Over the past couple of years, I've become more insistent that my students spend time every day practicing with an organ drone. My own experience practicing with drones has been very positive: it sets an excellent tone for how the rest of my practice session will be (ideally with very little tolerance for playing notes that don't "ring" truly in tune); and helps me to focus and establish a strong center to my conception of how intervals should sound.
To help my students and my self, I created a series of drones using an organ sound (very rich in overtones with a strong fundamental) that can be pumped out of a set of speakers, and that I find quite perfect for playing along to. I've sent these out to many of my own students, and have had a lot of requests for them over the years, so I've decided to put them in an easily accessible place: my new "Store" page. The drones are set around A-440, and range from C2 to C7 (61 tones total, each at 5 minutes in length).
The most convenient way I find of using them is through a playlist on my phone (I happen to use an iPhone, but I've also used this on a Windows laptop, an Android phone, and an iPad) which has the tones set in chromatic order. The device then outputs sound to a speaker, and I control the whole thing with a bluetooth pedal. Using this method, I can switch chromatically between tones as I warm up, or even create a playlist with a particular chord progression for whichever piece of music I happen to be working on (for instance, the arpeggios in the scherzo from Schubert's Great Symphony).
As with most things, the easier and more convenient the setup you have, the more likely you are to use it. With that in mind, I purchased a pretty loud battery-powered bluetooth speaker (mine is by Razer, but anything that gets loud and has a decent bass range will make you happy); and a PageFlip Firefly programmable bluetooth pedal. I want to emphasize the fact that this pedal is programmable, which means you can program the pedal to go forward or backward in tracks, instead of just up or down pages, which is important when using it with whatever device you might have. The programming is very easily done over an app downloaded to your computer, and takes about a minute to complete. With this setup, I can switch on the speaker and the pedal, open the music app on my phone, and be playing along to drones almost immediately. The speaker also doubles as being a very nice loud metronome, or as an excellent way to pump out a tuning note for a classroom of students.
I hope that you enjoy using the drones I've made, and please feel free to leave some comments or requests about this. An example of the drone is below, and free for download.