3 Essential Apps for Every Music Major
Anyone who is a music major likely knows how difficult it can be to balance our unique combinations of music courses, general education courses, practice time, work, and life apart from school and work. Oftentimes, we feel that we have minimal free time to take care of ourselves.
As we near the start of a new semester, I would like to share three apps that every music major should use to stay organized and motivated.
Sight Reading Factory (SRF): This app is great for practicing not only sight reading, but also melodic dictation. For sight reading, you can pick your instrument. The options available are percussion family, brass family, woodwind family, strings family, guitar family, voice family, piano, ensembles, rhythm only, and tone sets. From there, narrow it down and choose your exact instrument or voice part.
After doing that, the app allows you to pick a difficulty level for the sight-reading exercises or you can choose to customize it to your liking. Customization options include rhythms or note durations, rhythm difficulty, syncopations, ties, desired pitch range, maximum interval leap, accidentals, dynamics, time signature, and key signature. There is also an option if you want every exercise to start on the tonic. You can choose exercises in major or minor. Lastly, choose between free play or challenge mode.
When the app generates a sight-reading example for you, it also provides you with a metronome and “tuner hint”, which you can choose to set as the tonic, opening pitch, or block or arpeggiated chord. The app also auto-generates a practice log by tracking the cumulative time spent on the exercises.
For melodic dictation, cover up your screen, take out some staff paper, and hit the playback button on the app. Try to write down what you hear. When you are ready, reveal your screen and compare it to what you wrote down.
The app requires a year-long subscription for $35/year, which comes out to less than $3/month. Not bad!
Tenuto: If you have ever used musictheory.net, all you need to know is that Tenuto offers everything the website does but in a mobile-friendly format for a small one-time price of $4. If you have not used musictheory.net, I very highly recommend it to practice your music theory and ear training skills.
This app offers six categories containing various exercises. First is the staff identification category where you can practice note identification, key signature identification, interval identification, scale identification, and chord identification.
Next is the staff construction category, which allows you to refresh on constructing notes, key signatures, intervals, scales, and chords. The keyboard identification category includes exercises to practice keyboard note identification, keyboard reverse identification, keyboard interval identification, keyboard scale identification, and keyboard chord identification.
The next category is for all the guitarists out there - fretboard identification! This category offers exercises for fretboard note identification, fretboard interval identification, fretboard scale identification, and fretboard chord identification.
The ear training category has exercises to better keyboard ear training, note ear training, interval ear training, scale ear training, and chord ear training. The last category is for teachers, who can utilize the exercise customizer and code checker features.
Not to mention, every single exercise in each of the categories is customizable.
Notability: This app is amazing because it is suitable for a variety of activities, such as marking up your repertoire, taking notes, musical notation, and digitally filing away the notes that you create within the app. It is recommended for use on a larger screen, such as an iPad.
When you create a note on Notability, there is so much you can do with it. One feature I love is that there is a premade template of blank music staves, so I don’t have to carry around a bunch of staff paper in my bag. It is also much easier to do notations on the app, considering I erase and rewrite my notes so many times, which leaves me with a messy paper and faded staff lines.
You can also upload documents, such as your repertoire. Ever since I started doing this, I have had no desire to go back to paper repertoire. It is so convenient to mark up my music on the app and have it with me wherever I go. I have peace of mind knowing I won’t lose my music and notes unless I lose my entire iPad.
There are many templates for notetaking, such as college-ruled, wide-ruled, Cornell style, and blank. Every template, including the music staves, have three background color options. They are standard white, cream, and black. I like to think of a black background with white music staves as the equivalent of putting your device on night mode. This is a useful feature for those late-night homework sessions!
There is a free version available, but the pro version costs $11.99/year.
Of course, many additional apps may offer unique features, but I have used and loved these three while pursuing my Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance. I hope you find them useful and here is to a productive semester of growth!
