Recognizing Chords on the Page and By Ear
I have a problem with basic chord recognition. I know enough theory -- I can think through the chords in a key, tell you the scale degrees for a ii chord versus a vi chord, or spell out a dominant 7th. If you put notes on a staff, I can read each one and stack them up in my head to name the chord, but that's decoding, not recognition. It’s like reading a word letter by letter instead of seeing the whole word and knowing what it says.
I have two versions of this recognition problem. One is visual -- seeing chords on the staff. The other is aural -- hearing chords in real music. In both cases, I know the theory intellectually but I can't apply it fast enough for it to be useful while I'm playing.
Seeing Chords on the Staff
When I sight read, chords slow me down because I see a stack of notes and read them individually. I see a G, a B and an E, and eventually realize it's an E minor chord, but by then I've lost the beat.
I recently realized the missing piece of my visualization. When I think of a chord, I see the shape of my hand touching the keys. I don't see the notes on the staff, and I don't think of note names unless I pause to work them out. My hand knows where to go, but my eyes don't recognize the corresponding "shape" on the page. I need to be able to look at my hand shaping a chord and visualize those specific notes on the staff.
I built a chord matching drill in Tonic Sense to bridge this gap. It shows three chords on a staff and three on a keyboard diagram. Only one pair matches, and the others are decoys. I work in one key at a time. If I choose major and minor chords in the key of E major, there are only six possible chords, which limits the options enough that my brain starts building associations between the staff and the keys.
When I worked in F major, I got better at recognizing the chords on sight, but moving to a less familiar key was much harder. This tells me the approach works, but the familiarity has to be built separately for each key.
Hearing Chords in Context
The second problem is harder. I can hear major versus minor, but hearing a chord's function in the context of a key is different. I only know intellectually what chords belong with which notes in a scale. I don't have a good sense of why a ii chord feels different in the context of a key. They feel different when I listen carefully, but I can't reliably identify them in a song because the knowledge isn't in my ear yet.
I haven't found a drill for this, but I'm trying an approach I used for Spanish. When I was studying, I had trouble understanding native speakers because the words ran together. I started watching videos and just tried to hear every time someone said the word "pues". I wasn't trying to understand the sentence; I was training my ear to pick out one familiar thing from the sound.
I think the same approach can work for chord function. Real music moves too fast for me to think about every change, so I’m going to spend a week just listening for the V chord resolving to I. This is narrow listening in real-world material, repeated until recognition becomes automatic.
The Thread Between Both
Both problems come down to the gap between knowing theory and recognizing it in real time. Real-time playing requires pattern recognition, not analysis. I'm betting that focused, key-by-key practice and narrow, repeated exposure will make the sounds and shapes stick.
Other skills I'm working on in 2026: