The chord change test
Pick two chords and a tempo. Strum one chord a beat, change on the first beat of each bar, and this page counts how many of the changes landed clean.
What you need
A guitar, and a microphone the browser can reach. A laptop's built-in one is enough, and a phone works too. Nothing to install and nothing to sign up for. The sound is read inside your browser and thrown away as it goes: no recording is kept, and nothing is uploaded.
The click stays on the screen unless you tell the page you are on headphones or a line-in. Out of speakers, the microphone hears the click as well as the guitar, and a metronome makes a poor guitarist. The page would score its own beats as your strumming.
What counts as clean
Only the bar-line changes are counted. The beats in between are there to keep you strumming. What slows most players down is not holding the shape, it is getting to it in time, so the move is what gets counted.
A change lands when the new chord is the one heard, close enough to the beat. Early or late past the window is a miss even if the chord is right, and the right timing with the old chord still ringing is a miss too.
Read the number as a game, not a grade. The page has never met your guitar, your room or your microphone, and it gives itself two bars of count-in to work out how loud you are. A quiet nylon-string on a laptop mic will score below what the same playing scores on a pickup.
Why it is paced
The old drill is one minute, as many changes as you can cram in, counted by hand. This one runs to a metronome instead: 80 beats a minute, a change every bar, fifteen changes to land. Cramming rewards a scramble. A metronome rewards the change that arrives when the bar does, which is the one you can use in a song.
If a tempo is beating you, take it down. The changes you land at 60 BPM are worth more than the ones you miss at 80.
Where to take it next
Strumhold is the practice app this test came out of. It listens the same way, keeps track of which pairs you have got clean and which you have not, and picks what to give you next. It runs on your device, and there is no account to open.
The chord shapes above have pages of their own: how to hold each one, which strings ring, and the pairs each chord turns up in.
Already learning from the JustinGuitar app? Here is how the two compare. If you would rather know what happens to the sound these apps hear, we read the policies: guitar practice apps and your microphone.
Open the app Free to start, no account needed