DronePlayer vs Chinese Music Instruments

DronePlayer is a fun, interactive practice assistant for improvising musicians. Playing over extended tonalities is a great way to develop your ears as well as your musical ideas. Long, sustained tones are generally known as drones. Drones have proven themselves quite useful for practicing. Many people use them to assist with intonation. Some enjoy playing scales over them. I personally have found them useful for practicing improvisation and improving my ears. Muting one of the drone voices is a great way to play with just a fundamental pitch. You can then improvise over this and focus on hearing how what you are playing relates. Adding a second drone voice just adds to the fun.

Chinese musical instruments are very interesting and have a very long history. This app try to present these Chinese instruments to non-Chinese player. There is a Chinese Version for the Chinese people. Chinese Music has been made since the dawn of Chinese civilization with documents and artifacts providing evidence of a well-developed musical culture as early as the Zhou Dynasty (1122 BC – 256 BC). Today, the music continues a rich traditional heritage in one aspect, while emerging into a more contemporary form at the same time. Traditional music in China is played on solo instruments or in small ensembles of plucked and bowed stringed instruments, flutes, and various cymbals, gongs, and drums. The scale is pentatonic. Dizi and qin are among the oldest known musical instruments from China; instruments are traditionally divided into categories based on their material of composition: animal skins, gourd, bamboo, wood, silk, earth/clay, metal, and stone. Chinese orchestras traditionally consist of bowed strings, woodwinds, plucked strings and percussion. This app includes 24 Chinese instruments, which fall into four categories: Wind instruments include dizi, xiao, sheng, suona, guan and xun etc. Plucked instruments include pipa, zheng, ruan, liuqin, sanxian and qin etc. Bowed instruments include erhu, gaohu, banhu, zhonghu, gehu and matouqin etc. Percussion instruments include dagu, bangu, bo, lou, bianzhong and yangqin etc. Each instrument has a high resolution picture, a description text file and a famous representative music. There are total 25 pieces of Chinese music, total time play exceed two hours. There is also a Music Player to play the music, if you want to listen to the music only. Beside music, there are two YouTube Video links to each Chinese instrument.