Free · iPhone & Android · Education & Music
Ear training, anchored by a drone.
A note on its own is just a pitch. Held against a steady drone it has a place — and a character you can learn to recognise anywhere.
A note on its own is just a pitch. Held against a steady drone it has a place — and a character you can learn to recognise anywhere.
The idea
Almost nobody can name a note out of thin air — and you don't need to. What carries you through real music is hearing where a note sits in relation to home.
That relationship only exists if home is actually there. So SwarIT keeps a drone running underneath every exercise: a steady tonic that never moves. You stop trying to memorise twelve isolated sounds and start learning twelve distances — and a distance sounds the same in every key.
It is the oldest trick in ear training, and the one most apps leave out. Take the drone away and a third is a guess. Leave it in and a third has a colour you can name before you have finished hearing it.
Identify
Start with three notes against the drone and work outward. Score 18 out of 20 to unlock the next level — the ladder will not let you run ahead of your ear.
Tune & Feel
The part that turns theory into recognition. Sit with one degree of the scale at a time, over the drone, until its particular colour is obvious rather than deduced.
Free Play
The twelve notes laid out on a circle of fifths, sounding on their own over the drone. Nothing to answer. Mute any note you want out of the way and let the rest ring.
The details
The things that decide whether an ear trainer survives past the first week.
Seamless looped root-and-fifth samples in every key, taken from a tanpura — an instrument that exists purely to hold a drone. Flat and meditative by design, so nothing competes with the note you are trying to hear.
Do Re Mi Fa, or Sa Re Ga Ma if that is what you read. Switch mid-session; your levels and statistics do not care which you use.
Transpose to any tonic to suit your voice or your instrument, and the drone follows automatically. What you learn in one key is already true in the rest.
Piano and guitar, sampled and level-matched note by note, so a chord and a single note arrive at the same weight. No synthesised tones anywhere.
A practice heatmap, and a confusion view that tells you which pair you keep swapping — the one thing worth practising tomorrow.
Dark, still and quiet. No streaks shouting at you, no adverts, nothing blinking for attention while you are trying to listen.
Free to download. Start with one note and a drone.