Tone - Learn Perfect Pitch‪!‬ 4+

I love music apps and this was instant love at first sight. It is so cute and so customisable. I just feel like using it all the time. Feels effortless and fun and elegant. I love the themes customisation and the sounds (cello made all the difference for me as cello player). Some minor flickering here and there but maybe cuz I’m on iOS beta. But I already stopped using it because I hate goodbyes (and we will be parting ways after my free trial ends). My biggest gripe (probably only too) is the price. Is the reason I wouldn’t give it 5 stars. I know subscription is here to stay and it helps developers to keep providing a good service. But at $99 a year for something that is a feature on many other music apps is not worth it for me. Granted this is the best looking pitch practice app I’ve ever seen in here, but I can’t justify to myself paying for a subscription for just one feature that I already have in two or three apps I paid a one-off fee. And these apps offer me a lot more features. Again, nowhere near as good looking as this, but no subscription either. I guess if there was a lifetime purchase option it would worth buying it, but again it would have to be a bit more competitive price. But it is undeniable the fact this app is gorgeous and would definitely help anyone aiming to practice pitch perfect!

As someone who has grown up around music but never had the focus to learn an instrument or sheet music, I’ve gotten by with more or less the guessing of notes and tone. However as I have an interest in learning and playing piano, being able to pick out and identify specific notes as opposed to an ambiguous melody is a challenge without learning to identify the sounds and their placement by sheet. I saw tone recommended recently and figured there was nothing to lose and more to gain, so I downloaded it and was extremely pleased with the simple yet fun way the app helps you memorize notes and tone. It’s a super simple game, and it’s a little repetitive, but personally I don’t find that a dealbreaker (heck, I can always take a break if it’s getting boring!) My only complaint is that I wish the settings were easier for my inexperienced self to understand. When I checked the settings to see how I could configure the lesson/game, my eyes started to glaze over trying to understand what it meant. I would so, so love a little mini tutorial of how to work the settings and other things like that little table of notes (idk what that does?? I’ve messed around with it and saw no change, so I’m not sure if I’m getting what that does...) That way I could use this app even more to its potential! I would really recommend this for those learning music!

First of all, many people debate whether perfect pitch can be learned after the age of about 6. But there is a decent amount of literature claiming otherwise, and at this point one could find there is a trope to learning it as an adult. One of the main tenants of any practice of it, though, is constant, regular, long-form practice. Like, daily 30-minute intent practice over 10 years.

That said, this app doesn’t do that, at least not in its methodology. Maybe it could work with regular, 30-min practice over many years, but the app isn’t robust enough to incite that sort of commitment out of it.

As it is, it’s an excellent relative-pitch practice device. The main issue is that, once the user hears the first pitch of their practice session, the rest of the pitches from that point on are heard in relation to the first one — thus ‘relative’ pitch. The only way this could really be used for perfect pitch practice is to try at only the first pitch when you open the app, then put it away for 30 mins, listen to other stuff, then come back and try it again, over and over and over.

FWIW, it IS still really great as an on-the-go ear training gismo. I’ve already thought about having my students use it, as it is very simple but has many options for scales etc.

I have my doctorate in music composition, so I think about this stuff a lot. Thanks for the app regardless!