it’s hard to transcribe real music with good habits if solid foundations of relative pitch and music theory aren’t there.

Improving your ear for intervals and chords help tremendously when producing music. You ears are your eyes for sound, so improving them let you see sound better. I can almost sing because of this app alone.

Just do it, you will reap the benefits

@Cuantas Vacas according to Wikipedia relative pitch means:
Relative pitch implies some or all of the following abilities:

1) Determine the distance of a musical note from a set point of reference, e.g. three octaves above middle C
2) Identify the intervals between given tones, regardless of their relation to concert pitch (A = 440 Hz)
3) Correctly sing a melody by following musical notation, by pitching each note in the melody according to its distance from the previous note.
4) Hear a melody for the first time, then name the notes relative to a reference pitch.
This is the meaning I was referring to, I've never came across another meanings to relative pitch related to music, so I don't understand the question about why asking my definition about it.

I know music theory and can identify different intervals and can name them up to an octave, I can identify simple chords like minor and maj, dim, aug. I had piano lessons with a private tutor who taught me all this for a few months.

To sing a simple melody with some basic intervals and transcribe won't take me much time to get notes correct. However, I produce music and rarely I had need to know the exact name of the interval that is used between to notes in a melody, however writing chords with good catchy voicings was always difficult to me, even I had a bit of relative ear training prior.

What's up!

Do you have a specific goal in your mind, like being more creative, or speed up your workflow, or having more control of what you are doing by knowing how to translate through music theory, etc.?

Or you are just seeing to improve yourself as a musician on a whole?

Two more questions before I can give you a proper answer:

Can you read music notation?

When you are producing you use only the piano roll, or do you also write scores on the process?

For me, the philosophy is to work on improving the artist, not the art. Having a certain level of mastery over all of the tools can only help in their proper application.

@Igor Dinotte Good questions! I am looking for a better way to output my ideas, to put them in a DAW, better communicating those ideas to others, be more flexible with genres.

I don't write scores, but I can read a bit a sheet music, I know if I get more practice with I'll get more fluent, but I don't need it right now.

it's what you want and expect to get out of it; if you want to improve your understanding of harmony, melody and the reasons why chords and notes respond and corelate the way they do and to in turn replicate these ideas and practices into your music, and you want to have that value understood for your own sake of creating music then it's worth it. If you feel that you already have your grasp on music theory and don't want to continue the route of learning musical notation and further theories in music then just stick to sound designing on your synths since you already say that you have that base understanding of theory with your past classes. You are the only one who knows what YOU want to get out of music. So if you feel like further research and knowledge about music theory will help, then it will. If you don't think that continued research and study won't improve your skill set, then it won't.

I honestly can't tell if going through all the exercises on ToneGym is going to help you. Some knowledge of theory is necessary to avoid some things that can be ambiguous. The context of a musical work in which we hear notes, intervals, and chords, is very different than exercises that isolate some chord progressions, and intervals on a staff...

I believe that ToneGym is BEST for instrumentists.

Aural exercises alone, without proper experience DOING what we are hearing, can improve our musicianship very little and only to a small extent.

For example:

In the picture below you have an exercise of the Route VI game. At the start of the game, we hear an arpeggiated chord and then the stacked chord. This is intended to give us a tonic from which we are going to figure out which chord progression we are hearing. It fits perfectly for the game, BUT... in actual music experience we hear different harmonies over different tonal centers, and we can mislead ourselves if we try to relate what we hear with the practice of our exercises.

So, in the picture below we have the progression i-iv-bIII-ii°. Lowercase roman numerals are for chords with a minor 3rd, and capital roman numbers indicate chords with a major 3rd.

The game DEFINES the premise that i is the chord built over the first degree of tonality. Great. So, let's imagine that it is in C minor (Route VI doesn't inform us of the actual tonality until we give an answer; what matters most is the relation between chords).

So, for our purposes, if the i is the Cm chord, iv is Fm, bIII is Eb, and iiº is Dº.

But those chords DON'T APPEAR ONLY on the tonality of C minor. All those chords are shared between C minor and F minor tonalities.

Cm is i' in C minor tonality, and v in F minor.
Fm is iv in C minor natural tonality, and i in F minor
Eb is bIII in C minor, and bVII in F minor.
Dº is ii° in C minor, and viº in F minor.

