Recommended Tools

Sorry to steal your title, Donny.

C’est arrive´ — Banffblogging begins chez Darcy James Argue.

The only thing I would add to Darcy’s post is that Ben Monder returned to a perennial theme here: practicing extremely slow tempos. He recommends Ron Fleckner’s metronome app, (link is to developer’s site, contribute if you can) which I immediately downloaded and it is fantastic. It goes as low as 0.1 beats per minute. That’s one click every ten minutes, perhaps not so practical… and you have to turn off the “traditional tempos only” button. But at tempos below 40, like 20, 10, even 5, there’s a lot of fecund subdivision going on. And it seems infinitely flexible for other uses.

Fleckner Metronome

Ben was also talking about working on ear training in groups, playing notes back and forth, trying to reproduce and identify. I was reminded of a tool found at Rick’s Atlanta-basediwasdoingallright. It’s an iPhone app called Play by Ear that, among other things, produces random sets of pitches which you must play back for Guitar Hero style feedback on accuracy.

Photobucket

Other than that, lots of composing going on, composition workshopping, mountain air, birds.