Harmony Gym

Levels

Beginner

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Theory

  1. What Music Is Made Of: Melody, Rhythm and Harmony

    The three things every piece of music does at once — one note after another, when those notes happen, and what sounds together — and which part of this course teaches each one.

  2. How Sound Is Made: Pitch, Loudness and Timbre

    What a sound physically is, why a faster vibration is a higher note, why loudness and pitch are independent of each other, and why the same note is unmistakably a guitar and not a piano.

  3. The Harmonic Series: Why One String Sounds Like Many

    Why a single vibrating string produces a whole stack of notes at once, which notes are in that stack and in what order, and why the intervals at the bottom of it are the ones that sound consonant.

  4. Notes and Semitones

    The 12 notes of Western music, the semitone steps that separate them, and how to find any note on the keyboard.

  5. Intervals: the Building Blocks

    What an interval is, the semitone distances that give each one its name, and why the third is the interval that matters most for chords.

  6. Interval Quality: Perfect, Major, Minor, Diminished, Augmented

    Why some intervals come in major and minor and others do not, what diminished and augmented mean, and the one distance the last lesson's table skipped.

  7. Interval Direction and Size: Up, Down, Together, and Past the Octave

    The same interval arrives three different ways — ascending, descending, or sounded together — and keeps going past the octave under a second set of names.

  8. Scales: One Pattern, Twelve Keys

    What a scale is, the tone-and-semitone formula that builds a major scale from any note, why the natural minor is that same collection with a different home, and why the keyboard's black keys sit exactly where the formula needs them.

  9. The Harmonic Field: the Chords a Scale Contains

    Stack thirds on each degree of a major scale and seven chords come out in a fixed order — major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished. What the roman numerals mean, and why the seventh degree is the odd one.

  10. The Circle of Fifths: Why G Major Has One Sharp

    Why stacking fifths from C adds one sharp per key, why the order of sharps never changes, how to read a key signature at a glance, and why the circle closes after twelve steps.

Your instrument

  1. The Fingerboard: Strings, Frets and Positions

    A keyboard is a line and a fingerboard is a grid — what strings and frets are, and why the same note sits in several places at once.

  2. Open Strings on the Staff: Where Your Instrument Meets the Page

    The handful of notes you never have to finger, where each one sits on the staff, and why printed guitar music is written an octave above what it sounds.

  3. Range and Tessitura: What an Instrument Can Play, and Where It Lives

    The difference between every note an instrument can produce and the stretch where it actually sounds like itself — and why two clefs are named after it.

  4. Find the note

    A note is named on screen, then you find it on your own instrument — the map every player needs.

Chords

  1. The Major Chord

    What a major triad is, how to build one from any root note, and how to hear its bright, stable sound.

  2. The Minor Chord

    How the minor triad is built, why it sounds darker than the major chord, and the one-semitone change that makes all the difference.

Harmony

  1. What the Degrees Do: Tonic, Subdominant, Dominant

    Why I, IV and V keep turning up — the three jobs every chord in a key is doing, and the pull that makes music want to go somewhere.

  2. The Pull of the Dominant: The Leading Tone and the Tritone

    Why V wants to become I — the semitone under the tonic, and the unstable interval inside a dominant seventh that makes the pull stronger still.

  3. The Four Cadences: How a Phrase Ends

    Authentic, plagal, half and deceptive — the four ways a musical sentence can finish, and what each one tells the listener about whether to expect more.

  4. The Progressions Everyone Uses

    I–V–vi–IV, ii–V–I and the twelve-bar blues — three patterns that between them account for an enormous amount of the music you already know.

Rhythm

  1. Rhythm Basics: Pulse, Bars and Note Values

    What the pulse is, how a bar groups it, what quarter, half and eighth notes are as fractions of the beat, why two eighths are joined by a beam, and what the count-in before an exercise is for.

  2. Ties and Dots: Two Ways to Make a Note Longer

    A dot adds half a note's own value, a tie joins two notes into one sound, and neither can do the other's job.

  3. Tap the rhythm

    A pattern is drawn and played, and you tap it back — the drill that turns reading a rhythm into playing one.

Reading

  1. Reading the Staff: Lines, Spaces and Clefs

    How five lines and four spaces work as a pitch grid, what a clef anchors, and why written music needs two of them.

  2. The C Clef: The Third One, and Why It Moves

    The clef that names middle C, why it is the only one that changes lines, and who reads it.

  3. Reading the treble clef

    Name the note on the staff — the skill that turns sheet music from a picture into something you can play.

  4. Reading the bass clef

    Name the note on the bass staff — where the left hand, the bass and the cello live.

Ear training

  1. Ear Training: Hearing Intervals Before Chords

    Why ear training is not perfect pitch, why intervals come before chords, what the song-anchor trick is good for and where it stops working, and how to practice so it actually sticks.

  2. Intervals by ear

    Hear two notes and name the distance between them — the skill behind playing by ear.

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