Chord Ear Trainer

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Major Minor Diminished

Augmented Suspended

Major 7th Minor 7th Dominant 7th

Half Diminished Diminished 7th

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Chords

Chord Ear Training

This app is designed to improve your ability to recognise chord types. The app will play a chord and you try to pick the chord type such as major or minor. There are 10 different chord types and each type can be turned on or off to test any combination of these at a time. You can also look at your accuracy for each type of chord as well as your overall score.

For any given root note, each chord type can be played a number of ways. You can select for the chord to be played only in root positions or to include inversions. Chord inversions are when a note other than the root note (such as the 3rd or the 5th) is the lowest note of the chord. Chords can be played in close spacing, open spacing or either. In a close spacing chord, each note of the chord is adjacent to each other (such as C E G in c major). In an open spacing chord, adjacent notes of the chord may not be the next note in the chord. Ill try to illustrate this as follows:

C Major Scale:      C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C 
Close C Maj Chord:  C   E   G
Open C Maj Chord:   C       G         E

Note that each chord has all the notes of the chord in it, it is simply whether these notes are adjacent or if there is spacing between them.

Additionally, each chord can be played in one octave, multiple octaves or either.

The aim with providing these different options is so that the options can be set in a way that for any given root note and chord type, there are a number of ways the chord can be played. If you allow inversions and select open or close spacing and one or more octaves, there will typically be over 10 ways the app might arrange notes to form the chord.

I’m hoping this will allow you to develop a more versatile ability to pick chord types rather than simply becoming accustomed to the sound of a chord in say root position, close spacing. For example, when you have developed a reasonable ability to pick all the chord types in root position, close spacing over one octave its quite surprising that even testing between only say major and minor chords can sometimes trick you up when you allow inversion as well as either spacing or octaves.

Another note here is that when you allow inversions you are still only picking the chord type rather than trying to pick the inversion as well. If you would like to practice picking a chord type and its inversion, you can use our chord inversion ear trainer.

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