Welcome back
Short, spaced sessions beat long cramming. A few minutes a day is all it takes.
Your session
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Today’s plan
Other ways to practice
Shortcuts: 1–9 pick an answer · R hear again · N next
Learn the language
Short, plain-language chapters — every example has a play button, and the keyboard below lights up so you can see it under your fingers.
Read & play
Learn to read music fluently: short daily drills for notes, intervals, chords, key signatures and rhythm, then sight-read real pieces. Use MIDI, the on-screen keys, or A–K.
Custom drill Pick your own clef, range, accidentals and key signatures
Score & analysis
Open a MIDI or MusicXML file, or start with an example. Select notes to study keys, chords and harmony. Everything stays on this device.
Fingering comes from MusicXML files that include it.
Run complete
- Space
- Play / pause
- Home End
- Start / end
- ← →
- Previous / next bar
- L
- Loop the selection or A–B
- [ ]
- Set loop start A / end B here
- P
- Wait for me on / off
- M C
- Metronome · count-in
- 1 2 3
- Both hands · right · left
- + −
- Zoom the score or the look-ahead
- Esc
- Close a panel or clear the selection
- A…K
- Play notes
- Z / X
- Shift the typing octave down / up
About import & analysis
Drill one thing
Free practice on a single topic — it won’t change your review schedule, daily goal or streak, so grind as much as you like.
The drill opens with the keyboard dock below. Answer by playing or by picking an option; press End to see your score.
Play along with patterns
Pick a progression and a playing pattern, then loop it at your tempo. The keys light up in rhythm — blue for the left hand, purple for the right — so you can play along. Set Hands to mute one part and play it yourself.
Use the keyboard below to play along. Shift its octave with the ◀ Oct / Oct ▶ buttons if the lit keys are off-screen.
Sing a melody, get the notes
Hum or sing one clear note at a time into your mic. It works for a single melody line — not chords. Steady “la-la-la” or “da-da” lands better than words.
Tip: a hum lands roughly an octave below where a piano plays it. Turn off “Snap to key” to see the raw pitches, or pick the key to clean up stray notes.
Read it, sing it
Sing the melody on the staff into your mic — or play it on your keyboard / MIDI if you can’t sing out loud. Start with two notes and grow from there.
Tip: tap “Tonic” to hear home base before you start. Pitch matching ignores which octave you’re in, so basses and sopranos can both use it.
Explore
Play anything — Étude names what you hold in real time. Pick a key on the circle to read chords in Roman numerals.
The same notes in both clefs — bass on the left, treble on the right, as on the keyboard. Notes too high or too low for a staff are named beside an arrow.
Outer ring: major keys · inner ring: their relative minors. Click a key to hear it and see the fingering.
C major
Interval song book
Every interval, with famous tunes that open with it. Hum a song you know to lock in the sound. Click any title to hear the interval.
Progress
No reviews yet. Your stats, memory strength and practice calendar fill in as you answer questions.
Nothing scheduled yet — reviews appear here once you start learning concepts.
The method behind Étude
Étude isn’t a quiz — it’s built on what cognitive science actually says about learning a skill. Six ideas do the heavy lifting. None of them involve studying harder; they involve studying smarter.
Spaced repetition
You remember something best when you review it right as you’re about to forget it. Each successful recall lets the next review wait a little longer.
Retrieval practice
Pulling an answer out of memory strengthens it far more than putting it back in by re-reading. This is the “testing effect.”
Interleaving
Mixing different problem types in one sitting feels harder than doing them in blocks — and that’s exactly why it builds more durable, flexible memory.
Desirable difficulty
A little struggle is the signal that learning is happening. Effortless review barely moves the needle.
Immediate feedback & elaboration
Fast correction stops errors from sticking, and a short “why” ties the new fact to things you already know.
Little and often
The spacing effect: the same total practice spread across days beats one long cram. Short, frequent sessions win.
“We are what we repeatedly do.” The hard part of theory isn’t understanding it once — it’s remembering it under your fingers, months later. That’s the part Étude is for.