(Since I'm focusing here – and that’s what really matters when dealing with harmony, everything else on a given scale of a tonality are nuances from different natures and due different contexts – on the tonic and its quality, or in other words, the root of the “i” chord and the minor third above it; it doesn’t matter that we differ the chords as coming from natural minor, or the harmonic minor.)

So, unless we see those chord progressions as CADENCES, in which we hear the tonic chord first (considering that we have been hearing this chord before in the music as the one built over the tonal center) and the progression stops after a fourth chord, signalizing the end of a piece, section or presented idea or theme, they don’t match what happens on a musical piece: on reality, we would hear those chords enshrouded by chords before and after, and maybe even played in very quick succession.

Now, as for what you have mentioned in a previous comment.

You do want to write your harmonies with better voicings.

If you practice this properly, you gonna have a better opportunity of making you familiar with chord progressions than in the Route VI game.

Writing four-part harmony demands Harmony study... I achieved a level that I'm very satisfied with in writing fluent and elegant chord progressions.

For that, I would say it is necessary to practice writing sheet music. The piano roll is extremely counterintuitive and crippled for that purpose. Sheet music will provide at first sight all the information you need on a chord progression you write.

But you can start trying from the simpler to the more complex.

Write chord progressions only with the root of each chord on the bass;
Write only chords that share at least one note in common with the precedent and the following (this excludes chords that come right after or are right before a given chord, for example, you won't write C - Dm, or F - G, etc);
Follow the closest path to move your voices;
Avoid (for real) direct parallel motion of octaves and fifths.
And don't use the VII (diminished) chord for now. It has a tension, the tritone, which demands further explanations of how to deal with.
Don't use 7th chords for now, as these dissonances need further explanations, closely related to how to deal with diminished chords.
Don't use inversions.
The distance between the bass and the tenor can be free, as long as they don't get too far away from one another; to the upper voices (tenor-alto-soprano), make sure that there isn't more than an octave between them.
Work only with triads, which means that, since you will be using four voices, SATB, one of the notes of the chord gonna have to be duplicated. Give preference to the octave and the 5th. The 3rd gives the quality of a chord (major or minor) and therefore only one input of the 3rd is necessary to express your harmony.
Always begin and end the progression with the I chord.

These are not RULES, as there is no such thing in the creative process, BUT, we must seek rules in music if we have the purpose of writing in a specific style (that's why music from the classical period is different from the baroque, the baroque music is different from the renaissance, all of them are different to romanticism etc. - Because the tradition led to different principles that were strictly followed, and when composers were tedious about them they would do things unexpected by doing the contrary of how they were taught; and from that would emerge a new set of rules, and the relaxation of the previous rules, and give birth to a new style ).

To dive intuitively into how humans created music and how the voice leading rules emerged from - oh wow - our own nature, the human voice, and the resonance in our bodies - it's a great trip and makes you master voice leading.

Now, each one of us is different, and only you can tell (or hear what's inside you) what fits you best. I do recommend that you try a month of paid ToneGym.

If there is anything else that I can help with, let me know!

There is a lot of interesting opinions and facts in the thread already so I will be very brief. I have background in multimedia engineering and music production. Spent a lot of time on SoundGym and always avoided ToneGym because I thought music theory is only for musicians who play in tuxedos 😂 (and Rick Beato). Now I know a little theory goes a long way and it would make my life easier if I wasn't that stubborn. It is definitely more important for you to detect problematic frequency range than determine tone intervals but if you can, try to do both.

@Igor Dinotte thank you for your long and big input here, definitely gives more direction and understanding

You are welcome!

I'm a professional producer. Tonegym is way more useful than Soundgym.

If you're writing music, Soundgym improves your confidence with the keyboard, helps you with new scales, new chords, sing cleanly, and learn your favorite songs faster so you can see how they did it (plus playing along is fun). I love Tonegym!

On the other hand, I paid for a year of Soundgym, used it a couple of times, then realized it was a waste of time and cut my losses. Maybe it's because I'm already a pretty good mixer, but I literally do not see the point unless ALL you do is mix, and even then, they're purely academic exercises that have no practical application. So even if you get better at the games, it won't help your mixes, because mixing is knowing the sound you're going for, knowing the tools you have, and mindset. Not knowing if a compressor is doing 1dB vs 3dB. It's like those brain games that claim to make you smarter, but only teach you how to improve at that one game, which is useless.

The most useful thing may be identifying frequencies, but it doesn't actually save you that much time because you dial in the frequency knob to the perfect value when you EQ anyway... it's not like you have to know the exact frequency before you cut/boost. I'm good at identifying frequencies, and even then, I can admit it's nothing more than a party trick. You're better off watching MWTM.

