Free Interactive Music Theory Course
Chord Graph's music theory course is a free, self-paced program of 90 lessons that takes you from your very first note to professional-level harmony. It is available in 8 languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese and Russian), and every lesson includes visual diagrams and playable audio examples on piano or guitar. No account or install is required.
The course is organized into six levels:
1. Beginner
The absolute basics of reading and understanding music.
- What is a musical note?
- The piano keyboard
- Tone and semitone
- The octave
- The staff and treble clef
- Bass clef and other clefs
- Basic rhythm and note values
- Rests and dynamics
- Melody, harmony, and rhythm; pulse, tempo and the metronome; articulation and expression
2. Basic
Scales, intervals and your first chords.
- The major scale and the natural minor scale
- Intervals
- Triads
- Key signatures
- Pentatonic and blues scales
- The circle of fourths
- What is a chord? Why major sounds happy and minor sad; building chords from the scale
3. Intermediate
How chords work together to form progressions.
- Degrees and Roman numerals
- The circle of fifths in depth
- Common progressions
- Seventh chords
- Cadences
- The 12-bar blues in detail
- Suspended and "add" chords
- Voice leading; harmonic functions (tonic, subdominant, dominant); harmonic rhythm; lead sheets and chord symbols
4. High
Modes, secondary dominants and richer voicings.
- The 7 modes
- Secondary dominants
- Inversions and figured bass
- Voicings: how to distribute notes
- Harmonic and melodic minor
- Jazz turnarounds
- Slash chords and bass pedals
- Modes in context (Mixolydian, Dorian); the Nashville number system; transposition
5. Advanced
Color, borrowing and reharmonization.
- Modal interchange (mixture)
- Tritone substitution
- Modulation
- Altered chords and tensions
- Reharmonization
- Line clichés
- Polychords and hybrid chords
- Extended dominant chains; four-part voice leading (SATB); jazz voicings (drop-2, drop-3, fourths)
6. Professional
The modern and 20th-century frontier of harmony.
- Tonnetz and neo-Riemannian transformations
- Negative harmony
- Coltrane changes
- Symmetric scales
- Modern counterpoint
- Modern modal harmony
- Advanced rhythm: polyrhythm and compound meter
- Atonality and serialism; set theory (pitch-class sets); synthesis: composing with all the tools
Prefer to explore rather than read? Try the interactive music theory visualizations, test yourself with the daily challenge, or use the free online tuner.