More Ideas for Improving Intonation Skills
For the basic technique for using a drone to practice a musical passage, check out the article Basic Drone Practice.
Some Guiding Thoughts on Intonation Training
One of the measures of an improving player is the extent to which they are able to listen and respond to what is going on around them while they are playing. As the ability to read and play notes becomes more fluent, the performer can devote more attention not only to the sounds that they produce but to how these sounds fit with those of the other performers. This of course includes paying attention to intonation, which despite the illusion of an absolute right or wrong implied by commercial tuners, depends critically on the harmonic context and the collaborating players.
Playing in tune has both active and receptive aspects. The active aspects include anything we do to control the pitch. The receptive aspect is listening to and evaluating the note produced, as well as listening to the surrounding players and harmonies. As we gain skills, we are able to both execute actions and to discriminate with a finer grain and at a higher speed.
The ideal technique is to "prehear" the target pitch, and use this inner target to guide the very act of producing the note. Once the note is out in the air, it's too late to call it back. Yo Yo Ma once said that his teacher used to always say to him: "Never play a note without hearing it first." In the course of training with Tone Circle Drone then, it is recommended that the student take full opportunity to practice prehearing as part of the given exercises.
With good practice, pitch awareness will increase both in speed and accuracy and will decrease in the amount of attention required.
Comparison Patterns
In this exercise, we simply play a drone-pattern and listen to it. The drone pattern should be one in which we can listen and compare different tunings. The prebuilt pattern chords/compareTwoChords.tcd has been made to serve as an example. This drone pattern plays two triads in each cycle, with a beat of rest in between. The first triad is set to use equal temperament, the second uses Just intonation. The root is the same, but the fifth and the third differ by 2 and 14 cents respectively. Another example is chords/compareNoteInChord.tcd. In this example, we have two notes of a triad playing continuously, while the third alternates between two tunings.
The task is simply to play and listen, and try and hear what is different. It may be difficult to discern at first, as the differences are subtle. But you might notice that there is a beating or vibration in the tones in the equal tempered chord that is not in the Just intonation chord. After a while, it should also become clear that the 5:4 third is a little flatter than the equal-tempered third.
Feel free to explore by altering the tunings of the various notes and listening for the differences. Another way to compare is to open two drones at once, tune them to different tuning systems, and play them in alternation.
Play and Confirm
This method starts with having Tone Circle Drone play a drone note or notes that will be used as the reference point. The player's goal is to play a chosen target note. Once a target note is settled upon, the user flips ON a node containing the target note, and compares.
For this sort of work, I like to use a continuous sound, like the ETanpura for the held notes, and a timbre with a bell-shaped envelope, like the EPiano, for the comparison tone. The exact number of beats in the cycle or the position of the comparison note are a matter of personal preference.
Sweet Spot Practice
Set up and play a drone-pattern with just a couple tones that use a sustained timbre, and tune the tones to the root and its octaves, or add a fifth degree and possibly its octaves. I prefer to use the 3:2 ratio fifth for this exercise. The default drone-pattern that shows when Tone Circle Drone first opens works well. A tanpura drone-pattern can also work well for this exercise.
While the drone is playing, slowly play an arpeggio on your instrument. Before a note is played, try to hear it in your mind. When you play it, purposely alter the note's pitch, making it go a small but noticeable amount flat, then a small but noticeable amount sharp. Keep alternating by progressively smaller amounts until you center in on what sounds like the note's sweet spot, a point of particular consonance and resonance. At first, finding this point might be difficult. If so, try to at least arrive at a pitch that sounds neither sharp nor flat. With practice over time, the ear will become keener.
After having done this exercise with arpeggios (can be triads or sevenths, or even sustained chords or ninths), another version is to play simpler scales, such as various pentatonics. A bigger challenge still would be to play a full major, minor or modal scale, while prehearing and going through the tuning process for each note. One could eventually work their way up to a chromatic scale.
The goal is not so much to memorize specific pitches, but to practice the act of pitch discernment. By purposely moving the pitch around and progressively centering, one exercises and strengthens key neuronal pathways involved in pitch discrimination.