Tone Reviews

I bought a premium license for Tone when it first came out with the guarantee I would have it forever. Unfortunately, this license magically disappeared and now I have to buy a subscription.

Also, it makes absolutely no sense to me that Tone requires a subscription. Don’t get me wrong, the developer did a really good job designing Tone and it deserves some sort of payment, but a subscription is incredibly greedy. There are apps like Tenuto which require a single purchase, and Tone should be doing the same thing. Just based on this fact alone, I would advise people to look for a different ear training app.

The few minutes that I used Tone aren’t really enough to review Tone performance, but the dark pattens used to try to get me to subscribe are worthy of a negative review.

Using Tone constantly pushes you into paying for the pro model; this isn’t a bad thing by itself, but the methods used to persuade are very misleading.

First, “asking” for pro upgrade consists of a full screen modal dialog which does not provide a method of closing until the user has scrolled to the bottom.

Second, after closing the dialog a second dialog opens with a big button to upgrade. There is no obvious way to close this. The user needs to click on the payment button to proceed and then cancel out of the next screen.

Third, most of the features in config are pay gated, but the user isn’t informed until an attempt to change the value is made, which starts the full cycle listed on my first point above.

Additionally, there is no monthly payment option, and the upfront costs are very high. This isn’t really “dark” but it’s definitely a barrier to entry. It wouldn’t be nearly as annoying if you didn’t feel so pressured into upgrading.

Please don’t support these bad practices by buying into them.

I appreciate that there is a 7 day trial for this, BUT I think the $99 (for a year) price tag is a little greedy—especially when the developer(when introduced in Tone ) writes about his love of music and wanting to help others feel the same and achieve their musical goals. Despite the high price I am willing to pay because I am a singer and I’m trying to learn piano. It means a lot to me to be able to recognize notes by sound and to read music.

Since installing Tone a few days ago I have been encountering an extremely frustrating glitch that is both frustrating and discouraging. I open Tone , click on practice or learn and Tone immediately closes. The only fix that I’ve found for this is to uninstall and reinstall Tone . As you may agree this is RIDICULOUS. Am I going to want to practice knowing that when I try, Tone will close repeatedly until I uninstall and reinstall? The short answer is no, and I’m certainly not going to pay $100 for this aggravation. It’s extremely disappointing too, because Tone itself is great and deserves 5 stars. I hope the development team sees this review and I hope they fix this extremely annoying glitch because I can’t take it anymore. If it gets fixed I’ll stick with it. Please fix!

TLDR: Complete and disgraceful money grab.

I really want to like Tone as it can be a great resource for musicians. However, the $99 per year price is absolutely absurd for an app that should just be a $5-10 one time purchase. This is, in my opinion, a predatory move on the developers end. They are hoping people will start the 1 week free trial, forget to cancel it, then charge $99.

For $99 per year there should also be many more features such as choosing separated intervals, arpeggiated chords, different instrument sounds, rhythmic practice, and more specific customizations overall. In my opinion save the $100-$200 you would spend over two years and buy a cheap keyboard. You will get much more use out of it.

Anybody that studies/performs music knows you can just get tenuto for 4 dollars and it has way more functionality and lessons then Tone... (Only 3 exercises for 99$ a year? Not even close to tenuto). If you are not into music theory and just want to play auraly (by ear) tenuto is still BY FAR the better option because you have all 3 exercises that the this app app has (pitch, chord, and interval identification) AND scale training with basic aural keyboard training to boot. I also assume anybody that wants to auraly learn also wants to play either the guitar or piano which TENUTO HAS. Practice exersizes like aural fret/key identification as well as chords, intervals, and scale identication are all included within tenuto. On top of that the company that makes tenuto has a sight that you can access this information FOR FREE. So why spend money on this subscription when you quite literally can get more for less. I'll give 1 star for excellent design but this is a rip off.

Overall Tone is pretty decent at aural learning. There’s only three different exercises to choose from but they do a pretty good job at helping your aural skills. Tone wants you to pay $10/month for training courses but you really don’t get anything extra, you just get a more structured training regimen over a 45 day period. You can still so everything Tone has to offer without paying. Just make your own training regimen. I wish there were more exercises but for what it is its a decent app