Thank you, @Jason Blank !

It was important for me!

Thank you @Jason Blank for your input!
I find personally that Sound Gym is useful for me. I improved my aural skills for sure by doing it but that's not a topic of discussion here.
Could you give more details about why ToneGym is useful for you as a producer, what skills are developed along the way? also what type of music are making?
Right now, I'm not learning someone's music and playing instruments, that's not my area of interest and expertise.
I'm more into sound design and producing EDM type of tracks.

jumpin back in, I personally started producing EDM and Lofi tracks about 6 years ago with no previous knowledge in music theory. like, at all. Over the last 2 years, I took a step back from the DAWs and began heavily taking online classes about music theory, and about instrumentation. While I found good progress with my studies and relating that learned information to my music projects, I felt that there was a line where I could produce something very epic on any DAW you put in front of me , but if you asked me to play the piece I created on my DAW on say piano or guitar, I would have a lot of trouble articulating that on each instrument clearly. Jumping on Tonegym gave me more tools of understanding and playing the games are a bit more fine tuned towards what I am aspiring to get out of the process (ear training, note and chord detection , and becoming more fluent with sheet music in order to replicate whatever I produce easily to any instrument of choice. Even in terms of writing new projects, having an understanding of music notation and voice leading became a huge step in how I write my melodys and songs. Soundgym is great but like @jasonblank mentioned Soundgym does have sort of a gimick approach due to EQ/mixdown process being related to the sounds that you are using in the mix vs just EQing sounds in general, while personally, I have felt a big impact from even just one week of playing around with the tools on Tonegym. I went from producing just rhythmic and energetic tracks to producing songs that have an emotional purpose, how to invoke certain emotions in my projects and how to play around with that feeling. Now, again, thats what I wanted to get out of the musical journey with my studies and Tonegym. What do you want to get out of using Tonegym? Do you feel that you can improve your writing process in terms of both melody, instrument voicing and creating the desired emotion from the point of idea and easily translate that into your tracks? At the same time of all of this, while writing new fluid progressions has made my music feel more developed, there is no denying the strengths in todays ability of sound design with synths. Consider Serum and Vital or really any popular synth VST. The capabilities inside of those and the strength of sound that these tools can create are unmatched with any theory you can come up. I apologize if my previous comment came off as brash at all, but I do want to stress that the benefits of any educational resource depends on what you personally expect to get out of the experience. For me, I wanted to build on my weaknesses, which was not having a professional musical background in my past to guide me in my musical journey. So using Tonegym has in my case been one of the best applications to help further my studies and point me in the direction I want to continue in.

As a producer of any genre, you are playing with notes, chords and chord progressions. That is not something you can avoid with even the strongest sound designing tool. It helps provide the fundamentals to the basics of creating music. I feel that any producer, any musician, heck any person interested in music can strongly build their skill set with the tools provided by Tonegym, and they can lead you into further studies if your purpose is clear of what you intend to get out of the experience.

Hey man, I wouldn't really call myself a producer but I've had the payed version of tone gym for more than a year. I continue my subscription mostly just because I like the community here, everyone helps keep me motivated. But there are sites like https://tonedear.com/ that offer very similar tools to what tonegym offers but its completely free. So if its the money thats keeping you on the fence then you could try that out and see if its worth your time.

For what its worth, I think the main benefit to apps and sites like tonedear and tonegym is building up the ability to:
- read music notation
- identify intervals/scale degrees up to an octave, ascending descending and harmonic
- identify basic chord qualities such as min, maj, dim, aug, sus, and 7 chords
- transcribing basic melodies

Learning music theory, learning to hear chord progressions, and learning solfege/singing are also super useful skills to have but I honestly don't consider tonegym to be a great resource for achieving any of these things especially considering it costs money. I also don't think these apps or websites are that useful for progressing into the advanced stages of any of these skills.

You've already mentioned that you understand basic music theory, and basically have the skills I've mentioned above, so I'm not sure an app/website would really do that much for you. If your goal is to get better at outputting your ideas into a DAW, then it sounds like you'd benefit most from just improving piano since a MIDI keyboard is the easiest way to quickly create your own harmonic landscape in a DAW. IMO if you constantly try to understand and hear whats going on harmonically in everything you create in a DAW then you are going to get way more benefit out of that then you would drilling intervals here on TG or any other site.

