This is a tool to practice hearing the relationships between chords. Learning to identify a chord relative to a song's key is an important step toward understanding the song's progression/bassline, which helps with songwriting, improvisation, playing songs from memory, and more! == INSTRUCTIONS == First, a scale will play, giving you the key. Then, a different chord will play. What is that chord, relative to our key? MAJOR/MINOR KEYS: Click this button to practice on major keys, minor keys, or to randomly switch between both each round. DIATONIC: By default, it'll only play diatonic chords (chords that you can make out of notes in the scale). If the key is major, a ii chord will always be minor because a major II chord uses notes outside of the major scale. It's a good idea to start with diatonic chords because they're much more common. Turning off "Diatonic" changes it to randomly pick major or minor for every chord, regardless of if it's in the scale. HINTS: Ghost out chords that will never play in this key. (That is, if "diatonic" mode is on, ghost out non-diatonic chords, or if "diatonic" mode is off, ghost out the diminished chords since they'll never play) INVERSIONS: Randomly invert the chords. This means the top note in the chord might be played an octave lower, or the bottom note an octave higher, so you can't depend on hearing the bottom note to identify the chord. MORE CONTEXT: When this is on, the context plays the entire scale of the key. When off, it just plays the I chord. This allows for slightly faster gameplay, but I wouldn't recommend it until you've got it down with More Context turned on. == TERMS / FURTHER EXPLANATION == Here are some terms that might help you make sense of this project: KEY: A song can be played in one of 12 "keys" -- if you move every note in the song up or down by the same amount, the song sounds the same to most people, but it might be easier to sing/play if more of the notes are in your comfortable singing/playing range. Every key can be described by its "root note" -- the first note in its scale. This project isn't focused on specific keys, but instead on hearing relative relationships to the root note of the key. MAJOR/MINOR CHORD: a "major" chord is a happy-sounding chord, and a "minor" chord is a sad-sounding chord. They're hard to describe in text, but here's a lesson on chords: https://www.musictheory.net/lessons/40 ROMAN NUMERALS: The symbols in this project are roman numerals: i=1, ii=2, iii=3, iv=4, v=5, vi=6, and vii=7. They represent the chord that starts on the n-th note of the key. So, for example, in the key of C, the ii chord is D, the iii chord is E, and so on. Major chords are capitalized, minor chords are lower-case, and "diminished" chords have a degree symbol. So whenever you see someone talking about a I-vi-IV-V progression, they're talking about a song with the same chords as Heart and Soul -- in the key of C, they'd be C-Am-F-G.
