and untrained ears! It is for all vocalists and musicians playing guitar, piano, bass, drums, flute, or any other instrument!

A complete ear-training package!
EarMaster includes exercises in identifying intervals, chords, chord inversions, chord progressions, scales, and modes. You will also find exercises in transcribing melodies and rhythms and in sight-reading or imitation of rhythms. The broad range of exercise areas covers all your needs for training pitch, harmonies, and rhythms! All together the exercises will help you enhance your musicality and improve your playing!

Your own personal teacher!
EarMaster includes two advanced Tutors that will guide you and increase the level of complexity as you improve your ear. The Standard tutor has 440 lessons ranging from beginners to advanced users. The Jazz tutor has 211 lessons with swing rhythms and jazz chords! You can take a lesson again and again, because it will change every time you take it!

Powerful tool for advanced users!
You can customize EarMaster more than any other ear-training tool! There are a lot of settings for the user interface and for the way you use EarMaster. While you work with a lesson you can change clefs, time limits, input methods, tempo, sounds, etc. EarMaster also allows you to use your MIDI instrument to insert tones and rhythms, or as a remote control! There are also keyboard shortcuts to all features. A great feature is that you can make your own custom-tuned string instrument for inserting and displaying the tones on the screen. Even left-handed string instruments are possible!

Customized exercises!
In the customized mode you are in control of the exercises and you can configure them to do exactly what you want! You can customize pitch ranges, keys and meters, how the chord or interval should be placed in the keys, how intervals and chords are played, and you can specify exactly what intervals, chords, and rhythm values to work with, and much more. You can of course also define your own customized chords, scales, and chord progressions!

Instant feedback!
EarMaster gives instant audiovisual feedback on everything you do! The tones you enter are transcribed simultaneously on the staff and on the on-screen instruments. When you submit your answer, EarMaster will tell if your answer is wrong. Your answer and the correct answer will be shown on the staff and instruments, and you can hear both individually. This is a very effective learning process where you learn from your errors and improve your ear faster than with any other training method!

Guitar, piano, bass, violin, cello, ... !
Make ear training a musical project by relating it to an instrument you play! EarMaster is designed for musicians playing almost any instrument. You can interact with EarMaster in a multitude of ways. EarMaster supports onscreen piano, guitar, bass, violin, cello, banjo, and any other customized string instrument! Using General MIDI, you can utilize all of the 128 instruments and sounds. EarMaster also comes with real-time Sound2MIDI technology that allows you to sing and clap your answer using a microphone--and to play your answer on your favorite instrument! You can also use the onscreen staff, multiple-choice, or use MIDI input from keyboards and other MIDI-devices.

Detailed statistics on your progress!
You can monitor your progress by viewing the detailed statistics about your performance! Has your ear improved at identifying the minor 7th chord? What progress have you made in the past two weeks? Are you answering faster? How much time did you spend on ear training during the past month? EarMaster will provide all this information for you!

Pass your ear-training exams!
Do you need to pass an ear-training exam in a near future? EarMaster allows you to test yourself at home in similar conditions as an actual ear-training exam! Any tutor lesson or customized exercise can be turned into a strict and merciless test! Did you miss identifying the chord? Too bad, because I will not play it again! And I need your answer in 10 seconds!

Easy to use for beginners!
EarMaster is very suitable for beginners. It is intuitive and has a user-friendly interface. Even kids can use it! The program starts with an ear-training wizard that will explain the exercises and training modes for you. EarMaster suggests you let the standard tutor instruct you and let him guide you through the lessons. EarMaster also includes a quick music theory introduction and comprehensive help available anywhere in the program.

Features:

• Standard and Jazz tutors with over 650 lessons
• Instant interactive feedback on answers
• Create your own customized exercises
• On-screen guitar, piano, violin, bass, and others
• Sing, play, or clap answers into a microphone
• Automatic guitar tuner and metronome
• Variable tone range--from soprano to bass
• Plays in any of 128 instrument sounds
• Instruction available in 13 languages
• Statistics provide detailed information on progress

Product Description

If you want to sing, improvise or jam with complete confidence, you need to recognize all the sounds around you. Ear training can make this possible. Making music with others will become easy and fun! EarMaster is your personal teacher. It is easy to use and provides instant feedback. EarMaster includes a Standard Tutor with over 400 lessons as well as a Jazz Tutor with over 200 lessons. Both will guide you and automatically increase in difficulty as your ear improves. Create your own customized exercises to improve the way you play, compose and notate any style of music!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great software but..., March 30, 2010

By 

demago (Singapore) - See all my reviews

This review is from: EarMaster 5 (CD-ROM)

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.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Flexible, wide ranging exercises and excellent support, February 11, 2010

By 

L. Friedman (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: EarMaster 5 (CD-ROM)

I originally posted this review for EarMaster and not EarMaster Pro. I have the Pro version so I am adding the same review here.

I like the flexibility of this training software -- the ability to create my own exercises. I use the Tutor to narrow down issues and then construct my own exercises to further focus drills. Of the software I tried this one also has a fairly complete results report. I think this is important because it allows you to overcome your own sense of where weaknesses are when your own sense is incorrect.

The only issue I've found is with some of the rhythm drills that depend on the platform on which the software is running to be properly responsive. I find the responsiveness too unpredictable and therefor some of the drills like the rhythm imitation less useful. I do not think this is the fault of EM 5 or any other training software that tries to drill rhythmic input. It's more a platform issue.

Another very positive thing about this software is that I have found the Support to be outstanding. I've received responses to every single question or comment I've made within a day (I'm in the Pacific Coast USA timezone and they are in Denmark) even before I purchased it.

Well worth it.

40 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I bought this at the San Francisco Apple Store, December 13, 2009

By 

Robert D. Glover Jr. "robert-g-near-nyc" (Linden, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: EarMaster 5 (CD-ROM)

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.