I would normally also encourage learning to play the basics on lots of different instruments, but you mentioned that you're not particularly interested in that.

Music is a hearing art and anything that can help you hear and play what's in your head is a must. Being able to hear and sing (even if not good) intervals, scales, catch chord inversion etc makes you a better overall better musician. It opens up the Sonic Landscape. Melodies, phrasing, harmony. It will change your approach to composition guaranteed

My music mentor and guitar teacher had me focus on 3 three things. 1) Ear training 2) Rythmn 3) My own personal style

I had been playing guitar for 10+ years already before i met him and it changed my playing drastically

Yo, so many good points! thanks!
While we were having the discussion here I stumbled upon a video where a guy says that ear training exercises are dived into 2 categories: audiation(hearing notes inside of a head knowing how it sounds like before hearing actual interval) and recognition(telling what is after hearing). he says that most apps and programs are focusing and recognition of intervals and so on, but not on audiation because it's impossible to do in an app. recognition is not that important in real settings. I personally rarely find myself thinking what is this interval or what step in scale is it.

Maybe it's a confirmation bias playing a role on me here.

I want more experienced people take a look at this video a few minutes and let us know, if it's valid point or not

solfegiator helps with audiation a lot

Idk people say sound gym or tonegym is a party trick or tools that want help you in advance levels. Theses apps give you an opportunity to improve the fundamentals of being a composer. Yes in sound gym numbers aren’t that important but what is important is defining the changes in sensation in hearing. 1db defines a certain amount of loudness, 10db also defines an amount of loudness. This is important, beccaue now you have a better educated guess of how much you want to increase or decrease a sound program. Will you only really on theses applications no! But you should you use them to improve the fundamental of what you hear.

Do it, I improved beyond my imagination and will continue to improve.

@Question Man Listens — multi-genre... mainly electronic stuff but rock/pop/hiphop/trailer/instrumental.... Depends on the month.

If you're writing sound-design tracks like Virtual Riot, Mr Bill, etc, you're better off on Youtube and Patreon than either Tonegym or Soundgym. But if you're using chords and melodies/hooks then Tonegym will encourage you to explore those.

@Lavelle Romain you don't really need Soundgym to hear 1dB vs 10dB. But even smaller amounts like 3dB vs 6dB you'll pick up what you need on the way. Volume is a slider anyway, you should be adjusting it with your eyes closed until it sounds right. Not picking a number and letting confirmation bias come into play.

If you have fun training for that, that's great, and you should continue it; there are worse things you can be doing with your time. But for people who are producing music, Tonegym is the practical choice.

The kind of listening skills SG and TG are aimed for are so different that I'd say almost every present-day musician can benefit from both trainings.

I think @Jason Blank that Youtube and Patreon won't give the practice necessary, it'll provide us only with information but we need to internalize it, that's why I'm looking for a tool to sharpen my ears. SoundGym (and I believe ToneGym) has some useful and helpful games and at the same time there are games that aren't that helpful and can be skipped.
it's up to a trainee to choose his/her training exercises.

Thanks @Daniel Mcgarry now, I'm sold on this :)

@Jason Blank im sorry but I have to strongly disagree. I personally have the best ear of my life from using sound gym. I can find frequencies way faster. And I can level match quicker too. Before sound gym I would guess with my novice ears and after wasting so much time still come out with mediocre mixes. Now I’m fast n get my mix closer to what I want. @Question Man Listens seems like he know what he needs to do. 👍🏿

Something that most of us forget to say (myself included), when it comes to improving our musicianship, is simply listening to more music!

For the past few months I've been trying to listen to a different album, one I've never heard before, every day before my pre-sleep meditation practice.

Personally, I'm used to being open to new musical experiences, and I've listened to a lot across a wide range of genres, and yet, thanks to YouTube, Spotify, etc., there's always something new and beautiful to discover.

If we want to have more musical resources, we must first be aware that they exist, right?

As for becoming technically familiar with the names of scales and chords, I have already made some observations regarding what ear training methods offer and how effective I do not believe they are, at least proportionally in relation to the time we invest in them.

So, allow me to make a personal observation before expressing what I actually find effective in familiarizing yourself with scales, chords, and chord progressions.

