Practicing Basic Chords

MidiStickers provides a tool to master triads and tetrads in any key: the Basic Chord Dictionary. This widget will let you browse triads and triads and any inversion, and will let you practice them in all twelve keys with auto-accompaniment and real-time feedback

When MIDI is set to On, playing a chord on your MIDI controller will auto-select that chord and display voicings for it. Click the MIDI button to set this behiavor to Off, so you can experiment chords without changing the currently selected chord.

When you hover a chords, additional buttons will apear. Clicking the button will launch the Voicing Viewer tool, which transposes thie chords and its inversion to all 12 keys.

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The button starts the practice session. During your practice, an auto-accompaniment will be generated in a variety of musical styles and your progress on correctly playing through all the voicing transpositions will be tracked. During the practice session, you won’t be able to see the music notation before you acuratelly play the voicing, so that the focus is on hands-on transposition and not note reading.

Once you master moving the voicing chromatically, we suggest using the “Seconds” pattern. Playing by seconds is a greater challenge than playing chromatically and will improve your tactile memory.

At this stage, you might want to try playing the voicing around the Circle of Fifths, by using the “Fifths” pattern. This is the most difficult pattern, as it will require moving your entire hand position and immediate recall of the voicing. For best results in complex voicings, try breaking the voicing in chunks, ie, left hand plays a fifth starting on the root, while right hand plays a fifth starting on the third.

Once you are confortable playing through of the Circle of Fifths, we suggest you to try the “Random” ordem, which will generate a different random order each time it is selected. This mode will be the ultimate recall test!