Improve Your Singing With the IOS Tone App
iOS: Some people become karaoke gods the moment they pick up a microphone, leaving us mere mortals wondering how they managed to summon Freddie Mercury from the astral world. The rest … need a little practice. While there is no app that makes you the next American idol overnight, Tone ( iOS , free) is a great app for practicing basic note recognition and complex intervals.
The tone is almost stupid in its simplicity. Download it, admire the beautiful sine wave on your home screen and tap the play icon. Unmute the sound (or turn it up as the app advises) and tap the checkmark to start.
To begin with, the tone plays a note. You are trying to guess the title of a note from an unchanging list of options. The tone plays more notes. You are guessing all the time.
You score points every time you choose the correct note to play. As soon as you hit error number three, the game is over and you will be returned to the main menu. (Though Tone encourages you to brag about your high scores, giving you an easy way to post your progress to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.)
If you want to tweak your game settings, the settings menu in the upper right corner of the home screen allows you to choose between note names and solfeggio names (think Doe, Deer, Doe, and the endless examples that follow). You can also choose to display the virtual piano on the guess screen instead of the note name, which is very useful for visualizing intervals.
You can customize which notes the Tone uses in its tests — notes from the Base 5 category, Major Scale, Minor Scale, Full Chromatic Scale, or a custom set of notes you select. mid or high octaves for the sounds the Tone makes, and if you really want to challenge yourself, you can adjust the amount of time you are allowed to think about your choice before you make it.
I also love that you can set the app to “practice mode”, which replaces gameplay with learning. You will get a reference pitch and unlimited time to figure out which note you just heard – no pressure.
While I consider myself a pretty decent singer with intermediate interval skills – thanks to Forever Plaid – Tone is definitely one of my favorite iOS apps to play with if I have a little time to kill (and my EarPods are on hand).