Tag: music

Music theory - Interval trainer

Interval Trainer

Over the past few months, I have been getting back into playing guitar after a fairly long hiatus. I even started taking guitar lessons. My practice has involved playing a lot of bluegrass fiddle tunes and learning carter-style arrangements of old country and bluegrass songs.

Playing bluegrass with others involves playing solos, or "taking breaks". This just means improvising over the melody of the song. As I've been inching closer toward working on my own improvisational skills, I've realized that I don't have as much intuition about what each interval in the chromatic scale truly sounds like. I want to get to the point where I can listen to a song and recognize when the 4th chord is played vs the 5th or in a break when someone adds in a flat 5. 

To help myself train my ear to recognize each interval, I vibe coded a tool using Claude code. The page has two main parts: play each interval at your own pace and a quiz that will play intervals at random and you have to choose the correct one. I also added some descriptions to the intervals to help myself think about what those intervals feel like. There is also a toggle to show the "blue notes". 

This is one part of my journey to being able to both improvise better but also transcribe music faster.
# / 2025 / 12 / 13

My week in music

Moanin’ The Blues

I reached a major life milestone this week: I fell in love with Hank Williams. This is how I know I’m getting old. The music is timeless though.

Other notable artists this week: Ethel Cain and Kendrick Lamar. I need to find some new music asap.

# / 2025 / 02 / 21