Sounds like a spam post, right? Just wanted to share a couple of software packages I've had fun exploring lately since my ear training needs a lot of work and I learn the most visually.


ROCKSMITH 2014

With the cover song talk on another thread, I thought I would add this one in. As you can assume by the name it's geared mostly toward rock music. This is a spin on the old "Guitar Hero" games that used the plastic guitar with 4 or 5 buttons on it. The nice thing with this is you use your real guitar and learn the real notes of the 50 songs that come with it. It comes with a nice guitar-to-USB cord so that it can interpret your notes. The song notes scroll toward you on the screen and show the fret number and string it's coming in on. Kind of a modified guitar tab. When you start learning a song you'll only see a note every couple of measures or so. When you start hitting consecutive notes, it starts throwing more in, increasing the difficulty. It's constantly watching you for improvement to increase you Mastery Percent. I started in the 20-30% range on easy songs and now have them up to about the 80%+ range now. Songs go back to the Rolling Stones with "Satisfaction" and Ramones with "Blitzkrieg Bop". Current bands are on there like Arctic Monkeys and Weezer for those alternative rockers. There's also a big fan base that has its own website for user-developed songs. It's a huge list and you can probably find half the stuff out there from the past several decades. Another bonus, the program uses an internal guitar processor to make your guitar sound as it should for the given song you play. You can also emulate bass guitar on regular guitar or learn bass guitar parts on a real bass.


SINGING COACH

This one is more of a mom & pop shop developed software from a guy in Florida. I like this one because of its visual nature as well. The free version just has a few sample songs you can try with it. The jist is you import a MIDI vocal melody and the interface can switch to any key to adjust to your vocal range. You will see a MIDI note scrolling page similar to Piano Roll in BIAB/RB. The program will chart your voice on the screen with the MIDI notes. You can see where you're falling above or below the MIDI note and change your voice up and down to hit that note. Right now since my vocals have never been developed, I'm just running through the Warm Up exercises they provide and trying to master that. This program also gives you a score based on how much you hit the notes during the song as percentage.


In conclusion I'm not affiliated with either of these softwares, and just wanted to post my reviews on them.



Steve

BIAB/RB 2022, Pro Tools 2020, Korg N5, JBL LSR 4328 Powered Monitors, AKG/Shure Mics.
PC: Win11 PRO, 4 TB M2 SSD, 2 TB HD, 128 GB Memory