App Detail » Step and a Half: Melody Training

Published by: Chris Sutton

iPhone App - Designed for iPhone, compatible with iPad

Price: $3.99
Current Version: 1.2
Released: July 01, 2010

What's New

● New option to review answer at end of level
● Increased tempo range for Custom Stages (up to 300BPM)
● Improved iOS 5 compatibility
● HD graphics for Retina Display

App Description

⇒ From the makers of RelativePitch (as featured in New and Noteworthy in the App Store) ⇐

Learn to figure out tunes... by playing a game!

“This is the perfect companion to RelativePitch app.” (User review, August 2010)

“Great way to practice understanding what I am listening to.” (User review, August 2010)

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● I can sing it but I can't play it!
● I can't figure out that guitar solo....
● I wish I could play by ear like that!

Sound familiar? It's frustrating when you know how a tune's supposed to go, but you can't quite hit the right notes. You can get little bits of it right, but can't quite string them together. What to do?

Well, you could practice your instrument for another ten years and hope it gets easier - but you want results now. You could use clever software to slow the track right down and try to tackle it one note at a time - but you can't do that in a band practice or in the middle of a solo!

... or you could download Step and a Half now and make that all second nature.

Step and a Half is a game, simple as can be:

1. Listen to a tune
2. Drag blocks one by one to recreate the tune
3. Check your answer - and learn by correcting any mistakes

Step and a Half starts out slow: with short tunes, only a few intervals, and plenty of time to get the answer right. But by the final stage, you'll be tackling long sequences of notes, using any intervals at all, and getting them right - first time, every time.

Featuring:
• 35+ levels across 6 stages
• Gradual introduction of intervals
• Melodies of varying speeds and lengths, randomly composed for infinite replayability
• Increasing difficulty from simple to fiendishly challenging
• A custom mode to target your own problem spots
• High quality instrument sounds

You don't need any music theory to get started (though any musical education or ear training you've had will help). We suggest our RelativePitch app to start your core interval training, but you can jump straight into Step and a Half too, and the apps are designed to be used together as part of your training.

Here's what users have been saying about Step and a Half so far:

“It is clear that a lot of thought went in to their UI design, as it allows me to methodically improve my ear by providing fine-grained control over what I want to work on. [...] Definitely worth the money!” (October 2010)

“It's true that this approach to training the ear is quite eclectic: naming the spaces between the melody notes, rather than referencing the melody within a harmonic context. But, that is precisely why I love it.” (October 2010)

“Weirdly designed application that has you moving tiles to represent intervals in a melody. Fantastic, and very difficult for some of us.” (August 2010)

“This app fills a void in the ear training genre (to my knowledge) that was desperately needed.” (September 2010)

Step and a Half is part of the Easy Ear Training family - we believe that ear training should be easy, fun and effective. Our first app, RelativePitch, is rated 4.5 stars from over 200 reviews and was featured by Apple on the App Store front page.

If you have any questions about the app, please email us: [email protected].