Tuesday, January 01, 2013

Tone Tutor


For those who are unable to go to the Summer Liturgical School in Jordanville, the Tone Tutor is an excellent set of CDs that will teach you the 8 tones according to the common usage of the Russian Church, and uses the methods taught at Jordanville. There are 10 CDs: one for each of the 8 tones. One for "mid term" and "final" tests, and one for refreshing your memory. This tone teaches each variation of the 8 tones: the troparion, sticheron, sticheron refrains, prokimenon, and irmos melodies. The program is completely audio based... you need only pop in the first CD, and follow the instructions from there.

This fills an important need. In the 90's there was a cassette tape available, but it was not nearly as user friendly, and the translation used for the text was not the most commonly used ones in ROCOR.

Choir members who have not yet memorized the tones will greatly benefit from this, and especially those who are thrust into the position of manning the cliros, and have no one else to prompt them when a particular tone is called for, and they have no one to get them started. Many years ago, I was in that situation, and I used some cassette tapes that were available, and worked on the tone of the week each week, until I had them all down. But this is a much more thorough program. I highly recommend it.

It can be purchased by clicking here.