I like the idea of pitch memory rather than perfect pitch. Being able to rely on yourself instead of available or non available musical instruments which may or may not be in tune.... of course A as 440 is a 20th century construct versus a 380 A in say, Bach’s day. Good relative pitch would suffice in many instances. While pitch memory is indispensable to a professional or ambitious amateur/ student. I wonder if the price isn’t discouragingly high for someone NOT making money in some portion of the industry. Three weeks of the subscription price would buy a pitch pipe as easily carry-able as a cell phone and without the problems of batteries running low. Maybe engineers, doctors and mechanics could do with perfect pitch but 1) they have machines for those diagnostics and 2) it’s an AMAZING mechanic who can diagnose an engine defect by sound. I like this idea but I’m frankly annoyed by the cost. (Not that programmers shouldn’t be paid but with a few well functioning apps and they can get a high paying software gig making more money than the best paid professional artists). I’m happy to concede the point if you can explain.... There should be theory, notation and a pitch finding function in Tone for that price. Also NB this is all and only for western music and half this app scales. MUCH harder to hear for the western trained ear is Easter European and or African quarter this app scales. If someone could offer to train me to hear That, I’d pay good money for it.

Perfect pitch is something some of us we’re fortunate, or unfortunate, to be given at birth. While I do admit it is helpful being able to sign and note by name at the correct pitch, and it’s also great for songwriting.. it’s also a curse sometimes. It’s almost unbearable to attend live performances the majority of the time because we can’t just “not hear” every note the artist or band painfully plays or sings just a little pitched up or down. While everyone around me is just gleefully singing along and enjoying the “raw” aspect of the live performance, I am cringing at every minor vocal pitch mistake.. or that one backup guitar player who’s A string is inadvertently out of tune a half the entire time. It’s hard to explain, but the impact of these little “mistakes” gets far more attention from my perfect pitched brain than the rest of the music. So, maybe just enjoy not having perfect pitch be part of who you are. It’s not that great, all things considered.

The concept seems pretty good. However, to speed eventual consistent this app recognition working with how the brain learns is essential. So something more than just guessing notes is needed to gain perfect pitch. First try to notice how each note has distinct characteristics. As you do, though, learning can only begin to occur when you are able to compare any wrong guess with the correct this app. To accomplish this simply allow dwell time on the incorrect guess and the correct note instead of just moving on to the next set. Learning occurs when our focus is on how the wrong guess and correct note are different. With such a tweak to the behavior of Tone you may help develop more perfect pitchers.

Tone is gorgeous, with a very pleasing UI and color scheme. Some ear training apps feel too juvenile or alternatively too cold and scientific. this app strikes a nice balance. It feels odd to me to have to choose # or b in pitch display; it should show both like F#/Gb. I like using the piano keyboard for input to avoid this eyesore but it’s buggy with the black keys. Also a bug where playback is muted after pause and resume. I’m not convinced it will help you train absolute pitch; once I hear one note my brain just uses relative pitch to find the next notes. My biggest concern is the price. For $99/yr there are many other ear training apps that offer these same features and more. I won’t be subscribing but the trial has been fun.

First of all, many people debate whether perfect pitch can be learned after the age of about 6. But there is a decent amount of literature claiming otherwise, and at this point one could find there is a trope to learning it as an adult. One of the main tenants of any practice of it, though, is constant, regular, long-form practice. Like, daily 30-minute intent practice over 10 years.

That said, Tone doesn’t do that, at least not in its methodology. Maybe it could work with regular, 30-min practice over many years, but Tone isn’t robust enough to incite that sort of commitment out of it.

As it is, it’s an excellent relative-pitch practice device. The main issue is that, once the user hears the first pitch of their practice session, the rest of the pitches from that point on are heard in relation to the first one — thus ‘relative’ pitch. The only way this could really be used for perfect pitch practice is to try at only the first pitch when you open Tone , then put it away for 30 mins, listen to other stuff, then come back and try it again, over and over and over.

FWIW, it IS still really great as an on-the-go ear training gismo. I’ve already thought about having my students use it, as it is very simple but has many options for scales etc.

I have my doctorate in music composition, so I think about this stuff a lot. Thanks for Tone regardless!

This is by far the best ear training app I've used. It definitely helps train, but falls a bit short on its advertising of training perfect pitch. Since notes are played one after another, I think it helps mostly with relative pitch. But that's not a bad thing!

In the future, I think more options, including a true "perfect pitch" mode (possibly playing a series of unidentified notes in between) would give Tone even more longevity.

Overall I definitely recommend!

Amazing app for learning music note and chord recognition. You feel like you’re not learning anything at first but then you return to the piano the next day and subconsciously you’ve been building skills you never thought possible!

The only feature I’d suggest from Tone maker is for them to allow you to use your own instrument to answer in response to pitch or chord cues; eg if it plays and asks you to guess a certain this app (eg F sharp) the mic listens for you to (correctly) play back a note on the piano and gives you credit. The advantage of this feature is hat he learning would be more closely linked to your own instrument of choice 🎹

Tone is really coming a long way in improvement. I appreciate those who work on it so that we, users, can improve our musical ear. I’ve always focused on the Perfect Pitch portion of Tone and I can say that I can identify any more in any octave in less that half a second, which leads me to the feature request.

