Chords Ear Training Exercise For Beginners


                This tests your ears based on their ability to differentiate major and minor chords. Once you are confident with these 2 chords, you need to add dominant 7th too. You must master differentiating these 3 chords by ear as a beginner. The main use of this skill is to be able to find chords for whatever songs you listen to. But to do that you need to have a good theoretical knowledge of all the chords in addition to this aural skill. So check out my previous blog post to work on that.

How does it work? 

A random chord will be played and you have find whether it's a major chord or a minor chord (or a dominant 7th chord). Click on whatever option you think is the right answer. You can listen to a question as many times as you want. Just click on the speaker icon if you want to repeat a question.
This exercise might seem very hard at first. But don't give up. Your ears will slowly become sensitive to the difference. So keep on working on this as much as possible EVERYDAY. Consistency is very important. You can feel great difference in just a couple of weeks. The progress is not always an increasing graph. Though you might be working everyday, sometimes it might feel like you are getting worse day by day. Don't worry. It's part of the learning process. Your brain is constantly learning and unlearning things. So just keep working on it everyday regardless of the visible result. One day you'll miraculous get the difference.

Ready to test yourself? 

Try out these exciting 1 min challenges.
 
Easy test - Two options. Major and minor. 
Hard test - Three options. Major, minor and dominant 7th. 

Result

Accuracy : Above 90% is good.
Score > 50 : Amazing!!! It's a reflex at this point.
Score > 40 : Excellent!!
Score > 30 : Great! You are ready to learn new chords.
Score > 20 : Good job! You are getting there. Give another try. Be a little quicker this time.
Score > 10 : Not very confident? Just relax and keep doing it slowly. Don't think about the speed at first. Concentrate on the accuracy. Once you are confident with that, slowly try to be faster.
Score > 0 : Not very confident? Leave a break. Relax. Come back later. Don't think too much. Go with your gut.

Progress Graph 

Clue To Success 

Major chord sounds happy and minor chord sounds sad. It's tricky to define what a dominant 7th chord sounds like. Closest definition that I've come across is that dominant 7th feels incomplete like a question.
 

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