Building chords

Each round names one chord and you build it on your own instrument, note by note. The recipes are not repeated here — the chord lessons have them, and this page assumes you have them.

What it adds is the thing a lesson cannot give you: uncertainty. Every lesson in the chords module drills one quality at a time, so its prompts announce the answer before you read them. In the major chord lesson every round is a major chord; the only open question is which root. That is the right shape for learning a recipe and the wrong shape for using one, because music does not tell you the quality in advance. These five drills mix the qualities back together and then take away the assumption that the root is at the bottom.

The five drills

They climb in one direction at a time, so a drill that falls apart tells you what is missing.

Major and minor, mixed is where the ladder starts, because it is where the lessons stop. Two qualities in one pool means the third is a decision for the first time: count 4 semitones or count 3, and nothing on screen has narrowed it down for you beforehand. This is also the single most useful discrimination in the whole module — the two chords almost all popular music is made of, separated by one semitone.

All four qualities puts diminished and augmented into the same pool. The diminished and augmented lesson drilled that pair on its own, so the fifth was the only thing in question there; here the third and the fifth are both open at once, and that is the first drill on the site where naming a triad requires the full check rather than half of it.

Major and minor, inverted turns on inversions and drops the pool back to the easy pair. The inversions lesson moves two axes at the same moment — it switches on inversions and opens the pool to all four qualities — so a wrong answer there has two possible causes. This rung has one. The quality is a chord you have built a hundred times, and the only new thing on screen is which of its three notes has to be lowest.

Diminished and augmented, inverted is the same new question over the pool that makes it hard. A diminished triad in first inversion is genuinely awkward to find, because none of the shapes you have memorised are the one being asked for and the counting has to start from the bass note instead of the root.

Everything at once is the whole module in one session: four qualities, three positions, twelve roots. Nothing in it is new — that is the point of a last rung. It is here so that this page is complete on its own, rather than sending you back into a lesson for the only drill that asks for everything.

Two things the game tells you

A wrong answer is answered specifically rather than just marked wrong. If you build the right chord in the wrong position, it says so and names the position you actually built, which is a different mistake from building the wrong chord and worth separating. If your three notes are not a triad at all, it says that instead.

The instrument picker above each drill is worth using. A chord is a recipe in semitones and a shape under your fingers, and the shape is completely different on a keyboard, a guitar and a violin. The recipe transfers; the shape has to be learned once per instrument, and that is cheaper to do here than in the middle of a song.

Why augmented chords never ask for an inversion

In the last two drills you will notice that every augmented chord comes up in root position, and that is deliberate rather than a gap.

An augmented triad is built from two equal gaps, so its inversions are also augmented triads on a different root — the same three notes, describing themselves three ways. “Second inversion of C augmented” therefore has no single right answer, and the game does not ask for one. Every other quality in these drills is drawn in all three positions.

The diminished and augmented lesson explains that symmetry, and the inversions lesson covers what first and second inversion mean and why a composer would want one.