Feature Request: Can an advanced Perfect Pitch practice be introduced? Something where two or more notes are play at the same time and we have to select which notes are being played.

I’ve only tried this for 5 minutes, but I want to do more. It starts with buttons for C, D, E, F & G on screen. To begin, touch a button to play a this app. A waveform appears as the note is sounded. As you hear the this app, you select its letter name. If you were wrong the screen turns red and the correct name appears. If you were right the screen turns green, the correct name appears and a new sound plays. If you succeed, a third this app is sounded, and so on. Soon you are paying attention to intervals. With more trials, visual feedback of the correct name flashing reinforces name and this app correlation. The green color feedback reinforces making a correct response, and negative red feedback cautions and hopefully inhibits you from repeatedly selecting that choice again. Soon you’re hearing the tones in your head. And naming them. I like this so far. We’ll see how much progress occurs after a week’s free trial. I’ll update the review then.

Tone is amazing! It really helps when you are practicing perfect pitch! You can adjust the settings and customize the way you want to learn perfect pitch. If you want to learn how to hear notes in a low, medium, or an high octave, or even all of them simultaneously you can learn. You can learn all the notes in the piano, and there’s also the option to focus on what notes you want to learn in the chromatic scale. Tone is a really good way to practice and I totally recommend it without a doubt! 🙌🏾🙌🏾💯

As a guitar and piano music developer, I can confirm that it is very important, if not essential, to be able to play any melody that you make up in your head. this app teaches your brain to figure out what all of those notes are by their relation to each other and their pitch individually. With Tone, (as long as you know what note it starts on) you can play anything you hear, even if it’s in your brain.

So this game is just what the title says it is. It doesn’t have any in app purchases as far as I can tell, and I don’t have any trouble with getting it to work. You don’t need anything else like headphones or anything. It is just perfection. I really like games like this one just because they don’t glitch out, or they don’t have a bunch of adds. In this game, I haven’t seen any adds so far which is a super good sign! This game is a game that just makes me happy. Like it not only is fun, but it is a good helper for singing or playing an instrument!!!! I really love this because it shows you stuff, and it’s super fun to do with or without friends. It’s a great time consumer. It lets you know about different tones and how that stuff works. And it looks really cool when you play. I love the time running out thing too. Like when the time plays and the light is going down, I like that. So all in all, get this game kids, or adults or anything, because it is worth it and it’s free.

Studies have suggested that we’re all born with at least the possibility of developing perfect pitch, and that it’s also an inheritable trait. Some of us have it right out of the box, while others have to work at it. Maybe, like foreign languages, if you start too late, you may never be completely perfect. And yet: What a great app! Before this, the only way to practice like this would have been to pay someone (or coerce a talented friend) to sit at a piano and play intervals and chords for you. Any pianist would suffer boredom doing it for 30 minutes straight, and they’d also start making mistakes. Tone, instead, can help you keep your focus until YOU start to tire, and it has sometimes held my attention for an hour or more at a time. While I have yet to actually develop true perfect pitch, my overall sense is definitely improved. Fully perfect pitch still seems just out of reach, but maybe eventually I’ll get there. In the meantime, my relative pitch has improved tremendously, along with my general musicianship. This is an amazing tool for any musician. The younger you are to start this the better. But this writer is 62 years old and still finding it to be a great benefit.

This is the most succinct approach to ear training that I have discovered. I was playing notes for myself before I found it, similarly to the “practice” function, but the ability to have notes randomly generated, and to control for pitch class and octave with a time limiting function creates a far more robust tool. I’ve made more rapid progress in ear training with this app than in my entire career as a professional musician. It’s a simple, but highly effective, approach.

This is a great app and can make a fun party game. For people interested in music. The $99 subscription price is steep tho. I am terrible with reading and following through with unsubscribing to apps so Thank God I happened to check the day of and stopped it. I do still have it on my phone as the free version gives me enough options for my intended use which is to training my ears to distinctly recognize all 12 notes in the scale accurately I started at %50 and am now consistently at %80 or above. Thank You

Tone is amazing! It really helps when you are practicing perfect pitch! You can adjust the settings and customize the way you want to learn perfect pitch. If you want to learn how to hear notes in a low, medium, or an high octave, or even all of them simultaneously you can learn. You can learn all the notes in the piano, and there’s also the option to focus on what notes you want to learn in the chromatic scale. Tone is a really good way to practice and I totally recommend it without a doubt! 🙌🏾🙌🏾💯