Chord ear training you do while playing, not quizzing

Ear training that stays musical

Most chord ear training happens in a quiz app: a chord plays out of context, four buttons appear, you guess, a score updates. It works, but it trains you to recognise chords the way flashcards train vocabulary - isolated, unmusical, and nothing like the situation where the skill matters, which is hearing harmony go by while you play.

Alea Chord Randomizer takes the other route. The chords loop in time, at your tempo, through a real sound, and you stay a musician throughout: instrument in hand, playing over the progression you are trying to name. The recognising happens inside the playing, which is where it will eventually have to happen anyway.

Ear workout mode, in one paragraph

Press E, or turn it on from the menu in the top right corner. The chord names disappear behind a crossed-out eye, the incoming previews hide, and the MONITOR keyboard goes dark. The loop keeps playing exactly as before. The sounding card keeps its purple ring and progress strip, so you always know WHERE you are in the loop - you just do not know WHAT it is. Losing your place is not part of the exercise.

When you have named a chord, click the eye on that card to check yourself. That one chord reveals and stays revealed for as long as the card still holds it - a roll or a recall takes the answer away with the chord it belonged to. Revealing is for checking, not for peeking ahead: each card answers only for itself.

The mode is off by default, persists like every other setting, and works in the plugin and while stopped, so you can also use it as a plain quiz between takes.

A session that actually builds the skill

Start easier than feels necessary. The point is naming chords reliably inside the music, not scraping through.

1. Two triads, guitar-friendly roots. Set NUMBER OF CHORDS to 2, CHORD TYPE to TRIADS, leave Simplify on. Press E, press play. Two chords alternating is a coin flip you can always win, which is the right place to calibrate.
2. Lock a key. With Key lock on, every roll is diatonic, so you can name chords by their function - this is the one, that is the five - which is how most working musicians actually hear. Harmonic minor is a rewarding second week: its chords are distinctive enough to grab by colour.
3. Grow the series before you grow the vocabulary. Four diatonic triads is harder than two, without adding a single new chord type.
4. Then open the vocabulary. Sevenths first, then ninths and sus chords, then Simplify off for the full 21 roots. The hard end of this app goes far beyond most ear trainers, and there is no need to hurry toward it.

Bars and tempo are difficulty controls too. Four bars per chord at 60 BPM gives you time to sing the root before answering. One bar at 132 is recognition at speed.

Use your instrument as the answer sheet

The strongest version of the exercise answers by playing rather than naming. Hear the chord, find its root on your instrument, then its quality, then play a line that fits it - and only then click the eye to check. Being wrong is loud and informative: the clash tells you what you misheard in a way a wrong button press never does.

Auto roll turns this into a session that runs itself: AUTO brings a fresh progression every few loops, so the answers keep changing and you never stop playing to press a button.

The theory workout is the same coin, flipped

The app hides one of two things, and each hiding is its own exercise. Ear workout mode hides the NAMES and leaves the sound. The theory workout does the opposite: drag the window shorter until the MONITOR keyboard tucks away, and now the names stay while the notes hide - you see “Abm7” and must find its notes yourself.

Run them on different days. One trains sound toward names, the other trains names toward fingers, and between them they close the loop that ear training is actually for.

Setting up for a practice room

The built-in sounds mean the whole exercise runs from a laptop with no other gear. The sampled piano is the most revealing voice for chord quality; strings hold chords the longest, which makes slow sessions easier on the ear. If you practise with a metronome habit, CLICK in the header adds one, and it accents chord changes.

For routing the chords into your own instruments instead, see the MIDI routing guide.