Forwarding this announcement from Robert Hickman at Pure Ocarinas:
Phrase-by-phrase melodic figure practice tool
I have just released a tool for practising melodic figures on common folk instruments:
https://pureocarinas.com/melodic-figure-practice
== Why practice figures?
If you look at the structure of many Irish tunes, its really obvious that there are many note patterns (figures) that show up in numerous tunes. For example in jigs, patterns like DEF show up time and time again, in various places in the scale (DEF, EFG, FGA etc).
By identifying and practising figures from every note on the instrument’s scale, they become muscle memory and effortless to perform when encountered in tunes. By comparison, if one only practices tunes, a figure will be learned in some positions but not all of them. If you then play a tune using a figure in a place that hasn’t been practised, there’s a good chance that you’ll need to think ‘how do I play that’, and stall.
The figures currently available in the tool were the result of a study of the top 100-ish most popular jigs on this website. They are the most common 3-note figures encountered. I’ll add figures for reels and hornpipes later.
== How to use the tool?
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Select your instrument (or a similar instrument, ‘low whistle’ also works for flutes).
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Select the scale / mode you’d like to practice figures in.
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Look through the list and identify the figure you’d like to practice.
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Select ‘learn’, and an overlay will open with that figure from every note in the selected scale, for the range of the selected instrument.
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Click play, it will play the figure for you. You can use the audio to guide your intonation.
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If you’d like to practice one figure at a time, change the ‘move on’ option to ‘manually’, then either click on a phrase, or use the forward / back buttons, to select what you’d like to practice.
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You can freely change the tempo while it is playing.
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Practice repeatedly until you can play them all on your instrument effortlessly.