I've been ''playing'' the piano for 20 years (I'll soon make it clear why I put the verb in quotation marks). I had a very good teacher, a graduate of one of the leading music colleges here in Brazil. The study was on classical piano (which includes a very vast repertoire from centuries to the present day). I only took classes for a year and a half, more or less. Soon my aspirations to pursue a career in music were hampered due to external pressures. Anyway, I had a small hiatus, including selling my piano, but the desire to play was inherent and I started playing again some time later. Since then, I have been self-taught on the instrument.

Now comes the curious part. For some reason I feel something strange about verbalizing “I play the piano” or saying that I know how to play if someone asks me. What does knowing how to play mean, anyway? Later on, I will come to what I consider to be the measure that allows us to answer the question. But what was going through my head was the following reasoning: I can play some pieces I practiced - some Chopin preludes, mainly - but I can't play many other things!. If I say I know how to play the piano, is it in relation to what or who? Ask me to play a Rachmaninov prelude, and I can play the piano as well as a chimpanzee.

So the feeling I had is that I would best describe myself as an antiques keeper, for lack of better terms. I study the score of the piece and through me it is preserved and resonates. And that's it. Of course, the many piano techniques are found in many more works, and progress in studying one piece will influence progress in studying other pieces. But still, it's not enough for me to say I KNOW PLAYING THE PIANO (and it's the verb ''know'' that matters here), because, otherwise, anyone who knows how to read sheet music and find the notes on the keyboard knows how to play as much as myself

I know I'm not the only one who has similar concerns, including among professional pianists.

So, upon reflection I found a conception with which I would be satisfied to be able to say ''I know how to play the piano''. It's about, so to speak, being intimate with the keyboard. Knowing its geography, adapting my ergonomics to its nuances. Actually playing the instrument, rather than reproducing a given piece. It is being able to remove the intermediaries between the human being and the instrument so that music can be made through sound.

And this is where what I consider the best way to learn scales, chords and chord progressions comes in. It was the intuitive answer I arrived at, and I don't maintain a constant practice in this regard, as other topics are of greater relevance to me than being an instrumentalist, although I can imagine returning to this practice at some point, while the world turns.

Improvisation. Contrary to what it may seem, a musician who knows how to improvise is not a genius who hears all the sounds of an instrument once, and from then on instinctively knows which notes to play at which moment. The study of improvisation allows the instrumentalist to move consciously (although he does not need to think about each new movement) through melodies and chords.

Is there any way to say that ear training exercises, in which we hear scales and have to press a button to answer which scale it is, are better than the live experience of hearing the same scale through the action of our bodies? Especially since we can also sing it while making it come from our fingers to the instruments? Also, wouldn't this be true for chords and harmonic progressions?

Therefore, the study of improvisation evolves gradually as knowledge of musical theory increases. And in a lively way, in a musical context.

I found material for this in jazz literature, and in partimento. Going straight to jazz improvisation may not be so good, due to the characteristics of its harmony. Partimento, in turn, is a method that develops, at the same time, knowledge of harmony, counterpoint and improvisation on the keyboard. I recommend that those interested take the time to research what it is about, and then listen to yourself to see if this would be the best way to become increasingly familiar with the resources of music and musical practice.

Better than hearing an isolated chord, progression and scale, looking at a screen, and pressing a button, is having it come out of your fingers while you can sing it. It leaves you, and comes back to you in a cyclical way. This involves much more physiological, neural and ergonomic resources in learning, and therefore, there is no saying that it is not much better.

I hear what you are saying . I believe that people are pulled to a resource like ToneGym for a reason. We all come from different starting points, with different fears about our abilities and bring with us different resources. From a learning perspective, we all learn in different ways. The more different senses that we bring to learning sometimes the easier the journey I played the piano for years but don’t have one right now, but I do find that constantly signing the notes or chords helps my ability immensely. In the diffrrent posts I read I think that others do it too!

Yes, I recommended the author of the post to pay ToneGym for at least a month. Of course it's best to use all the tools available, but if I don't have any different opinions to offer, the only thing I could say is ''yes, this is the best method, stick with it!'' And it would be impossible for me to try to assume all the possible backgrounds of each person and give a specific answer to each hypothesis. I just try to offer another perspective for everyone to use as they see fit, and I see a lot of progress when we step outside of a comfort zone. Many ToneGym members have already completed the game, but still find meaning in participating in competitions, and I don't see anything wrong if that is someone's main motivation instead of composing, playing, singing or analyzing music better.

And we don't need a piano, but having any keyboard helps a lot. It could be a midi controller, a synthesizer, an organ, a harpsichord... It makes it easier to affirm musical information in our minds through visual memory.

Cheers!