Frequently asked questions

Yes - 100% free, with no account required. Open the app, load a chart, and start playing. There are no paywalls, no premium tiers, and no ads.

No account is needed. The app runs entirely in your browser. Your saved charts and settings are stored locally in your browser's storage, so they persist between sessions without signing in.

Music Training Games is a fast challenge layer built inside Chord Progressions. It turns ear training, rhythm recognition, and visual pattern drills into quick mobile-first rounds with audio, timers, streaks, and answer reveals.

The goal is to feel more like a modern music game than a theory worksheet. The same playback engine powers both the interactive app mode and the vertical Shorts version.

There are three main families:

Ear Training with chord, mode, interval, and progression prompts.

Rhythm Training with Konnakol-inspired subdivision, memory, accent, and polyrhythm challenges adapted into a quicker game format.

The rhythm training games borrow part of their logic from Konnakol and Solkattu, which are vocal systems used to internalize pulse, subdivision, grouping, and accent placement. Instead of treating rhythm like abstract notation only, they make you feel the shape of the beat through short spoken-style cells and repeating patterns.

In Chord Progressions, that idea is adapted into a faster game format. You are not expected to study the full South Indian vocal tradition to use it. The app turns that influence into bite-sized challenges around quarter notes, eighths, triplets, takadimi-style subdivisions, memory chains, and accent recognition.

The goal is simple: hear rhythm more clearly, count less mechanically, and build a stronger internal pulse for improvisation, comping, and time feel.

Shorts Mode uses the same interface as the app, but condenses it into one vertical 9:16 challenge. A prompt plays, the countdown runs quickly, and the reveal lands fast enough to feel native to YouTube Shorts and TikTok.

That mode reuses the project's existing queue, capture script, and GitHub Actions publishing flow, so the final video still feels like an actual app session.

App Mode chains several questions together, shows score and combo, and ramps the pressure by tightening time, increasing musical ambiguity, and choosing distractors that stay believable.

So an easy round might contrast major and minor, while a harder one keeps the same root and asks you to hear a smaller color change such as dominant versus major 7, or a similar rhythmic shape with a different accent.

No. The games avoid absurd random options. Wrong answers are chosen to stay musically plausible, such as same-root chord colors, related scales, nearby rhythmic feels, or visually similar note patterns.

Yes. The module is built around reusable question presets and a shared challenge model, which makes it possible to drive both app rounds and Shorts prompts from the same source data while reusing the existing automation stack.

The virtual rhythm section includes piano, upright bass, and drums. You can balance each instrument independently in the mixer. Each instrument also offers multiple playing styles inspired by classic jazz approaches.

Trading means the backing track alternates between playing and leaving space for you. For example, if you set trade bars to 4 on piano, the piano plays for 4 bars, then drops out for 4 bars so you can answer or solo. You can use this to practice trading 2s, 4s, or 8s with the rhythm section, or simply create breathing room while you improvise.

Target notes are the most important notes to hear and land on over each chord. In practice, they are often the chord tones that define the color of the harmony most clearly, especially the 3rd and 7th, and sometimes an added tension such as the 9th, #11, or 13th.

For a soloist, target notes are useful because they make your lines sound connected to the chord changes instead of sounding like a scale moving at random. If you can hear and aim for the right note when the harmony changes, even a simple phrase starts to sound more intentional, melodic, and inside the progression.

In Chord Progressions, target notes are there to help you practice voice leading and harmonic awareness. You can use them as landing points, as resolution notes at the end of a phrase, or as a reduced map of the progression before adding more passing notes and rhythmic ideas.

The Chord modal shows the current chord as notation on a staff, plus a few suggested scales that fit the chord. It is meant to give you a quick harmonic snapshot: what the chord looks like, what notes it contains, and what scale colors are commonly used over it.

This view is useful when you want to connect the chord symbol to actual notes on the staff, check voicing content quickly, or compare common scale options such as Ionian, Dorian, Mixolydian, Lydian dominant, or altered depending on the chord quality.

In short, the Chord modal is the harmonic reference view. It helps you understand what the chord is before deciding how to phrase over it.

The Guide Tone modal highlights the most important target notes for the current chord, then shows where those targets can resolve on the next chord. Instead of giving you every possible note choice, it reduces the harmony to the tones that make the progression speak clearly.

For soloing, this is especially useful because it trains you to hear and aim for strong landing notes when the chord changes. Even if you play very simple lines, hitting the right guide tones at the right time makes the solo sound more connected, melodic, and inside the harmony.

In short, the Guide Tone modal is the line-building view. It helps you practice voice leading, resolution, and phrasing from one chord to the next.

The Chord Trainer is a practice mode where specific bars can teach you what to play over the chord, then leave space for you to answer on the next bar. You can set a bar to play an arpeggio or a scale, choose the scale type, and choose whether it moves ascending or descending.

A common use is something like: bar 1 arpeggio, bar 2 your turn, bar 3 scale, bar 4 your turn. This makes it easy to practice call and response, II-V-I ideas, blues vocabulary, or one chord at a time without losing the groove.

In short, the Chord Trainer is the imitation-and-response view. It helps you hear a simple melodic idea over the harmony, then repeat or adapt it yourself right away.

Metric modulation is the feeling of a new pulse appearing without changing the underlying barline. In practical terms, the band keeps the same form, but the notes start implying a different pulse relationship such as 3 over 4, half-note triplets, dotted quarter notes, or 2 over 3. In Chord Progressions, the dedicated metric modulation studies start with a normal A section and then shift the pulse in the B section so you can hear and practice the change clearly.

Yes. The app is fully responsive and works on iOS Safari and Android Chrome. For the best mobile experience you can install it as a PWA (Progressive Web App), which gives you a native app icon and full-screen playback without the browser UI.

Yes. Chord Progressions is actively in development, and feedback is very welcome, especially if you notice a bug, a wrong chart, or an idea to improve the music generation engine.

Use the contact page to send feedback.

You can load charts in three ways:

Paste chord symbols - type or paste chords directly, e.g. Cm7 | F7 | Bbmaj7 | Eb6. The parser handles most common jazz chord symbols including extensions, alterations, and slash chords.

MusicXML - import .xml or .mxl files exported from Sibelius, MuseScore, Finale, or any notation app.

Absolutely. You can paste any chord sequence directly into the input field. The app parses standard chord symbols - Roman numerals are not supported, but Nashville numbers are on the roadmap.