Chord Crush is an interactive web app that teaches you to recognize chords and chord progressions over time!

"Conventional" ear training courses attempt to cover a bunch of stuff that quite frankly, most of you are not interested in. Being able to tell the difference between diminished 7th and minor 6th intervals, or knowing whether an augmented 6th chord is "Italian" or "German" is great if you teach classical music. But for most of the rest of us, we just want to hear a song and know how it goes on a guitar or piano. Chord progressions are the foundation of music, and learning to recognize them is the best thing you can do to improve your musicianship.

You will be presented with a chord progression pulled from a real song from our Theorytab Database with some of the chords missing. Drag a chord from the available options below to fill in the missing ones!

If you get the puzzle correct, your rating will improve and you will be served slightly more challenging puzzles. Your rating is a reflection of your strength at hearing chords and the system uses it to target puzzles precisely at the difficulty appropriate for your level!

That’s ok! The puzzles at the lower rating levels are meant to be solvable by beginners. If you think the puzzles you are getting are too difficult, getting a few in a row wrong will cause the system to naturally adjust what type of puzzle you get. At the lower levels, you can click on the chords to hear how they sound for help. As your rating improves we gradually remove the ability to "preview" chord sounds until you can identify chords just by hearing them.

If you’re looking for more resources to help you learn, check out the Hooktheory Book Series on our website.

Very hard. The Hooktheory song database contains some very complex progressions in exotic modes, with tricky borrowed chords, and jazzy embellishments. Even if you have perfect pitch, you will be challenged!

Yes. It was designed for phones/tablets. It also works great with a mouse and large screen.

Not yet. For now, just the web app at chordcrush.hooktheory.com. If you purchase a subscription for Chord Crush, it will work for any future iOS / Android app.

Consistency is key when training your ear! Our brains can only absorb so many new patterns at once and in one sitting. Trying to do a little bit every day will likely yield better results than cramming in a longer session one day per week!

Chord Crush is based on a relative numbered system for identifying chords as they relate to a key. The goal is to identify chords in this relative system and to hear the numbers rather than particular names. So for example, you will learn to hear a progression as one → four→ five not C → F → G. You don't need to know all the ins and outs of Roman Numeral notation to get a better ear though it definitely provides some context.

The basic version is free but has limited functionality: you can do 5 puzzles per day and 1 Rush game! If you'd like to remove these limits Chord Crush is $50 per year billed annually.