A short while ago, we asked users of our Chordelia: Triad Tutor app what they wanted to learn next. And the answer came back resoundingly:

Seventh chords!
It’s easy to see why. Seventh chords are versatile and can provide a wide variety of interesting sounds. They’re essential in jazz, and can add that special spice or sparkle to any music.

At a glance, they seem simple enough: a triad chord with an extra note added – the seventh of the scale.

But by varying the type of triad and the scale you can produce many types of seventh chord. Dominant, Minor, Major, Minor/Major, Diminished, and so on. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, even before you try to tell them apart in context by ear!

Most musicians never get past the most basic grasp of seventh chords, and so limit their harmony skills by never moving beyond the core triads – or perhaps just learning the dominant seventh chord.

Our new app, Chordelia: Seventh Heaven, is the first dedicated tutor for seventh chords in the App Store and will teach you to hear all the important types of seventh chord easily and reliably – whether they’re played one note at a time or all together, and whichever inversion of the chord is used.

Why learn seventh chords?

If most musicians get by without ever really understanding seventh chords, why should you bother?

Well, if you’re a jazz musician you’ll already know the answer! For rich, interesting harmonies, seventh chords are where it’s at. You’d be hard-pushed to find a jazz standard which doesn’t utilise one or more types of seventh chord. By developing your ear to recognise seventh chords quickly and easily, you’ll be hugely increasing your potential as a player. Just ask the guys over at JazzAdvice.com!

Seventh chords aren’t just reserved for jazz though. Click to read the rest…

Ever since we launched our interval training app for iPhone and iPod, RelativePitch, we’ve had people asking us for an app to learn chords in the same way. Well, the wait is over!

Today we’re releasing a new ear training iOS app, called Chordelia: Triad Tutor, which is designed to get you up to speed with the most important types of chord in a fun, simple way.

Chordelia: Triad Tutor teaches the four core triad chords. If you’ve studied our Pitch & Harmony series you’ll know that triads are three-note chords, and the four types of triad form the basis of all commonly-used chords in Western music. Learning to recognise triads is an essential fundamental part of any musician’s ear training.

Focus on the fundamentals

It’s easy when studying harmony to get carried away with the wide variety of weird and wonderful chords you find in music – suspended chords, sixth chords, the many types of seventh chord, extended chords… Not to mention the guitarist’s favourite: power chords. On top of all that you’ve got block chords, arpeggiated chords, chord inversions, chord voicings – and then on to cadences and chord progressions!

Overwhelmed yet?

Making ear training easy is our goal around here, and so with our first chord training app, we decided to follow the KISS principle and keep things simple.

Rather than throwing every possible type of chord (and chord-related skill) at you at once, Chordelia: Triad Tutor teaches just the four types of triad chord. You start off by learning to tell the four types apart, when they’re “spelled out” as arpeggios, one note at a time. Then, as you progress, you learn to recognise them as “block chords”, with all the notes played together. Finally you can really challenge yourself by learning to recognise the chords in different inversions, and even try to tell which inversion it is!

Why train with Chordelia: Triad Tutor

Chords are fundamental to harmony, and harmony is essential to all but the simplest of music. Learning to understand, appreciate and recognise particular types of chord is a core part of any musician’s development – and as a bonus, it’s a great way to enhance your enjoyment of the music you listen to every day!

Even experienced musicians can struggle with chords if they haven’t spent time practising. Was that a major or minor chord? Sounds simple, but put in a musical context, it can be frustratingly hard to tell! Wouldn’t it be great to never have to worry about that kind of fundamental distinction again?

After a few short sessions with Chordelia you’ll find you can easily recognise major, minor, augmented and diminished triads when you hear them in music. What’s more, you’ll have a solid basis for recognising more complex chords too, since these are all based on triads (with notes added, removed or altered).

Once you’ve studied further with Chordelia you will know these triads back-to-front and inside-out, recognise them immediately and always be able to confidently say which type and inversion is being used.

What about all that theory?

There’s a vast body of music theory which deals with harmony – and again, it tends to be overwhelming to all but the most academic of musicians.

Fortunately there’s not much you actually need to know to understand harmonies aurally and develop the skills mentioned above. In fact, if you’ve already been training with RelativePitch or reading about intervals and chords on this site, you’re halfway there!

Chordelia: Triad Tutor features detailed, illustrated lessons to introduce you to all the key concepts, and make sure you know enough theory to develop your understanding of triad chords. You’ll learn what triads are, how they’re constructed, and why they sound the way they do. Later you’ll find out about triad inversions, and the more advanced types of chord built on triads.

You’ll get benefit from any previous music theory or interval training you’ve done, but neither is essential: the app teaches you everything you need to know.

When can you get started?

If you have an iPhone or iPod, you can download Chordelia: Triad Tutor from the App Store today!

LAUNCH SPECIAL: For one week only, get Chordelia: Triad Tutor for just $1.99! That’s 50% Off the usual price of $3.99!

We’re excited to launch this new app, and help musicians learn to recognise chords in the same way RelativePitch has taught thousands to recognise intervals!

As always, we’d love to hear what you think, especially if you’ve tried the app. Please leave a comment below, or email us with your thoughts.

Our newsletter subscribers got a free preview copy of the app earlier this week. Want to be tipped off to future special offers? Sign up for our newsletter for free!

The previous articles in the series have covered how to recognize the different qualities of triad – major, minor, augmented and diminished. Not only can we learn to hear the quality of triads, we can learn to hear their inversion. First we will briefly review the basic theory of inversions.

Inversions

Triads are made up of three pitches, a root, third and fifth. It is possible for any of its members to be the lowest note. A triad, therefore, has three possible positions, or “inversions”: root position, first inversion and second inversion, with the root, third, or fifth respectively, as the lowest note:

The three inversions of a triad

1. The root, first and second inversions of a triad

We spent quite a bit of time working on root position triads in an earlier article. We will begin studying inversions by first considering their interval content from the lowest pitch to the highest.

As we already know, root position triads contain stacked thirds, and a fifth from the root to the highest member. As we saw before, it is the quality of these intervals that determines its type.

We can observe a similar idea with inversions. Click to read the rest…