In time-honoured fashion, I’ve broken my New Year’s resolution immediately. I’m about to talk ear training.
After resuming frequent testing recently, I felt the whole project was going nowhere slowly. While I sense my feeble powers of transcription are slightly improved, the return doesn’t justify the effort. So I’m starting a new phase, using fixed points of origin and not mixing ascending and descending intervals. It’s back to basics.
Here’s where I got to with the last program, for now unfinished:
And here’s how things have gone so far with the new (third) program:
On the first day, I scored 99% or 100% on the first three tests - no need to repeat those. I scored 95% on the fourth test (2, 5, 7, 9 and 12 semitone intervals, analogous to where I was up to in the previous set of attempts). It’s clearly easier to go in only one direction, and from the same starting note every time. Most of the 5% errors were induced by the software automatically trying to raise the difficulty because of the level of success I was having, and putting me off. I’ll try to get more resilient.
For now I will stick at this level and see whether I can get it up into the 99-100% range (which I eventually did on 23 January).
Meanwhile, I’m playing a lot these days - up to two hours a day. Some time ago I noted that I was happiest when I played well. I’m pleased to say that this is where I am improving now. My playlist in Ultimate Guitar has 57 songs in it, and about half of these are also tracks in my DAW. I don’t need more songs. I’ve had a grasp of music theory long before I took up guitar seriously. I don’t need to learn how music works. So, the road ahead is pretty clear - keep practicing. Play more, and you’ll play better.