Drone

What you practise

Drone practice gives you time to listen and adjust while singing. It is useful when you reach a note but drift flat or sharp while holding it, or when you want to practise hearing your own pitch in real time.

Unlike reproducing a note after it stops, you hear the reference and your voice together throughout the attempt.

How it works

1. Open the exercise and choose Free Training.
2. Start an attempt and allow microphone access when requested.
3. Listen to the continuous reference and sing the target in a comfortable octave.
4. Listen as you make small adjustments; use the live pitch feedback to check your impression.
5. Hold within the target tolerance until the attempt completes, then review the result.

Understand the feedback

The live indicator shows whether your detected pitch is below or above the target. Its colour changes with your distance from the target. Hold within the exercise’s tolerance to complete the attempt.

The attempt score is the absolute smoothed pitch error at completion, measured in cents. It is not an average of every moment you sang and does not summarise the stability of an entire phrase. Lower means closer to the target at that point.

Free Training and Test

Use Free Training to explore listening and adjusting against the reference. A Test contains ten completed attempts and reports their average score in cents to two decimal places.

Once a Test attempt starts, you cannot stop it and replace it. Leaving the exercise abandons the incomplete Test.

Free Training is available without an account. To take a Test, register or sign in; the account is free. Completed Tests are saved to your account history. Free Training and unfinished Tests are not saved as Test results.

Practice tips

Keep the volume comfortable and use headphones to keep reference playback separate from the microphone signal. Listen to the interaction between your voice and the drone instead of constantly chasing the visual indicator.

After practising, return to a sustained note in a song. Notice whether you hear drifting sooner and can make smaller corrections.

Choose your next exercise

For entering a note after hearing a reference, try Match the Pitch. To isolate listening from singing, use Pitch Discrimination. For a sustained note inside a harmony, explore Harmonic Tuning.