There is a lot to fit in your weekly music lesson: technical work, learning new repertoire, polishing old repertoire, sight-reading and ear-training all need plenty of time and attention. While most playing-related skills can be easily worked on at home, students don't always have the know-how to go away and develop their relative pitch (or what musicians like to call their 'inner ear'). As students approach the higher grades too in the AMEB syllabus, more is required in terms of the student's ability to distinguish intervals, cadences, and two simultaneously played musical lines, among other things. 

Today's post lines up a couple of helpful resources which students can use to develop their ability to recognise intervals. Most reading this post will already know that an interval is the distance between two musical notes, played either together, or subsequently. This is something which will need to be explained further in lessons, but for those with an understanding of what intervals are, here are some places where you can test your interval recognition:

VCU Music Theory 

Sometimes it's useful to identify intervals by recognising them as they are found in songs. The above website very helpfully gives you a list of intervals and the songs where each interval can be found.

Teoria.com

​This great website gives you the chance to customise which intervals you will be tested on; there are also a number of other tutorials on their pages. 

Musictheory.net 

Another excellent resource for testing intervals (check on the 'Intervals' link); there are a number of exercises on other aspects of ear-training which this website provides. 

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Today, here's the first in a series of sight-reading sheets for beginner cellists. Today's sheet has one week of sight-reading exercises, using open strings, with varied key signatures, and crotchets, minims and quavers. Happy practising everyone! 

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