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So, some of you have probably heard of the Charlie Banacos ear training exercise where you play a ii-V-I on a piano, and then you close your eyes and play some random note with the eraser end of a pencil. What's happening is that the cadence establishes the key in your ear, and then you are training your ear to hear the "penciled" note relative to that key. The reason for the pencil is that if you simply close your eyes and use a finger, it's pretty easy to tell if you've struck a white key or a black key, and then... that isn't quite as much fun.
I really like this, and wanted to be able to keep doing the exercise away from the piano, like say driving around in my car, so I made recorded examples of all twelve notes in 5 different octaves. Basically, every "song" is a ii-V-I in C on the piano, then a random note, and a few seconds pause followed by me announcing the name of the note. The idea is that you would load all 60 examples into a playlist on your iPod (or whatever) and then you can shuffle through it and train your ear at the gym, at your office or cleaning the house! I've been enjoying it and I thought I would share it in case anyone else was interested too.
Enjoy
go to www.andrewmartinmusic.net (http://www.andrewmartinmusic.net) and click on "The Lab"