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Guide

Drills & Ear Training

Short, timed exercises for building finger independence, faster chord changes, and a trained ear — reached from Practice Hub's Drills tile, with no score to chase.

~5 min read

Drills live inside the Practice Hub, under their own tile, separate from Routines and the reference tools. They're short on purpose — most run just a few minutes — built for the ten minutes before you start on a song, or the days you don't feel like committing to a full session. Five drills live here: two build hand mechanics, one builds plucking speed, one trains your ear, and one is the classic one-minute-changes challenge.

Worth knowing: no drill in this section produces a score to beat or a streak to protect. Each one ends with a plain, calm summary — reps completed, chords cycled, however that particular drill measures itself — and then gets out of your way. The point is the repetition, not the number.

Spider Walk

Spider Walk is a four-minute finger-independence warm-up: index, middle, ring, pinky, one finger per fret, walking frets 1-2-3-4 across all 4 strings. A running timer keeps you moving, and a visual finger-ladder diagram shows exactly which finger lands where, so you're not stopping mid-drill to think about it. It's worth doing before you pick up a song at all — bass frets sit wider apart than a guitar's, and cold fingers loosen up faster with a few minutes of this than by starting straight into a bassline.

Practice Hub, Spider Walk drill in progress, finger-ladder diagram and running timer, Strata theme
Spider Walk drill in progress, finger-ladder diagram and running timer

Chord Change Clock

Chord Change Clock cycles a four-chord progression — G, D, Em, C — one chord per bar, at whatever tempo you set. The current chord's diagram stays on screen the whole time, so your eyes are checking your hand instead of hunting for the next shape. The goal isn't playing the progression once, cleanly; it's playing it enough times, at a real tempo, that the changes stop being a decision.

Practice Hub, Chord Change Clock, current chord diagram and tempo control, mid-cycle
Chord Change Clock, current chord diagram and tempo control, mid-cycle

Pentatonic Ascending

A speed drill: climb an A minor pentatonic box, repeatedly, at a steady tempo. The scale sits on a fretboard diagram the whole time, so there's no guessing where the box shape falls — just repetition, aimed at even, consistent plucking rather than raw speed for its own sake.

Practice Hub, Pentatonic Ascending, fretboard diagram with A minor pentatonic box highlighted across all 4 strings
Pentatonic Ascending, A minor pentatonic box highlighted across all 4 strings

Ear Training

Ear Training is a ten-round listening quiz with four separate modes:

  • Major/minor — is what you just heard major or minor?
  • Name the chord — identify the chord by ear.
  • Color — tell apart 7th, 6th, diminished, and augmented voicings.
  • Progression — recognize common progressions, like I-IV-V or ii-V-I.

The app strums a chord or progression, you pick what you heard, and the answer is revealed right after your guess either way — a fingering diagram for Major/minor, Name the chord, and Color, or the actual chord sequence for Progression — so a wrong answer still teaches you something instead of just registering as a miss.

Practice Hub, Ear Training, Name the chord mode, answer revealed with fingering diagram
Ear Training, Name the chord mode, answer revealed

Chord Change Trainer (One-Minute Changes)

The classic drill: pick any two open chords, set a 30, 60, or 90-second timer, and tap once every time you make a clean change between them. It's a direct, simple measure of how fast your hands can move between two shapes.

Worth knowing: the "last score" shown here only ever compares to your own previous run on that same chord pair — there's no leaderboard, nothing shared, nothing ranked against anyone else's hands. Just today against last time.

Practice Hub, Chord Change Trainer, timer running with tap counter and last-score comparison
Chord Change Trainer, timer running with tap counter and last-score comparison
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