Today I would like to write a little about various aids you could use to improve your ear training routine. There are a few books and tools I use that you might find of benefit too.
The first thing you need to get your hands on is something that will give you an in tune pitch. There are a lot of contraptions out there, but my favorite has always been the A 440 tuning fork. They're small, they're very affordable, and they don't go out of tune unless they have been seriously abused. Other people use pitch pipes, which are like circular harmonicas. There are a few types, some give you a pentatonic scale, and some give you a major scale in a particular key, while others offer you the chromatic scale. Some people sing the phrases of applications you can buy for various smart phones, but don't waste your money waste your money on an application when you can just use the dial tone? That's right, the dial tone has to be a pitch, so just figure out what it is and go from there. In the city I used to live the dial tone was A 440, and the boys at the local guitar shop refused to tune to anything else. Most metronomes these days with produce pitches for you too though a lot of people find these sounds quite harsh. The last place you might go is to you computer. Many musicians make use of a laptop as part of their regular practice, I know I do. There's an endless umber of java and flash programs on the web that are free to use that will produce pitches for you.
Second step is to take you chromatic tuner and throw it right in the garbage. This is mostly addressed to electric guitarists and bassists, but you banjo, mandolin and 5 string graphite cello players are to blame too. How are you going to ever learn how to identify pitch if you can't match pitch? Learning to tune your instrument is a life long process that improves your pitch. Each day as you affix your attention towards that incremental distance between those two pitches, you're improving your ability to accurately judge distance. Stop cheating your self.
The third thing to do is pick up some books with notes to read and sing. I recommend the Bach book, 371 Harmonized Chorales and 69 Chorale Melodies with figured bass. It's published by G. Schirmer, Inc. and distributed by a few different companies. I got mine through Hal Leonard, but the pieces have long entered the public domain so you should be able to find a copy without much trouble. Any reputable choral director or sheet music store attendant will know exactly which publication you're looking for. Mine cost me $15.95 back in May of 2007, so you wont expect to pay much for it. What makes this book so good is that you're getting 371 four-part chorales, (that's more than 1,490 parts) in every key, many time signatures, a wide melodic range, and in multiple clefs. Additionally, as you learn to sign by ear better you will better know one of the more important collected works of music in history, and the development of harmony and melody in western music. Also they sound good.
Grab a sight-singing book. Most of the time there's no need to pay for these because they are a favorite item for public and university libraries to throw away. Depending upon the way things are done in your part of the world, a few times a year in your local library you'll find stacks of books marked "FREE BOOKS". There's typically a dusty old sight-singing book that no one has taken out for the last 50 years right under "M" for music. If you flick through the pages you'll notice that very little has been added to the realm of sight singing in the last 50 years, and really what you need more than anything else is some music in the right range that grows progressively more difficult.
If you can get those things together you should be hard pressed to run out of material to work on for the next 30 years or so. Your tuning fork wont rust, and you'll never get through that sight singing method book, but it's about the journey after all, it's not about getting to the last page, the one that has been intentionally left blank by the publisher.
Keep Training those ears!
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