Online Ear Trainer
EAR TRAINING
Train your ear to recognise intervals and chord qualities without relying on your instrument.
YOUR RESULTS
Train Your Ear to Recognise Intervals and Chords
The Play Like A Pro Ear Training Tool is a free online ear trainer designed to help you recognise musical intervals and chord qualities by sound.
Listen to an interval or chord, choose what you think you heard and receive instant feedback on your answer.
You can start with simple sounds such as major and minor chords, gradually introduce more intervals and chord types, and progress towards recognising more complex harmony without relying on your guitar or looking at the notes.
What Is Ear Training?
Ear training is the practice of learning to recognise musical sounds by listening.
Rather than identifying a chord because you can see the fingering or naming an interval because you can count the frets, you learn to recognise its sound directly.
This develops your relative pitch — your ability to recognise the relationship between notes rather than needing to identify every individual pitch by itself.
How to Use the Online Ear Trainer
Choose whether you want to practise Intervals or Chords, select your difficulty and press Start Session.
The trainer will play a musical example without showing you the answer.
If you're unsure, use Replay Sound before answering. Repeated listening is part of the training.
Interval Ear Training
A musical interval is the distance between two notes.
In interval ear training, you hear two notes and try to identify the interval between them — such as a major third, perfect fourth, perfect fifth or octave.
Learning to recognise intervals by ear helps you understand the building blocks behind melodies, chords and musical phrases.
Ascending, Descending and Harmonic Intervals
An interval can sound different depending on how the two notes are played.
Ascending Intervals
The second note is higher than the first. This trains you to recognise an interval moving upwards in pitch.
Descending Intervals
The second note is lower than the first, helping you recognise the same interval moving downwards.
Harmonic Intervals
Both notes are played together, allowing you to hear the combined colour of the interval.
Use Both when you want the trainer to randomly mix ascending and descending intervals.
How to Learn Intervals by Ear
Trying to identify every interval from unison to octave immediately can make ear training much harder than it needs to be.
Start with a smaller group of distinctive intervals and only introduce more options as your accuracy improves.
Start with a smaller group including unison, major 2nd, major 3rd, perfect 4th, perfect 5th and octave.
Introduce minor intervals, sixths and sevenths once the core sounds become familiar.
Train every interval from unison to octave, including the tritone.
Musical Intervals You Can Train
Chord Ear Training
Chord ear training teaches you to recognise the quality of a chord from its sound rather than from its shape or chord symbol.
The trainer plays a chord from a random root note and asks you to identify whether you heard a major, minor, seventh, diminished or augmented sound.
The aim isn't necessarily to identify every individual note inside the chord. Instead, you learn to recognise the overall harmonic character of each chord quality.
Learn to Hear Major and Minor Chords
If you're new to chord ear training, start by learning to distinguish major and minor.
These two chord qualities differ because of the third of the chord, making that note an important clue when you're learning to recognise the difference.
Often perceived as brighter, more open or more settled.
Often perceived as darker or more introspective than a major chord.
Once you can distinguish major and minor consistently, add more chord qualities rather than increasing the difficulty too quickly.
Chord Qualities You Can Learn to Recognise
Build Chord Recognition Gradually
MINOR
+ DIMINISHED
+ SEVENTHS
This progressive approach keeps the number of possible answers manageable while your ear learns the characteristics of each new sound.
What Should You Listen for in Chord Ear Training?
Try to notice the characteristic colour of the whole chord rather than immediately trying to calculate every note.
One of the clearest clues when distinguishing major from minor.
An altered fifth contributes strongly to diminished and augmented sounds.
Seventh chords add another colour that separates major 7th, minor 7th and dominant 7th harmony.
With practice, aim to recognise the chord as one complete sound rather than solving it note by note.
Use Short Ear Training Sessions
Each training session contains 20 questions.
The tool tracks your score, accuracy, current streak, best streak and response time so you can see more than simply whether you got the last question right.
As your ear improves, the aim is not only to give the correct answer more often but to recognise familiar sounds with less hesitation.
Practise the Intervals and Chords You Struggle With
The trainer stores your exercise results locally on your device and can identify sounds that consistently produce lower accuracy or slower responses.
Once enough training data is available, use Practise My Weakest to focus your session on the intervals or chord qualities that need the most work.
How Often Should You Practise Ear Training?
Ear training doesn't need to dominate your practice session.
Short, focused practice done regularly gives you repeated exposure to the sounds you're trying to learn.
Why Guitarists Should Train Their Ears
Guitar makes it very easy to rely on shapes.
You can learn scale patterns, chord diagrams and fretboard boxes without necessarily developing a strong connection between those shapes and the sounds they produce.
Ear training helps build that missing connection between what you hear and what you play.
Train Your Ear, Not Just Your Fingers
Knowing that a perfect fifth contains seven semitones or that a minor chord contains a flattened third is useful.
But the next level is being able to hear those sounds when they appear in actual music.
Use the Play Like A Pro Ear Training Tool to gradually connect interval names, chord qualities and music theory with what they actually sound like.
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