What it is for

Chord Roulette is a practice partner for chord progressions. It rolls a key and a progression that makes harmonic sense, shows what every chord is and what to play over it, and plays it back with a piano and a drum machine. Work through it on your instrument, and roll again once it is under your fingers, until every key feels like home.

How to use it

1. Roll. Press Roll, in the middle of the card, or the Space bar, for a new key and progression. The progression options, opened with the gear on the card, decide what can come up: how many chords and how long each lasts, whether some bars change chord halfway through, whether they resolve the way real music does, how they end, from a perfect cadence to a turnaround, which keys and scales, from major and minor to the modes and beyond, whether to borrow chords from the parallel key, triads or sevenths, and which scale degrees.
2. Read the card. Each bar shows the chord's job in the key (tonic, predominant or dominant), the chord itself, its numeral, the mode to play over it and its notes. When the roll aims for an ending, its name sits under the scale. Point at anything for an explanation, and use View, at the top of the card, to hide the lines you do not need.
3. Make it yours. The chevron beside a chord picks the chord for that bar, and its lock keeps that chord, and so the key, through the next roll. The chevron beside the key picks a key and holds it, and the Key lock holds the key you are in. Under each chord, the two small menus set its inversion and how widely it is spread.
4. Listen. Play goes round the progression until you stop it. Drag the tempo or type it in and it changes as you go, Click adds a metronome, Count-in gives you a bar of clicks before the chords come in; they sit at the top of the page. At the top of the card, the sound menu chooses the piano, and Play style beside it how it plays: the chords in the rhythm you choose, from held to a bossa nova, or broken into single notes by the arpeggio, with both hands or one. Chord length, in the progression options, gives each chord one bar or two. With Auto on, beside Roll, a new progression takes over as soon as the chords that will change have been played. In Chord Roulette for Mac, coming soon, the chords can also go to a plug-in synth or a MIDI instrument, and the tempo to a looper like the Boss RC-600.
5. Add drums. Click a step to turn it on or off, and drag it up or down to set how hard it hits: soft, normal or accent. Drag it sideways to hold it over more steps: the sound is cut off at the end of the last one. The next step you turn on takes the level you set last. Presets come with their accents. A and B hold two patterns: play the one you pick, or Chain them to take turns over two bars. Copy puts the pattern you are looking at into the other, ready to vary. Each row's name opens other sounds from the same family, in the styles of classic analog drum machines. Save beat keeps the beat, patterns and sounds and all. Style picks a kind of music and puts one of its beats on the Sequencer, and Shuffle brings another, a little different each time.
6. Keep what you like. Save, on the card, keeps a progression, with its beat when the drums are on, and Back beside it steps through your last few draws, its arrow listing them. The name at the top of the page is the card's: click it to rename the progression, or rate it with the stars beside it, and either one keeps it in the Library. The Library, behind the button at the top right, has a tab for chord progressions and one for beats: play them where they sit, load them, rename them, and export everything as a backup.
7. Take it with you. Sign in with the 6-digit code we email you, or the link in the same email, and your library and settings follow you to every device.